Common Edible Mushrooms

Mushroom Cookery
The History of Mushroom Eating
Before you try the recipes for cooking mushrooms, you may
be interested to know that they have been a highly prized and
often considerable part of the diet of man in many lands and for
many centuries. They are mentioned as food in the Talmud and
in Chaldean writings that date from the dawn of civilization. More
than twenty centuries ago the eating of fungi became a mania
among the rich in Rome, and for a time the passion for mushrooms
was synonymous with an unseemly and undisciplined love
of luxuries. Special vessels were used to cook certain kinds, and a
poet of the day makes one such vessel complain because it has
fallen so low as to be used for cooking Brussels sprouts!
This remarkable taste for mushrooms was partly social affectation,
to be sure, but it was based upon the sound fact that they
are a palatable and delicious food. It is perhaps worthy of emphasis
that no mushrooms were cultivated then or for a long time
after that, and the widespread demand for edible fungi was necessarily
satisfied by those collected in the wild.
The Romans had rules of thumb by means of which they recognized
the edible kinds, and these rules probably worked fairly
well most of the time. They were, however, unreliable in so far
as they disregarded real distinguishing characteristics, and they
were often interwoven with superstition. One of the fireside naturalists
of the time stated that those mushrooms growing near
serpent holes or rusty nails were sure to be poisonous, but there is
no reason to suppose that those "in the know" put much .stock in
such ideas. At that time most practical knowledge of plants consisted
of folklore, and the real authorities on mushroom eating
were those who learned to know their mushrooms through experience
and observation. To a certain extent this still holds true,
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