Happily, it is reported that Evans and his companions are recovering but it could have been much worse: Cortinarius specciosissimus is a really dangerous mushroom, containing cyclopeptides that attack the kidneys and liver. Two unfortunate campers who ate the mushroom in 1979 needed kidney transplants, while a lucky third recovered.

Despite alarming stories like this, there’s really no reason not to enjoy wild mushrooms, providing you take the necessary steps to properly inform yourself and always follow the golden rule of wild mushrooms:

The golden rule of wild mushrooms

Never, ever, eat a wild mushroom unless you have positively identified it with absolute confidence.

If in doubt (even the vaguest shadow of doubt), don’t eat it!

Worth the trouble

The nine steps below may seem like a lot of bother for a few mushrooms but, believe me, it’s worth the effort. Learning to identify mushrooms opens up a world of gastronomic adventure and enriches any walk in the woods (or fields).

Suddenly you’ll see mushrooms, good and bad, everywhere and experience the intense joy of discovery when you find something really good, like a cep (Boletus edulis), chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius), giant puffball (Langermannia gigantea), chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus), St George’s mushroom (Calocybe gambosa) or morel (Morchella esculenta).

Please do make the effort to follow these steps: it really can be a matter of life and death.

Nine steps to safe mushroom picking

1. If possible, go on a mushroom foray with an expert
   There’s no better introduction to the rigours and skills of informed mushroom identification than seeing it done properly. (If you don’t know an expert, you can skip this step, but follow the others all the more thoroughly.)
2. Read Mushrooms by Roger Phillips
   An excellent photographic guide to the mushrooms and other fungi of Great Britain and Europe.
   Read it from cover to cover to familiarise yourself with all the 900+ most common species of fungus. Scrutinise the entries for each of the listed poisonous species (the ones you have to be sure to avoid), edible species (the only ones really worth picking) and very common species (the ones you’ll see most often). Read it again.
   (Phillips’ photos – including many not in the book – are also available online at RogersMushrooms, a fantastic resource, but you can’t beat browsing the book to really get to know the mushrooms.)
3. Read How to Identify Edible Mushrooms by Patrick Harding, Tony Lyon and Gill Tomblin
   Instructive guide to the identification of edible mushrooms, explaining and illustrating the distinguishing features, usual habitats and seasons. Crucially, the guide also describes lookalikes, that might be mistaken for all the main edibles, with tips on how to distinguish them.
   (The deadly Cortinarius specciosissimus is detailed as a lookalike for chanterelle, Cantharellus cibarius.)
4. Read Poisonous Plants and Fungi: An Illustrated Guide by Marion R. Cooper, Anthony W. Johnson, Elizabeth A. Dauncey
   Authoritative guide to the fungi (and plants) that you really must avoid. Contains plenty of detail on the severity and effects of poisonous mushrooms. Once you’ve read this you’ll have a real idea of the dangers, a powerful incentive to proper identification.
5. Have a dry run
   Collect some mushrooms and identify them in the above books. This will develop your eye for the necessary details and general feel for mushrooms. It’s amazing how quickly you’ll learn to see the differences between mushrooms that “all look the same” to the uninitiated.
6. Know your prey, know your enemy, know the little pagans
   In following the above steps, you’ll develop a clear idea of the edible mushrooms worth looking out for and the really poisonous ones to avoid at all costs. The vast majority of mushrooms fall in between, neither particularly good to eat, nor particularly toxic: these are the little pagans (as I gather they’re known in Russian).
7. Ignore any rules of thumb
   The only way to be sure a mushroom is safe to eat is to positively identify it. Any supposed rule – “the caps of edible mushrooms peel”, “if it’s been nibbled by an animal then it’s safe to eat”, “cooking mushrooms makes them safe to eat” etc – is untrue, misleading and dangerous.
8. Take account of all relevant information
   Mushroom identification isn’t just a question of examining the specimen in isolation. The more information you have, particularly the habitat and season, the easier the identification. If you found it in the middle of a treeless field, it’s not a cep. If you picked it in September, it’s not a morel.
9. Pick, identify, cook, eat, enjoy!
   You should now be ready to go out and pick some mushrooms to cook, eat and enjoy. But always remember the golden rule: positively identify any mushroom before you eat it. It’s only safe to eat if you know what it is.

Answers

The pictured mushrooms are (from top):

• Tawny grisette (Amanita fulva)
  Edible but a member of the Amanita family, which contains some of the most deadly poisonous mushrooms, including the death cap (Amanita phalloides) and destroying angel (Amanita virosa). One for the experienced picker only!
• Chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus)
  Edible, delicious and readily identifiable.
• St George’s mushroom (Calocybe gambosa)
  A superb edible spring mushroom, unmistakeable once you get to know it.

Related posts:

1. St George’s mushrooms, a sublime taste of Spring
2. Poisonous plants and fungi: the essential book for foragers

Know your enemy

Plants and fungi can be dangerous. For all our very real concerns about healthy diets, chemical additives and pesticide residues, it’s wild, natural plants that have the potential to cause immediate harm and even death.

For anyone tempted by the delicious and healthy (if you’re careful) bounty of nature, the Stationery Office’s authoritative Poisonous Plants and Fungi: An Illustrated Guide, by Cooper, Johnson and Dauncey, is the single most important book to read.

Forager, beware!

Anthony Worrall Thompson’s recent confusion over henbane and fat hen amply illustrates just how crucial it is for anyone thinking of picking or using wild plants to know the poisonous as well as, indeed better than, the good to eat.

You’d have thought the word “bane”, hardly suggestive of good things, would have encouraged some reflection on the edibility of the plant. Not only did the chef fail to check just what he was advising, so did the editors and subs at Healthy and Organic Living, which published his risky recommendation. Responsibility is essential if harvesting wild plants is to be part of healthy living.

A quick check of Poisonous Plants and Fungi would have confirmed that henbane is:

a dangerously poisonous plant with an action similar to that of deadly nightshade

Fortunately it is “uncommon in this country”, but confusion and misguided experimentation has led people astray in the past:

A 20-year-old man who chewed four flowers to produce an intended pleasant sensation was found lying on a footpath; he became excitable and restless, with a rapid pulse and hot dry skin, and had difficulty in seeing and swallowing. He experienced hallucinations and behaved in a bizarre manner; recovery was complete in 48 hours.

At least this incident ended happily, though the book is full of less happy cautionary tales, providing ample warning to the careless forager. Woody nightshade, false morel, death cap, thorn apple and cherry laurel are just some of the plants that have killed people.

Toxic detail

Poisonous plants and fungi excels in the detail it provides on precise toxicity, likely symptoms of poisoning and known cases. It’s invaluable in informing the forager of the plants that must be avoided (with good photos too) but is also useful in clarifying just how toxic each plant is.

Googling for [poisonous honeysuckle], for example, might give the impression that it’s far too dangerous to grow within reach of children, who may well be tempted by its luscious looking berries. It’s reassuring to read that the berries are “harmless or of very low toxicity”.

Unexpected poisons

Many of the plants we think of as perfectly edible can also be poisonous if not properly prepared or if the wrong parts are eaten.

Elderberries are commonly made into superb cordials, jellies and more, but don’t be tempted to use them for uncooked juice. Eight members of a party that drank raw elder berry juice had to be airlifted to hospital in 1984 after developing severe symptons of poisoning.

Even fat hen (which Worrall Thompson intended to recommend) should be approached with caution. Like other plants of the beet family it contains high levels of oxalates and another substance that causes sensitivity to sunlight and survives boiling. Especially if eaten raw and in large quantities, there’s a danger subsequent exposure to sun causing blistering and ulcers. Personally, I’d err on the safe side and only eat modest amounts, well cooked.

The potential toxicity of potatoes is reasonably well known, but a surprising number of stomach upsets are probably caused by dodgy potatoes without the cause ever being suspected. The rule here is never to eat potatoes that have started to turn green or sprout (peeling and cutting out the bad bits isn’t good enough) and make sure children don’t eat the leaves, stalks or berries.

Be safe, know your enemy

The toxicity of some plants and mushrooms may seem alarming. It is!

However, the well-informed forager can feel confident in accurately identifying the berries, leaves and fungi that really are good to eat, and really good to eat. Wild hops, wild garlic, St George’s mushrooms, ceps, cherry plums, sloes, (cooked) fat hen and much, much more are all too good to miss.

Read this book, know what to avoid and enjoy the safely delectable fruits of the wild.

Related posts:

1. Mushrooms without fear: 9 steps to avoid poisoning yourself
2. St George’s mushrooms, a sublime taste of Spring
3. Twittered morsels: chimera & rats, food costs, 30s foods, tiny farm, meaty questions, dead sheep, safe fungi

For their sublime aroma and intense sweetness, and for the sake of our desperately declining cherry orchards, do whatever it takes to find and eat some British cherries over the next couple of weeks. We’re losing our cherry orchards at an alarming rate and the only way to save them is to eat more British cherries.

Finding British cherries

Henrietta Green’s Foodlovers Britain is running the CherryAid campaign to promote and support the British cherry, leading up to British Cherry Day on Saturday 19th July. Particularly useful is the directory of Pick Your Own and farm shops selling cherries.

The wonderful and distinctive Common Ground also celebrates cherries within its Orchard Path “journey through trees, blossom, fruit…”

The Romans to thank

Cherries have been cultivated in Britain since their introduction – like so much else – by the Romans, but almost all our once extensive cherry orchards have been lost since the War. Of the 30 to 40 thousand acres of orchards 60 years ago, we’ve now under a thousand acres left.

Cherries were grown across the south and west of the country, with the greatest concentration of orchards in Kent – close to the hungry London market and the growing expertise of the continent – since the 16th century. British cherries are almost exclusively English cherries – though much grown in nearby Herefordshire, I can find no record of cherry production in Wales.

Traditionally grown as large standard trees, harvesting cherries was a laborious process involving long ladders, scissors and sieves. Like other commercially grown fruit, almost all modern cherry growers now use dwarfing rootstock for smaller trees. Harvesting is far easier and the trees can be netted to protect the valuable fruit from hungry birds. A few old orchards survive, such as the illustrated Park Farm orchard, where the custom of letting sheep graze beneath the trees also continues.

Sweet and sour

A little like cooking and dessert apples, cherries come in sweet and sour varieties, though the sour are now very little grown. There are dozens of varieties of both types – the Brogdale National Fruit Collection has 306 varieties of cherry in cultivation, from Alba Heart and Aldridge’s Unknown to Yellow Spanish and Zweitfruhe – all descended from two species still found growing wild in Britain.

Prunus cerasus is the parent species of the sour cherries, while Prunus avium (known as the gean or mazzard) is parent to the sweet varieties. The fruit of Prunus avium can be as delicious as any cultivated cherry but the birds generally get to them first. Legend has it that the wild trees still grow along old Roman roads, where passing Romans discarded the stones.

Eating cherries

What to do with cherries? It’s hard to resist just eating them, savouring them one by one. But the food blogging community has plenty of suggestions for more adventurous uses of cherries, from traditional Kentish cherry batter (better known by its fancy French name, clafoutis – cooked and blogged by Alex at Eating Leeds and Cook Sister!, amongst others) and madelines with cherries to lemon and cherry posset to Girl Interrupted Eating’s inspired Wild Mallard Duck with Balsamic Cherries and Lentils.

Farewell huffkin, long live the cherry

Another traditional confection, the cherry huffkin – a flat, round tea-cake with a hole in the middle filled with hot cherries – seems sadly extinct. By eating more British cherries, we can help make sure the cherry doesn’t go the same way.

Postscript – The huffkin lives!

Happily, it appears that the huffkin lives on after all. In his travels round Britain with a fork, Matthew Fort tracked down a baker who’s recreated the huffkin – Martin Flynn of Oscar’s Bakery at 3 Limes Place, Preston Street, Faversham, Kent. There’s talk of the distinguishing dimple in the top but no suggestion that it might contain cherries.

Related posts:

1. Promise of summer fruit, threat of a blackthorn winter
2. Bramley apples, an English culinary icon resurgent
3. Peach blossom

Cherry plums (Prunus cerasifera also known as myrobalans) vary in colour from a deep, almost ox-blood, red to pale yellow, with the fruit ripening any time from mid July to late August. A small group of trees along a hedge-line can give a good harvest over several weeks.

Cooking and eating cherry plums

The fruit are versatile and delicious. Taste and texture, like the colour, vary between trees, but most of the fruit are excellent eaten raw. Cherry plums can be substituted for ordinary plums or damsons in almost any recipe, from cobbler to chutney. With a high pectin content, they’re ideal for jams and jellies (the Cottage Smallholder has good recipes for both chutney and jelly). Alternatively, try pressing them for their sweet juice.

Finding cherry plums

Cherry plums are common across Britain, particularly south of the Wash-Severn line (as the Science and Plants for Schools website’s distribution map illustrates), but too often overlooked. By late August, most of the fruit ends up as a jammy mass beneath the trees.

The fruit can be difficult to spot when ripe, the bright colours masked by the dense green foliage, but their early blossom is easily spotted in the winter – it’s worth noting the sites of trees for summer foraging. Cherry plum trees are frequently found in small groups along hedgerows and garden boundaries, while a purple leaved and fruited variety is often grown in suburban streets.

The cherry plum is sadly neglected by some writers on wild food. It is unaccountably omitted from Roger Phillips’ otherwise excellent Wild Food (Natural history photographic guides), while Richard Mabey cursorily dismisses it in his classic Food for Free (Collins Natural History), suggesting that the trees rarely produce fruit, and that, even when they do, it’s only palatable if sweetened and cooked. I’ve enjoyed delectable sweet fruit every summer for more than 10 years – perhaps a consequence of the changing climate.

Though neither cherry nor plum (but a parent, with blackthorn, of the domestic plum), cherry plums are often mistaken for wild plums. Escaped domestic plums (Prunus domestica) are also found in the wild, their fruits as various as damsons, bullaces, greengages, ordinary plums and the small, yellow, cherry-plum-like mirabelle. All are superb fruit and worth gathering wherever they’re found.

(This post is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by In Mol Araan)

Related posts:

1. Promise of summer fruit, threat of a blackthorn winter
2. Peach blossom
3. Eat British Cherries now! (if it’s July)

Hedge Garlic (Alliara petiola) is one of the earliest fresh spring greens of the hedgerow, its bright green garlicky leaves appearing from February and at their best as the plant flowers in April and May.

Otherwise known as garlic mustard or Jack-by-the-hedge, it has a more delicate, but nonetheless distinctly oniony, aroma and flavour than the better known wild garlic or ramsons (Allium ursinum).

Much of the flavour is lost in cooking but it holds its own in a salad. As well as the leaves, the young flowers are edible and particularly attractive.

John Evelyn, in his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699) – (UK)(US)- notes that:

Jack-by-the-Hedge … has many Medicinal Properties, and is eaten as other Sallets, especially by Country People, growing wild under their Banks and Hedges.

Evelyn knows the herb also as sauce-alone, for hedge garlic works well as a garnish and in uncooked sauces.

Richard Mabey’s Food for Free gives a simple but delicious recipe for a sauce for lamb along the lines of mint sauce – just finely chopped hedge garlic (with a little hawthorn and mint) mixed with vinegar and sugar.

Like both garlic and mustard (though it’s not related to either), hedge garlic is highly versatile in the kitchen. Roger Phillips reports that it was once often matched with mutton, salt fish, bacon and herrings.

Essential Reading

Wild Food (Natural History Photographic Guides) by Roger Phillips (UK)(US)

Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets by John Evelyn (UK)(US)

Food for Free by Richard Mabey (UK)(US)

Related posts:

1. It’s March – eat some hedge garlic
2. Alexanders: a forgotten vegetable
3. St George’s mushrooms, a sublime taste of Spring

St George’s Day and my thoughts turn inevitably to St George’s mushrooms. It’s the traditional start of the British season for these chunky, creamy Spring fungi (Tricholama gambosum / Calocybe gambosa), which runs till the end of May.

The True Mushroom

St Georges may be less well known than ceps, girolles or morels, but they definitely rank amongst the finest wild mushrooms, with a firm texture, appealing mealy smell and distinctive flavour, reminiscent of soil and wood smoke. In France it’s known as le vrai mouserron, “the true mushroom”.

Cooking St George’s Mushrooms

They’ve an affinity with chicken and eggs, as well as those other seasonal Spring delicacies, asparagus and hop shoots. It’s hard to beat a simple but exquisite St George and asparagus omelette. An inspired pairing, suggested by @Farctum, is with hedge garlic, another wild food of the Spring, in a St George, hedge garlic and chive omelette. Or use them in just about any mushroom recipe.

Where They Grow

St Georges grow in a wide variety of habitats, from woodland to pasture, but are particularly fond of chalk grassland. I’ve found them on sites as various as London’s Hyde Park, Salisbury Plain, Newmarket Heath and on Suffolk lawns and commons.

Picking St Georges amongst the cowslips on the grassy expanses of Salisbury Plain, with skylarks singing overhead, is for me the epitome of the English spring.

Besides their sublime flavour, St Georges have the great advantage of growing in quantity. They often form rings in grassland, the subterranean fungal body growing from a central point and sending up its fruiting bodies (the mushrooms that spread the spores) around the perimeter each year.

Rings can be of almost any size – I’ve seen them from a hand’s span to several dozen metres across. There are rumours of giant rings half a mile wide or more! A good sized ring can produce several kilos of mushrooms.

The rings – of yellowing and darker grass together – are often clearly visible from a distance and a helpful guide to the location of the mushrooms. Up close they can be completely hidden under long grass – as an Italian mushroom hunter once told me, you need eyes on the ends of your fingers to find them.

Identification

As with all wild mushrooms, be absolutely sure of a positive identification before eating anything. St Georges can be confused with poisonous varieties of Inocybe and Entolama fungi.

Roger Phillips’ classic Mushrooms is an excellent guide with clear photos and is also available online, a superb resource.

The Collins How to Identify Edible Mushrooms guide has clear advice and useful illustrated warnings of possible confusion.

Essential Reading

(This post is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging #80, hosted by A Fridge Full of Food)

Related posts:

1. Mushrooms without fear: 9 steps to avoid poisoning yourself
2. Poisonous plants and fungi: the essential book for foragers
3. Cherry plums: a promise fulfilled

Eating alexanders

Cut and steam the stems and buds, ideally just before the flowers have opened, for an absolutely distinctive, even peculiar, vegetable, a little like celery, parsley or chervil.

The Cottage Smallholder recommends:

Its best use is when the spring growth produces good sized stalks. If they are not too woody, these can be cut, and peeled, then braised in a little butter in a pan for a few minutes until soft. Serve with a sprinkle of pepper. This tastes rather like asparagus and is a real delight. The yellow-green flower buds can be eaten raw or added to salads and have a pleasant, nutty taste.

Roger Phillips, in his excellent collection of photos and recipes, Wild Food, gives advice on the simplest preparation of Alexanders – little more than 6 to 8 minutes’ boiling to serve hot with butter and black pepper.

The history of alexanders

Alexanders were once grown in kitchen gardens as Alexandrian parsley. Like so many other naturalised edible plants, Alexanders were introduced by the Romans and enjoyed centuries of popularity before eventually falling out of fashion with the introduction of new varieties of celery in the 19th century

John Evelyn, in his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699) describes Alexanders as “moderately hot, and of a cleansing faculty”, comparing them favourably to parsley. He recommends:

The gentle fresh sprouts, buds, and tops are to be chosen, and the stalks eaten in the spring; and when blanch’d, in winter likewise, with oyl, pepper, salt, etc by themselves, or in composition: They make also an excellent vernal pottage.

Just such a pottage was described by Robert May in The Accomplish’t Cook (1660) with the beautiful concision rarely seen in modern recipes:

Ellicksander Pottage
Chop ellicksanders and oatmeal together, being picked and washed, then set on a pipkin with fair water, and when it boils, put in your herbs, oatmeal, and salt, and boil it on a soft fire, and make it not too thick, being almost boil’d put in some butter.

Roger Phillips’ Wild Food quotes a recipe of 1907, demonstrating that Alexanders’ popularity just about survived into the 20th century.

(This post is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging #78, hosted by Cook Almost Anything at Least Once)

Related posts:

1. Cherry plums: a promise fulfilled
2. St George’s mushrooms, a sublime taste of Spring
3. Garlic from the hedgerow

Wherever this earliest blossom breaks the greys and browns of winter, July and August will bring abundant golden or scarlet fruit, honey sweet with sharply sour skin. It’s often said, and repeated this month by Simon Barnes in the Times, that the cherry plum rarely fruits in Britain, but I’ve collected reliably good crops for years.

The cherry plum is a much neglected fruit. Neither cherry nor plum, it isn’t even quite the mirabelle, so loved by the French, for which it’s often mistaken. The cherry plum’s alternative name, myrobolan, suggests close kinship but the cherry plum is its own distinct species, prunus cerasifera. It’s native to central Asia and a parent to cultivated plums and gages.

The better-known blackthorn follows the cherry plum into bloom almost a full month later and is now appearing as the cherry plum blossom drops. The past few days have seen a classic blackthorn winter. The cherry plum’s early young fruit should weather such cold snaps but they’re more threatening to delicate garden peaches also coming into bloom.

Related posts:

1. Cherry plums: a promise fulfilled
2. Peach blossom
3. Eat British Cherries now! (if it’s July)