Lincoff - The Complete Mushroom Hunter: an Illustrated Guide to Finding, Harvesting, and Enjoying Wild Mushrooms

Wherever we are living, we are becoming more and more concerned about what we are eating and how our food is produced and marketed. Mushroom consumption will increase as we become more aware of its benefits. What many once believed was of no food value has become central to a new lifestyle that involves choosing foods that are good for us, not just foods that taste good.

Mushrooms, whether wild or cultivated, contain medicinally beneficial polysaccharides in addition to amino acid complexes that are high in lysine. Lysine is an essential amino acid notably absent in food staples, including wheat, rice, corn, and barley. Eating mushrooms with bread or in pasta or with rice or polenta, or in a mushroom-barley soup, which is how mushrooms are eaten in much of the world, is the surest way to get the most nutritional benefit from them. In addition, mushrooms are rich in vitamins and minerals and low in fat and calories (depending on how you cook them). Besides, mushrooms are not injected with hormones or raised on bonemeal. And hunting wild mushrooms has all the advantages of being in the great outdoors, the only caveat being a little care in selecting choice edible kinds.

If you take this book along with you, a walk in the park or the local woods will no longer be simple exercise or a way to pass time. It will be an opening into a world beneath your feet and over your head that has always been there, unobserved.

Perhaps you have seen mushrooms in your neighborhood and wondered what they were, but knew no way to distinguish the edible ones from the poisonous. This book helps you recognize some of the best edible mushrooms and reliably distinguish them from any poisonous look-alikes.

M ushroom hunting is an activity that comes to us out of prehistoric times. The Iceman, the man dubbed tzi whose body was found frozen in a glacier near the Austrian-Italian border, has been dated as being 5,000 years old, and he was carrying two mushrooms in a pouch. One was the birch polypore (Piptoporus betulinus), a common bracket fungus found on birch trees, which is believed to have been used by him medicinally against intestinal parasites or as a styptic or compress to stanch bleeding. The other, the tinder fungus (Fomes fomentarius), also a common bracket fungus on birch, was used as a source of tinder for lighting or maintaining a fire. Whatever other mushrooms his people might have used, that he was traveling with these two indicates a considerable knowledge of mushrooms and their uses.

Our knowledge of the use of mushrooms goes back in China more than 12,000 years, but written records go back only about 2,000 years. The Romans relished wild mushrooms and wrote about how they used them in their feasts as well as the occasions on which the reputed poisoning of emperors occurred, such as Claudius in 54 CE. Today, in Paris, Prague, and Moscow, and any number of European cities in between, during the mushroom season, many of those who drive out to the country on weekends are going to hunt mushrooms. Some leave Moscow Friday night and sleep in their cars near entrances to their favorite hunting sites to be the first ones in the woods when dawn breaks on Saturday morning. Some landowners outside of Paris have been known to slash the tires of cars with Parisian license plates parked near wooded areas: people everywhere become possessive of the mushrooms they consider their own. While it might be seen by tourists as a curious cultural activity in Prague, to the citizens of the Czech Republic, mushroom hunting is the national sport, and people flock to the summer and early autumn woods to fill baskets with wild mushrooms. It has been estimated that 40 percent of the Finnish population heads out into the woods to collect mushrooms during their short summer season.