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  The best, time-tested mushroom meals require few complex cooking techniques and even fewer special ingredients beyond the right kinds of mushrooms. The first step is to familiarize yourself with different types of mushrooms and the menu possibilities. Then assemble the ingredients and have fun with them. The following pages will introduce you to some of the best wild mushrooms in the world and some of the most common and easily identifiable mushrooms you are likely to find in your region. Some of the best edibles are also among the more easily identified, and are fairly common across much of the United States. So head out and learn a few good local mushrooms or find a local source to purchase wild mushrooms and enjoy the process and the prospect of great eating.

  Guidelines for the New Mycophagist

  I developed this set of guidelines for anyone who is considering hunting for and eating wild mushrooms. Although the guidelines may seem extensive and cautionary, it’s important to consider them all. Additional resources such as books, Web sites, and mushrooming organizations are listed in the Appendix.

  Before Collecting Any Mushrooms for Food:

  Learn as much as you can about mushrooms. Spend as much time and effort learning the poisonous mushrooms as you do learning the edible ones. Become familiar with the toxic mushrooms that resemble the good ones you intend to eat. Safe eating requires knowing both. Here are some resources to help you learn, with details in the Appendix:

  1. Buy and use one or more good mushroom field guides that cover your region of the country.

  2. Become familiar with the best mushroom identification and information sites on the Internet.

  3. Take part in mushroom classes or public walks.

  4. Join a mushroom club or mycological association. Though they might sound high-brow, mycological associations are actually a friendly mixture of experts, hobbyists, and beginners united by an interest in mushrooming. (See the Appendix for options).

  5. Befriend an experienced local mushroom guide. Home-baked cookies are a powerful inducement.

  When Collecting Mushrooms:

  1. Start slow and stay safe. Be conservative about the groups of mushrooms you collect for eating. Begin your mycophagy with the common well-known edible species in your region, such as the “Foolproof Four.”

  2. Avoid collecting mushrooms from potentially contaminated sites. Some mushrooms can concentrate heavy metals and other contaminants. Avoid busy roadsides, landfills, golf courses, power lines, railroad beds, or other industrialized or potentially polluted land.

  3. Take only young or prime specimens, leaving old ones to drop their spores. Old mushrooms are perfect breeding grounds for bacteria. They are 85 to 95 percent water and loaded with up to 45 percent protein.

  4. Collect a number of specimens in various stages of growth in order to gain a good understanding of what changes occur to the mushroom as it ages. There are often remarkable differences between the appearance of the button and mature stages of a mushroom.

  5. Collect all parts of the mushroom, above and below the ground.

  6. Do a spore print to confirm spore color as an aid to identification.

  After Collecting Mushrooms:

  1. Do not eat a new mushroom prior to having collected it several times. Each time, confirm identification (including taking a spore print for color). This is increasingly necessary as you collect and eat more obscure species.

  2. Never eat a mushroom unless you are 100 percent certain of the identification and its edibility. When in doubt, toss it out! This is vitally important!

  3. Avoid eating mushrooms that closely resemble or are related to toxic species. Why bother, when there are so many great edible, easily distinguished mushrooms?

  When you are certain that you have correctly identified and weighed the risks of the mushrooms you intend to eat:

  4. Keep some uncooked specimens for comparison, just in case of mistaken identification.

  5. When you are trying a new mushroom, cook up a small amount and try a few bites. This first meal of a new species is never shared with family or friends.

  6. Always cook your mushrooms well. Some mushrooms are toxic when raw, and all are more easily digested following cooking.

  7. Be cautious with new friends who dine at your table. If they are not familiar with wild mushrooms, let them know what they are eating so they can make the decision for themselves. It’s not unheard of for a case of “mushroom poisoning” to crop up as a result of someone’s anxiety about the meal they’ve just eaten. There is a strong body–mind connection, and the stomach is firmly wired into that pathway.

  Anyone who approaches mushrooming with open eyes and is prepared to follow these guidelines will be well protected from getting sick. Remember: Eating wild mushrooms need not be an extreme sport or a competition for developing the longest list of species eaten. Many devoted lifelong mushroom hunters have learned two or three species they know and love that provide them with an opportunity to be out in nature and to collect an ample supply of edible mushrooms for the entire year. Always keep your hunger for knowledge ahead of your hunger for mushrooms.

  You can give a woman a basket of wild mushrooms and feed a family for a day, but if you teach her to identify and use a few species of great wild mushrooms, she can provide a family with great mushrooms for life. Trite, yet true.

  3

  THE FOOLPROOF FOUR

  Updated for a New Millennium

  Strange that mankind should ever have used the mushroom.

  All the various species of this substance are of a leathery consistence, and contain but little nutriment.

  The condiments or seasonings which are added are what are chiefly prized.

  Without these, we should almost as soon eat saw dust as mushrooms.

  WILLIAM ANDRUS ALCOTT, The Young House-keeper (1846)

  As I make my way through the world as a teacher and a guide for people who want to learn about mushrooming, I frequently am asked about which mushrooms are my favorites, which are the best, and which mushrooms are safe to start out eating. True of many endeavors—the initial bike ride, the first kiss, the first bungee jump—the first step in picking and eating a wild mushroom is the hardest and requires forethought, planning, and, inevitably, a leap of faith. (Of course, there are always people who leap blindly, without prior thought, a personality type I’ll address in the chapter on mushroom poisoning.) For the virgin mycophagist, the first mushroom collected, identified, and successfully transferred from the forest floor to the basket, from the basket to the pan, from the pan to plate, and finally from the plate to stomach, is an experience fraught with a mix of anxiety, anticipation, and excitement. For me it was that puffball in New Mexico. For someone in the Midwest, it would most likely be a morel; in New England it could be a chanterelle, a meadow mushroom, or a hen of the woods. The overwhelming majority of Americans never begin eating wild mushrooms. What if someone could make the initial leap less daunting? Many mycologists—both amateur and professional—have done just that by easing fears, teaching skills, and normalizing the idea of eating wild edible mushrooms. My work rests on the cushion of their leadership and guidance.

  In 1943, an American mycologist named Clyde M. Christensen (1905– 1993) created the concept “Foolproof Four” to describe four edible mushrooms that were common, easily identified, and very unlikely to be confused with any poisonous species. His book, Common Edible Mushrooms, was one of the early American mushroom field guides that sought to bring the much feared and maligned world of mushrooms into people’s parlors and kitchens.1 Christensen, a professor of mycology at The University of Minnesota, challenged the pervasive American belief that all wild mushrooms are suspect, fit only to be mowed over and removed from the lawn or the garden at first sight. “All too often these evanescent plants are looked upon as strange unearthly things, to be feared and avoided, if not trodden upon and destroyed.” With the support of the depression-era Work Projects Administration staff for preparation of the colored plates, Christensen wrote h
is small guide. He used clear, direct language to describe mushrooms and supportive words to encourage folks to gather, learn about, and make meals from the common mushrooms in their lawns, fields, and woods. He made no effort to cover all common species and avoided the tendency to overwhelm his audience with too much information. At the end of his book, he even added a series of recipes made with common wild mushrooms, written and contributed by well-known cooks and mycologists across America. Christensen sought to bring the enjoyment of mushrooming to a mycophobic America more than twenty years before Gordon Wasson used the terms mycophobic and mycophilic. In doing so, he coined a phrase and a short list of edibles that would endure for decades to follow.

  Clyde Christensen’s Foolproof Four include the sponge mushrooms (morels), puffballs (the sulphur mushroom or sulphur polypore), and the shaggy mane, or shaggymanes, as he referred to them. He included all morels in the genus Morchella without differentiating among species and referred to them as sponge mushrooms, one of the common names for this group. Christensen also did not separate out the species of puffballs, but included all puffballs that grow above ground and have a pure white interior, including all Calvatia and Lycoperdon species. In choosing the sulphur mushroom (Polyporus sulphureus), Dr. Christensen recognized one species from a very large genus, a species that is now included in the genus Laetiporus. The last of the four is the shaggy mane mushroom (Coprinus commatus), a single distinct species within a very large group of mushrooms, the inky caps.

  Clyde Christensen’s Foolproof Four include:

  • Morels (or sponge mushrooms), genus Morchella without species named

  • Puffballs (all puffballs growing above ground and with white interiors) including Calvatia and Lycoperdon species

  • Sulphur mushroom or sulphur polypore, Polyporus sulphureus

  • Shaggy mane, Coprinus comatus

  During the six decades following publication of Common Edible Mushrooms, a lot has changed. The understanding of mushroom toxicology and genetics has expanded rapidly, and our ability to track mushroom poisoning and the species and toxins involved has improved immensely. Many of the older taxonomic groups have been divided into new genera and additional species to reflect what’s been discovered about their relatedness. This expanding knowledge affects our understanding of morels, puffballs, the sulphur shelf, and shaggy manes no less than it affects our understanding of other mushrooms. What has become of the reputations of the Foolproof Four and our understanding of them as distinct species and good safe edibles?

  MORELS, AKA SPONGE MUSHROOMS

  Genus: Morchella

  Species: M. esculenta, M. elata, and M. crassipes, etc.

  No single wild mushroom has captured the hearts, imagination, and stomachs of the American public like the morel. There are numerous morel cookbooks, and any decent gourmet shop will be stocked with a variety of morel products (read kitsch). The taste of morels seems to defy rational description; most people resort to poetic analogies referring to ambrosia, heavenly sauce, or a bit of nirvana. In his book, Morel Tales, Gary Fine quotes one morel hunter as saying that, until he ate a morel, nobody had ever been able to describe to him what they tasted like. “People just say they are ‘wonderful’ or ‘like nothing else’ while smiling knowingly as older girls do when asked by younger girls about love. But now that I have had my first taste, I can say that morels are tender and they are sweet. . . . As a matter of fact, they are ‘wonderful’ and taste ‘like nothing else.’ Just like they were described to me.”2

  I recall one late spring fifteen years ago when I removed a tarp covering a lawn mower outside the home my wife and I rented in Thomaston, Maine, and discovered two perfect, young, 2–3-inch yellow morels, Morchella esculenta, fruiting in the old leaf litter and wood mulch beside the rear wheels. Since they were next to the house and protected from discovery by another hungry mushroom hunter, I decided to allow one mushroom time to grow larger and mature further before it met its final destiny in a sauté pan. Because morels grow slowly, it was another eleven days before I cut the now 7-inch morel and sliced it into thin rings. Simply sautéed in butter with salt and pepper and then added to a lightly cheesed omelet, it transformed a perfectly good omelet into a slice of heaven. The flavor of morels improves as they age, and the extra eleven days of growth deepened the rich morel taste. What began as an omelet became an archetypal experience in dining worthy of the finest restaurant.

  There is a morel mystique that further adds to the sense of reverence with which enthusiasts speak about the coming of this rather odd and unappetizingly drab-looking ground-dweller. Unless you are blessed with living in the mid- to northern Midwest, morels are difficult to find in any numbers with any consistency during most years. I live in eastern Maine and, because I love the taste of morels, I have spent countless hours searching from mid-May to mid-June over the past twenty-five years. As someone who has embraced New England’s parsimony, I am embarrassed to estimate a number of morels-per-hour-searched value to my hunt, but suffice to say, the number would be less than one, and if you did not count the past five years, far less than one. The combined wisdom of age, time spent in study and pursuit of morels, and the act of sharing stories of success and failure with other area mycophiles have brought me to the lofty position of successfully finding morels along the coast every year. Thus, I feel worthy to share some of that wisdom.

  TAXONOMY

  When Clyde Christensen added morels to his Foolproof Four list, he didn’t differentiate among species within the genus Morchella, noting, “There are several species, but they are all enough alike to be described as one.” At the time, Christensen was living in an America that recognized perhaps three common species of morels: the morel, half-free morel, and black morel. In addition, there were a significant number of named species that closely resembled the common morels. Like many mushroomers, Christensen referred to the group as the sponge mushrooms due to the honeycomb appearance of the cap.

  Morels, as we understand them today, are even more confusing than when Clyde Christensen was writing. (Thankfully, all the species in the genus Morchella are edible, though a few in related genera can cause sickening.) Morels belong primarily to the genus Morchella and there is a very active debate regarding the true number of species included in the group. According to the author Michael Kuo in his 2005 book Morels3 and on his Web site, www.mushroomexpert.com,4 North American Morchella can be divided into four morphologically distinct species groups. In New England, we primarily see Morchella esculenta, the yellow morel, and M. elata, the black morel. The yellow morel has several forms that are ‘at times’ split into separate species but are similar enough to be lumped together for this discussion. Black morels also are divided into additional dark-formed species of similar characteristics. Morel taxonomy is under active revision in this age of molecular and genetic analysis, and though all agree that the process is not complete, it seems clear that the U.S. morels will be grouped into related clans or clades of yellow morels, black morels, and a few others that don’t fit into either group. The morels represent a very small portion of the division of fungi known as Ascomycetes or sac fungi. These fungi form and mature their microscopic spores in sac-like mother cells called asci from which they are forcibly discharged upon maturity. The asci in morels line the surface of the honeycomb pits on the cap.

  DESCRIPTION

  (The following description is for the yellow morel, Morchella esculenta.) Fruiting bodies are 3–6 inches tall (with occasional late-season varieties growing 12 or more inches) and 1–3 inches wide, with a generally conical sponge-like cap fused at the base to a pale central stalk (see #2 in the color insert). The stalk and cap are completely hollow with somewhat brittle flesh. The surface of the cap is composed of a honeycomb of pits that are vertically elongated at maturity and not arranged in rows. The color is variable, ranging from almost white-gray when the mushroom is young to pale yellow tan and at times light brown in older specimens (#1). The pits are generally darker than the
intervening ridges. Stalks are narrower than the cap, pale yellow-tan, minutely roughened, and broadening at the base. The flesh is thin, brittle, and has a rich earthy odor that becomes more pronounced with age. The spore print is ochre-yellow.

  LOOK-ALIKES

  The early morel, Verpa bohemica, is sometimes found in midspring. This is a small-capped morel with a longer stem and more infolded cap surface rather than the true pits of most morels. It is widely eaten in the western United States and in Europe but causes gastrointestinal distress in some individuals. It is not known whether this toxic reaction is due to inadequate cooking or idiosyncratic reactions, but beware of eating this mushroom, especially for the first time.

  Known as the half-free morel or, in the Midwest, peckerheads, Morchella semilibera generally fruits early in the morel season and, in most years, it is rare in New England. I have found it under poplars and birch in moist rocky terrain. This mushroom generally resembles a small-capped morel with an elongated stalk that is watery and fragile. When cut longitudinally the cap clearly shows itself to be “half free” of the stalk. This species is edible with a similar flavor to other morels, though less pronounced.