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 information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Broiled Mushrooms
In order to test mushrooms, sprinkle salt on the gills-if they turn yellow they are poisonous; if they turn black they are good. After testing, pare, and cut off stems; dip in melted butter, season with salt and pepper, broil on both sides and serve.
The cooking here is trivial; the problem is the first sentence, which is a wild-mushroom identification test. It does not work, and the failure mode is death rather than a bad dinner.
- The salt test is worthlessSprinkling salt on the gills and reading the colour change tells you nothing about toxicity. Gill discolouration in mushrooms is a normal bruising or oxidation response and varies within a single species, between young and old specimens, and with how damp the cap is. No colour reaction, on salt, silver, onion or anything else, separates edible fungi from lethal ones.
- The species that killsAmanita phalloides and its relatives contain amatoxins, which shut down protein synthesis in the liver. A single cap can be a fatal adult dose. The toxins are heat-stable, so broiling, boiling, drying and soaking all leave them intact.
- Delayed symptoms mean no second chanceAmatoxin poisoning typically causes no symptoms for six to twelve hours, then vomiting and diarrhoea, then an apparent recovery before liver failure sets in. By the time anyone suspects the mushrooms, the poison has been absorbed. There is no antidote in the ordinary sense.
- Look-alikes are closeDestroying angels and death caps resemble young field mushrooms and puffballs closely enough that experienced foragers have died on the mistake. Regional guides, spore prints and microscopy exist precisely because gross appearance is not sufficient.
- What to do insteadIf you want broiled mushrooms, use a current recipe and cultivated or reliably identified commercial fungi. Wild collecting for the table needs training and a local expert, not a rule of thumb from a cookbook.
Household manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries circulated a small family of mushroom "tests" — salt on the gills, a silver spoon in the pan, a peeled onion cooked alongside, the theory that any mushroom whose skin peels is safe. None had a basis in chemistry, and mycologists were already publishing warnings against exactly this kind of shortcut; federal and state agricultural bulletins of the period carried notices on mushroom poisoning. The tests survived in print because mushroom gathering was a genuine part of rural and immigrant kitchens in Europe and America, and because a printed rule felt more transferable than the thing it stood in for, which was local knowledge of particular species in particular woods. The broiling method itself — pare, trim the stems, dip in melted butter, salt, pepper, both sides — is a common treatment of the era for a cap firm enough to take direct heat, and it is the least remarkable thing on the page.