Important: Safety Warning
This page offers rules for telling edible mushrooms from poisonous ones. No such rules are reliable, and these identifications predate modern mycology. Deadly species closely resemble edible ones, and mistakes are regularly fatal. Never eat a wild mushroom on the strength of this text.
This page states that certain wild plants are safe to eat. Its identifications and edibility claims are more than a century old and in some cases simply wrong, and deadly look-alikes exist for many edible species. Never eat a wild plant on the strength of this text.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Mushrooms (Numerous kinds of Mushroom)
THE numerous kinds of Mushroom (Agarics, Boleti, etc.) which spring up around us, (and of which more than a hundred edible sorts are to be found), do not possess any special medicinal virtues except as regards two, or three; nor do those which come to table boast any greater food value than other ordinary fresh vegetable products. Indeed, in some respects they are inferior, and their very nature as saprophytes, or products of rotting vegetation, and decaying organic matter, stamps them as somewhat ignoble food. The popular belief that Mushrooms are highly nutritious-one kind being described as the vegetable beef-steak (Hepatica fistulina) is more or less a delusion. As compared with meat, their supply of proteids, or flesh-formers, is very small. We have to tell the vegetarian he must consume at least ten pounds of Mushrooms in order to gain the equivalent of a little over one pound of prime beef. These fungi, however, furnish an unusual amount of potassium salts, which fact is much to their credit. As to the dry, solid constituents of Mushrooms, they differ very materially in kind from the superior solids of meat. With the juice of the Horse Mushroom (Agaricus arvensis) Catsup is made. This Catsup, or Ketchup (from the Japanese), is to be concocted thus: "Lightly bruise the Mushrooms, and strew over them a little salt; then boil with spices, and herbs, the juice which may be expressed after the Mushrooms thus treated with salt have stood for from twentyfour to forty-eight hours." Sydney Smith, when a hard-working curate (1798) in the midst of Salisbury Plain, said he often dined on a mess of potatoes sprinkled with a little Catsup. Once a week the butcher's cart came over from Salisbury, and it was only then he could obtain any meat.
For making Mushroom sauce: Wash, peel, and stalk enough 'button' Mushrooms to fill a half-pint measure, and add them to two gills of the best beef gravy, which has been previously thickened with from one to one and a half teaspoonfuls of flour, and stirred over the fire till it boils. Allow the Mushrooms to simmer slowly in the sauce for ten, or twelve minutes; then stir in four teaspoonfuls of Mushroom Catsup, and half a teaspoonful of lemon-juice; season with salt, and pepper, if necessary, and serve very hot." The field Mushroom for cooking can be readily distinguished from any harmful fungus by the fresh pink colour of its gills underneath the top disc, by the solidity of its stem, the fragrant anise-like odour which it emits, and the separability of its outer skin. The chief chemical constituents of wholesome Mushrooms are albuminoids, carbohydrates, and fat, with mineral matters, and water. From the Golden Spindlespike (Clavaria fusiformis), when stewed, a sweet dish may be made. Our English Agaric, or field Mushroom, furnishes phosphate of potassium, a cell salt especially reparative of exhausted nerve tissue, and its energies. Mr. A. Broadbent, of Manchester, teaches that an excellent tea for invalids may be made from the ordinary edible Mushroom (Agaricus campestris) which is highly nitrogenous, and endowed with much fat. The beef-steak fungus grows on oak trees, and resembles in its darkbrown appearance, its sapid taste, its animal odour, and its soft, pulpy touch, the commodity after which it is named. "Fried in butter," says Dr. Cooke (Royal Horticultural Society), "it is delicious." The Roman Emperor Claudius was killed by eating Mushrooms. "Hither the Emperor repaired in hope to recover his health through the temperature of the air, but, contrarily, here met with the Mushroomes that poysoned him." If a carefully-peeled onion is boiled with Mushrooms, and comes out clean-looking, they may be eaten with confidence; if it turns blue, or black, they should be thrown away.
Strong alcoholic drinks ought never to be taken together with, or immediately after eating Mushrooms. Experienced fungus eaters (mycophagists) have found themselves suffering from severe pains, and troublesome swellings, through drinking whisky and water at a Mushroom meal; whereas a precisely similar meal, minus the whisky, could be eaten with impunity by the very same experimentalists. Edible Mushrooms, if kept uncooked, become dangerous: they cannot be sent to table too soon after being gathered. In Rome our ordinary Mushroom (there known ८०
Two workable recipes — a mushroom catsup and a mushroom sauce — sit inside a page of wild-mushroom identification advice that is wrong in ways that kill people. The identification claims, and the catsup that depends on foraged fungi, cannot be followed.
- The onion test is worthlessBoiling a peeled onion with mushrooms and watching for discolouration detects nothing. Amanita phalloides and its relatives leave an onion, a silver spoon and a coin exactly as they found them. This belief was already old folklore when the book was printed and it has no chemical basis.
- The field-mushroom checklist misses the deadly speciesPink gills, a solid stem, an anise smell and a peelable cap describe Agaricus campestris — and also describe young destroying angels (Amanita virosa) and the death cap well enough to fool people every autumn. Young Amanita gills are pale and can read as pinkish, the cap skin peels, and the volva at the stem base is the feature that matters and is not mentioned here at all. Agaricus xanthodermus, common in the same fields, smells of phenol rather than anise and causes violent gastric illness.
- The catsup is an unprocessed low-acid preserveBruised mushrooms, an unmeasured "little salt", forty-eight hours at room temperature, then a boil with spices — no measured acid, no measured brine strength, no heat processing, no storage instruction. Mushrooms are low-acid and grow in soil, which is where Clostridium botulinum spores live, and home-preserved mushrooms are a documented botulism vehicle once bottled and sealed. If you want mushroom ketchup, use a current recipe with a stated acid level and processing time.
- Amatoxin poisoning has a false recoveryThe page treats mushroom poisoning as a matter of pains and swellings. Death-cap poisoning typically begins six to twenty-four hours after the meal with severe gastroenteritis, then appears to improve for a day or two while the liver fails. Anyone who has eaten a suspect wild mushroom needs a hospital, not a wait-and-see.
- The whisky claim has a real species behind itThe author's mycophagists were probably eating Coprinopsis atramentaria, the common inkcap, which contains coprine and produces flushing, palpitations and vomiting when alcohol is drunk within a day or two of the meal. The effect is specific to that species and a few others, not a general rule about mushrooms and spirits.
- The sauce, if you want itTwo gills is half an imperial pint, about 10 fl oz of beef gravy; a half-pint measure of button mushrooms is roughly 3 to 4 oz. Cultivated buttons from a shop carry none of the identification risk. Ten to twelve minutes of simmering leaves them soft rather than firm — five is closer to modern taste.
- Nutrition claimsThe "highly nitrogenous, and endowed with much fat" mushroom tea is not supported: mushrooms are roughly ninety per cent water and contain almost no fat. The book is more accurate when it says you would need ten pounds of them to match a pound of beef for protein. The potassium point is fair.
Mushroom catsup was, for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, what the word ketchup meant in an English kitchen — a thin, dark, salty, keeping sauce poured into stews, gravies and hashes, of which the tomato version was a latecomer and eventually the survivor. The book's etymology is wrong: ketchup is generally traced to the Hokkien kê-tsiap, a fermented fish or shellfish brine, carried into English via Malay kecap and the Southeast Asian trade, not from Japanese. The Sydney Smith anecdote is characteristic of the man and of the period's rural clergy — a curate on Salisbury Plain in the 1790s saw the butcher's cart once a week, and a bottle of mushroom catsup was how a plate of potatoes was made to taste of meat between visits. The page belongs to a genre of late-Victorian and Edwardian medical-domestic writing that treated foods as mild drugs, hence the potassium salts and the "cell salt especially reparative of exhausted nerve tissue" — the language of biochemic tissue-salt theory then in wide popular circulation. Claudius did die after a dish of mushrooms in AD 54, though the ancient sources, Tacitus and Suetonius among them, blame poison introduced into the dish rather than the fungi themselves.