Venomous and Muthering

A toadstool has a cap and a stem and you can’t eat it.
A mushroom has a cap and a stem and you can eat it

It all started with Him Indoors cutting the lawn. The next thing I knew there was a large brown mushroom sitting on the kitchen table whilst he pored over a fungal identification website intent on discovering whether we could eat it. Seems he was having some sort of mushroom epiphany. I was worried he was trying to kill us.

Autumn is the time for mushrooms. This is the season for boletes, parasols, blewits and wax caps and only a fool would head into the countryside without a bag or basket. Trouble is you have to know your stuff. Mushrooms are tricky to identify, unless you happen to be an expert mycologist. Or even the son of one, the likes of whom I encountered on my first ever fungal foray. He was four and knew everything. I was an undergraduate botany student and knew to defer to him in all things mycorrhizal. It was a memorable experience.

Only a few mushrooms will kill you, most will just make you wish you were dead. Species such as the Destroying Angel, Poison Pie, Death Cap and the Sickener get their names for a good reason.

What makes things particularly difficult is that many toxic mushrooms are so frighteningly similar to edible varieties that only an expert can tell the difference. The Yellow-Stainer, for instance, can leave you racing between basin and toilet for days on end, but bears more than a passing resemblance to  a field or cultivated mushroom. The only way to tell some lookalikes apart is to stick them on a piece of paper and check the colour of the spores that drop from their undersides.  And that’s every bit as tedious as it sounds. I felt I had good reason to be ever so slightly nervous about this new found enthusiasm. I was tempted to cite the case of Claudius, the Roman Emperor who died after being fed poisonous mushrooms by his fourth wife, Agrippina, but felt it wouldn’t be very supportive. I could, I reasoned, just refuse to eat them instead.

In the good old days (pre- early eighteenth century) you had an excuse to be cautious, having no idea about these earthie excrescences. Few had a good word to say about these poysonous damp weeds, other than to mutter they were venomous and muthering, and quite possibly evil fermentations. However, when you’re desperate and starving, you’re prepared to try almost anything to keep your stomach from rumbling. And toilet facilities were nowhere near as sophisticated as they are now.

Makes you wonder why, if mushrooms can be so dangerous, do folk persist picking them. But then again we do pretty stupid things for a bit of an adrenaline rush. Throwing ourselves out of aeroplanes or climbing really tall mountains spring to mind, so why not dice with death by experimenting with potentially lethal food. At least Him Indoors hadn’t suddenly announced he was going to combine the two. If he had, I could have recounted the story of a group of Italians who’d died collecting mushrooms. Not poisoned, merely falling off a precipice. In their drunken enthusiasm, they’d gone foraging in the dark.

Makes cutting the lawn and pouring over the Internet seem positively tame by comparison.