Common Edible Mushrooms

COMMON EDIBLE MUSHROOMS
and many an authority on mushrooms retains an unclouded amateur
status.
One finds little mention of mushrooms from the time of the
Romans up to the last century. The Grete Herball, published
about 1529, an authoritative if often inaccurate treatise on plants,
contents itself with stating, "Fungi ben musherons. There be two
maners of them, one maner is deadly and sleeth them that eateth
of them and the other dooth not" — a statement that even the most
illiterate faggot-cutter in the forest must have known from experience
to be only partially true. Caspar Bauhin, eminent Swiss
botanist of the same century and considered one of the fathers
of modern botany, damns all mushrooms, obviously because he
knew them only from hearsay. The professional botanists disliked
fungi of any kind because they found these plants difficult or
impossible to classify in their artificial keys, and consigned them
to chaos or worse. But people continued to eat them nevertheless!
Up to the present time (at least until the outbreak of World
War II) in many of the countries of Europe the quantity of wild
mushrooms offered for sale in the public markets has far exceeded
that of the one or two cultivated kinds, and in India and China
the traffic in wild mushrooms has always been heavy.
It is hoped that this brief summary will convince even the most
skeptical that mushroom eating has never been confined to one
region or time, that it does not partake of the strange or the
esoteric but rather is a common pleasure, open to all. The first
recipe in the next section, indeed, is three hundred years old — and
quite as good today as it was when it was first written down.
General Recipes for Cooking Wild Mushrooms
The famous old recipe for jugged hare reads, "First catch your
hare." So far in this book we have been busy helping you to catch
your mushrooms and to be sure they are the ones that you can
safely eat. Now you will find recipes for cooking the mushrooms
you have caught. The choice of recipe will depend, of course, on
the kind and quantity of your catch.
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