Mushrooming without Fear, Book Review

I love mushrooms. I love to eat them and I love to take them as medicine. I can identify them in pictures. Yet, I wanted to identify them in nature. To wild-craft, to go find mushrooms when I roamed around in the woods. Turkey tail, Trametes Versicolor, was an easy one for me to identify. For some reason that one stood out and spoke to me. Hemlock Reishi also stood out and spoke to me. Otherwise, I was concerned with making a decision, especially with picking and bringing them home. The old toad stool fear of killing someone or being fairly uncomfortable seemed to loom within me.

Then I found a book by Alexander Schwab entitled Mushrooming without Fear. It is a wonderful “Beginner’s Guide to Collecting Safe and Delicious Mushrooms”. It has great pictures. And literally is a step by step process of describing and identifying mushrooms.

There are mushrooms with gills, tubes, spines and ridges.

There are eight rules about picking mushrooms:

Number 1: Never take a mushroom with gills.

Rule Number 2: Pick mushrooms with tubes, spines and ridges. There are a few exceptions of puffballs, horn of plenty and cauliflower mushrooms.

Rule Number 3: Eat only mushrooms that you are clear about all its identifying factors.

Rule Number 4: Only pick mushrooms that are in perfect condition. If they smell rotten, they are rotten. If they feel soggy, they are soggy.

Rule Number 5: Wash and cook all wild-crafted mushrooms. Do not eat raw.

Rule Number 6: Look out before you cut the mushroom. Use a stick to check around the mushroom. There could be other living ones close by. Leave some mycelium, roots, and cover the mycelium with leaves so that another mushroom will grow. Put the same kinds of mushrooms together in your basket, in case there is an odd one.

Rule Number 7: Do not suffocate your mushrooms with plastic. Mushrooms like to breathe.

Rule Number 8: Do not pick a mushroom unless you are sure about its identity.

The book has individual sections on how to clearly know mushrooms which have tubes, Boletes and Hen of the Woods; mushrooms which have ridges, Chanterelles; mushrooms which have spines, Hedgehog Fungus; and mushrooms that are the exceptions, Puffballs, Horn of Plenty and Cauliflower mushrooms. The book is filled with wonderful pictures that are easy to use as a guide in the woods.

There is some more general information: about different regions, mushrooms relationships to trees, how to take care of mushrooms, cooking. (It also talks about the symbiotic relationship of mushrooms to trees, falling leaves and branches, and similar markings.) A few fanciful pages on the Fly agaric mushroom.

All in all this book gave me the confidence to find and eat a 3 lb. cauliflower mushroom. Of course, my mate helped too.

Sydney is the owner of an online business selling medicinal mushrooms, named Cordyceps Reishi Extracts, LLC. In addition to the two medicinal mushrooms that are part of the business name, she also offers chaga mushroom extract, agarikon and many, many more.