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!
How about deadly mushroom physics?
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...
I just go for morels in the Spring.
My dad grew up on a farm in Poland. Whenever we went camping, he would go foraging for mushrooms. He never got sick. Scared the hell out of all of us.
My husband has just planted 100 hazelnut trees and their roots have been infused with truffle spores. In about 3 years we will be interested in finding a good truffle dog...... or a truffle pig. :)