Edible Wild Mushrooms[dropcap1]Q. [/dropcap1]Can you recommend a field guide to edible mushrooms for our area (across the lake). I wonder if I've been wasting perfectly good mushrooms growing in my yard. Especially when I'm going to the store to buy cultivated mushrooms, which I hear are grown in disgusting conditions. I am familiar with the concern and caution surrounding eating wild 'shrooms but you gotta start somewhere. Where?
[dropcap1]A. [/dropcap1]The best book I've found is the Audubon Field Guide to Mushrooms, which has pictures and text on almost anything you might find out there. However, it can't be said emphatically enough that eating wild mushrooms is not recommended unless you're really an expert. There are no uniform characteristics that indicate poisonous or safe mushrooms. Too many look-alikes exist among both the delicious and deadly.
That said, I will admit to you that after reading up on one particular kind I found in my fields and mulling it over for two years, I finally took a leap of faith and ate one. They matched what all my sources identified as edible bolete mushrooms (also known as porcini and cepes). What make me roll the dice (and it still was chancy) is that the boletes include no seriously poisonous species. My wife still won't touch them. She may be the smart one.
[caption id="attachment_28305" align="alignleft" width="500"]
A wild mushroom that grows in my yard. It's a bolete, and edible--but I checked it out with experts before I tried to eat it.[/caption]
In France, one can take suspect mushrooms to the pharmacy and be told yea or nay on them. There is no such service here, although mycological groups (mushroom-hunter clubs) will often do that for you, if you can find them.
The bottom line again is if you have even a little doubt, don't eat a wild mushroom. The consequences can be very, very bad. They can kill you.
