Don’t Eat the Poisonous Shrooms

On our recent hikes through the forests of the north country, we’ve seen dozens, if not hundreds of mushrooms. I don’t recall ever seeing this many mushrooms before. And not just a few varieties, but there have been a myriad of different looking mushrooms as well - concave, puffy, convex, round, flat, ugly, pretty, red, white, grey, brown, spotted, slimy, furry, smooth, dull, glistening. Some look like they’d be delicious, while others look so nasty and unappetizing that they’re surely poisonous. But do I know, or even have a clue which ones are edible? Not a chance.

Here’s a few we saw. (As always, you can click on an image to see it in full size).

And a few more:

I really like mushrooms - the store-bought ones anyway. White button mushrooms are almost a staple in our diets, and Marcie has perhaps a dozen great recipes starring portobello mushrooms. To a lesser extent, we also use crimini, shiitake, and porcini mushrooms, and like them all. In fact, like Pavlov’s dog, I’m salivating just writing this.

Surely, of all those varieties of mushrooms we’ve encountered in the wild, there are many that won’t send me on a psychedelic trip or kill me, and, perhaps, even taste good. It’s only a matter of identifying the edible ones, right? So, I thought I’d check with the online experts and get some guidance on how to tell the good ones from the bad.

There are no shortage of online guides for identifying mushrooms, and the writers usually seem to be quite knowledgeable. But my first clue that I may not want to dabble in the art of amateur mushroom hunting is that almost every website on the subject has at least a few warnings, usually all in caps, similar to this: “Never, ever eat any mushroom based on what you read here or anywhere else on the internet”, or “Online guides are helpful, but nothing takes the place of hands-on instruction”. Apparently, it’s easy to make a mistake.

Take Morell mushrooms, for example. While not the most attractive mushroom, they are said to be delicious. I found several websites that described how to identify them, including this one, but all added the caveat that I’d best be careful because Morell mushrooms look much like the False Morell, which, if eaten, will cause major gastric distress, or the Brain mushroom which can be deadly.

Then there’s the chanterelle mushroom, another species that mushroom aficionados claim is delicious, and it even looks like it might be. But there are two similar looking shrooms to beware of, the Jack O’Lantern, which causes cramps and diarrhea, and the false chanterelle mushroom, which causes gastric distress. The photos and a description of how to identify chanterelle and their lookalikes were from this very good website.

Finally, there’s the rather benign sounding Common Puffball mushroom. It’s a white mushroom, with a firm meaty flesh, and supposedly quite tasty - as long as it isn’t too old. Apparently, if it is an overly mature specimen, it can cause gastric distress. Unfortunately, there is another, not quite so benign mushroom that is sometimes mistaken for it, the Deathcap, which was the favorite poison of assassins in medieval times. I’m sure it causes a very drawn out, painful death involving diarrhea, vomiting, stomach cramps, pain, and, no doubt, the hemorrhaging of blood from the eyeballs and fingernails.

So, my hat is off to all you mushroom enthusiasts out there who regularly forage for their own fungi in the wild and have managed to live to a ripe old age. As for me, I plan to admire mushrooms from a safe distance and limit my foraging to the produce department of the local grocery.

See you next week…