CONNOISSEUR: It's mushroom season so get picking - but not before reading about the dangers, writes Hugo Arnold
THE THRILL OF picking field mushrooms and carrying them home in baskets fashioned from shirts and jumpers is a memory hard to shift. It was a long time ago though, when fields were sprayed with less fertiliser, perhaps. We fried them in butter, some as big as steaks, and ate them with eggs collected from hens earlier that morning. This was Sligo in the 1960s.
Today, the interest in mushrooms has never been greater. And with good reason. Mushrooms offer variety and good eating possibilities. There are around 2,000 species of flowering plant growing wild in the British Isles. Compare that with 2,200 known species of mushroom, which if you add in the likes of puffballs, hedgehog fungi and jelly fungi, quickly rises to 3,000. There are some, including Patrick Harding, who has just written Mushroom Miscellany(Collins, £14.99 ),who reckon the figure is more likely to be around 14,000 species of fungi. Nobody is suggesting all of this larger grouping are edible, but it shows not just how big the category is. And there is growing interest in the subject.
In the mid-1980s Patrick Harding's introduction at Cambridge University's adult education department was met with howls of laughter. Why on earth would somebody teach, let alone want to go on, a mushroom course?
Yet, in Italy at this time of year entire villages are given over to mushroom festivals, stalls and stalls sell truffles and porcini, along with other varieties that are both fresh and dried. Here, in part prompted by the influx of other nationalities more used to foraging for food, interest is growing. and the number of mushroom hunts each autumn increases year on year.
There is a lot of sense in these team efforts. Not all mushrooms are edible and while a photo in a book may serve to warn, there is nothing to beat the first-hand experience of somebody kneeling beside you while you unearth what you hope to be a cep, but which turns out to be a hedgehog mushroom. Both may be edible, but the latter has nothing like the eating qualities of the former.
Harding's Miscellanyjoins a growing number of books on the subject published over the years. But where many, such as Roger Phillips's excellent Mushrooms, tend to concentrate on the identifying, gathering and cooking of wild mushrooms and other fungi, this book fascinates in revealing not just the edible glories, but how the whole area mycology is relatively unexplored and not that well understood.
The striking devil's fingers Clathrus archeriis an Australian species that is now turning up in southern England. How and why remains a mystery. Not quite so much of a mystery, and a welcome development for those of us focused on the culinary delights of mushroom hunting, is the growing emergence of morels.
Harding's explanation for the surfeit of morels is the increasing use of so-called wood-chip in gardens. This cheap form of mulching, largely made up of wood bark, is the perfect habitat for morels. Not only this, but the relative warmth of suburban gardens (often a degree or two warmer than the countryside) means that this spring-fruiting delicacy is now more common. Sadly the false morel, Gyromitra esculenta, is also more common and can prove fatal.
There have been very few new plants discovered over past 20 years, but the world of mushrooms, with growth of amateur and professional mycologists, seems to be revealing more and more by the day.
Check it out
Northern Ireland Fungus Group, www.nifg.org
Fungal Records Database of Britain and Ireland, http://194.203.77.76/fieldmycology
British Mycological Society, www.britmycolsoc.org.uk