Posted on 03/17/2013 7:22:25 PM PDT by neverdem
Stay away from the one with white ring on the stem :O
Supposedly, the toxic varieties turn purple in a short time when the caps are freshly broken.
I haven’t dared eat a gilled mushroom yet (other than from the store.) Puffballs, some boletes, chanterelles, okay. Gilled mushrooms, too iffy. And there were some lovely blewits a few years back but I didn’t dare. It’s funny how long many years go by between fruiting bodies - I assume chicken fat suillus mycelium is still growing under my pines, but last saw them thirteen years ago. So who knows how long for the blewits to come back?
My lab died from eating mushrooms. She did it one year before and I was able to make her throw them up. I knew immediately what she had done. Outside to do her stuff and back inside with excessive salivation. She was almost 16 years old. The 1 year old lab survived easily. Sad.
For Heavens sake why in the world would anyone want to go eating a fungus? Fungus is toxic, filthy, mouldering decay. YUCK!
Oh, Gus, the gardener’s gone now
And you went with him too.
The fungus here reminds me of
The fun Gus is having with you.
-Benny Hill (My Garden of Love)
Mrs Spokeshave saved a goat with Burdock Thistle root and Milk Thistle seeds ground up and administered with water using a coke bottle and the thumb from a rubber glove as a teat.
Psychoactive (magic) mushrooms have that property too but some are only damaging if you eat more than a kilo.
If you are crazy enough to go picking, I recommend trying no more than 1 gram of any unknown mushrooms the first time. Maybe 5 grams the next day if you didn’t feel sick. Otherwise you might be in for death. Or a free trip to the moon.
Notice the wife in one of the stories ate some she picked and died. While the husband survived after only eating a small amount.
How about deadly mushroom physics?
Y’know what, you are right, the purple indication was for psychoactive ones...not necessarily the toxic ones.
Agreed, you’d have to be nuts to pick your own, especially considering the amount you’d use in a typical food application. (a FOOD application?) Geez, I better get off the ‘puter & go to bed.
So do many highly prized edible mushrooms like the boletes. But I don't think the Destroying Angel (closely related to the death cap and just as deadly) bruises purple at all.
Destroying Angel (Amanita virosa)
Death Cap (Amanita phalliodes)
Never ever eat any mushroom that you have not positively identified. Eating even 1 gram of either the Destroying Angel or the Death Cap will be enough to destroy your liver and kidneys and the onset of symptoms might take two or three days to occur.
Anyone picking white puff balls to cook should always cut them open and look to see if they are actually young amanitas that have yet to develop. You will be able to see the stem and gil cap if it is. Don't eat them!
Chantarells are choice and easy to identify. Used to grow in my backyard under a shingle oak tree. They had a smell that was slightly spicy, at the same time like apricot. Also, if you find a chantarell with gills, its not a chantarell!
Anyone who experiments with mushrooms should be aware that Milk Thistle contains silmarain, which helps protect against amanita poisoning. Keep some on hand. Best protection though, is to avoid eating them in the first place.
Even supposedly “safe” mushrooms occasionally come up toxic. One or two “experienced” mushroom hunters die every year from consumption of a “safe” mushroom. And, although there are differences, sometimes toxic and safe mushrooms are so closely similar that even experienced hunters get it wrong. Once you stray away from the really well-known species, mushroom hunting has a small but significant amount of uncertainty.
I have an old copy of The Joy of Cooking, and in it, there’s a quote: “There are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.”
I think I’ll stick to hunting in the produce section....
Fungi collected near former smelters, landfill sites and land treated with sewage sludge can accumulate significant quantities of metal ions, such as cadmium, mercury, lead, copper and chromium. Even worse, high levels of radioactive caesium-137 isotope have been found in mushrooms.
Yuck... makes a person want to rethink eating the things...
When asked how they tasted, each person said: "Delicious. Just like regular mushrooms."
A long time ago I read a survival guide, which had advice on safe foliage to eat. They said: stay away from mushrooms. They have virtually no nutritional value, and unless you're an expert, it's not worth taking such a risk.
Ref: Clint Eastwood in "The Beguiled".
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