Curiosities like a voodoo evening at Boggle Hole in Robin Hood’s Bay are available, or an Esperanto weekend in the Peak District. First prize for an offbeat break, though, must go to the ‘fungus foray’ based at Edale on the weekend of October 7th–9th. For an extra £6 you can join mycologist Dr Patrick Harding collecting blewits, chanterelles and boletus [sic] edulis and consuming them in a ‘fungus feast’.
Five years later I was invited to teach a mushroom course on behalf of Cambridge University’s Adult Education Department, based at Madingley Hall. The silver service dinner on the Friday was preceded by a resonant gong and full Latin grace. Prior to the coffee, the warden addressed the assembled company:
Welcome to Madingley and to a fascinating range of weekend courses. ‘Unexplored Mozart’ will take place in the Saloon; those ‘Reading Greek’ will be in the Library while ‘Mushrooms and Toadstools’ will be …
Her voice was drowned by the rising tide of laughter from the musicians and linguists as I tried to appear invisible. By the Saturday evening I had recovered my composure and made my own announcement before the coffee was served:
Those of you studying Mozart and Greek are more than welcome to pay a brief visit to the board room, where you might be interested to see what those on the Mushroom course have been up to.
Spread across eight tables were scores of labelled specimens collected on our field trip. Two years later, when the course was repeated, I was delighted to welcome among the course members two from the Greek and three from the Mozart group. Twenty years on and the mushroom course is still running. It is heavily oversubscribed.
Mushroom hunters of European extraction included Polish immigrants who had settled in Britain during and immediately after World War II. Collecting and eating fungi is an important part of Polish culture and those in the vanguard of the more recent influx must have been pleasantly surprised by the lack of local competition when it came to mushroom hunting. A Polish dish traditionally served on Christmas Eve includes Boletus edulis in the list of ingredients.
Old English books about cookery and mushrooms mentioned Boletus edulis under its local name of penny bun. This moniker arose on account of the likeness of the pale-brown, slightly sticky, convex cap to a product displayed in many bakers and which had originally sold for just one (old) penny. In the years following World War II the bakers’ penny bun lost its fight against inflation while the mushroom lost the battle to keep its old English name. As British cooks looked for inspiration from French cuisine so the writers of cookery books anglicised the French name for the fungus Cèpe and penny bun became known as cep.
British cooks have rarely suffered from a shortage of recipe books; if anything the problem has been more one of surfeit rather than deficiency. The same cannot be said of books about mushrooms and toadstools; although like buses, after a long wait, several turned up at once. Lack of interest in edible mushrooms has long bordered on a phobia in Britain; a condition not helped by a paucity of non-technical books aimed at the general public.
Mordecai Cooke did his best in Victorian times with publications such as British Edible Fungi – How to Distinguish and to Cook Them. The British Government’s attempts to encourage fungal foraging, especially during times of food shortage, resulted in Edible and Poisonous Fungi – Bulletin No 23 of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, first published in 1910. This slim booklet described just 19 edible ‘varieties’ and nine poisonous ones. The remaining stock of the 1945 edition was destroyed by a German incendiary bomb, which may have been a blessing in disguise given that one of the species included in the edible section has since proved to be poisonous, albeit it to a minority of the population.
In the 1960s Findlay’s Wayside and Woodland Fungi included some illustrations by Beatrix Potter (see here), but the book was not aimed at those with a culinary interest in the subject. Richard Mabey’s ground-breaking Food for Free, first published in 1972, included a section on edible fungi. Three years later Jane Grigson produced her culinary classic, The Mushroom Feast, although with only limited mycological information and rather small line drawings. In the same year Shirley Conran included the following advice in Superwoman:
I’d rather lie on a sofa than sweep beneath it.
Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.
At the time the only widely available picture book aimed at the interested amateur, with the exception of The Observer’s book, was Lange and Hora’s Collins Guide to Mushrooms and Toadstools. As a young naturalist I ‘bagged’ my first 100 species with the help of Lange and Hora, but the quality of the pictures left much to be desired and no English names were included.
In 1981 Roger Phillips paved the way for the interested amateur mycologist with a user-friendly book (recently updated) adorned with excellent photographs and lightened by the inclusion of some English names. By 1986 Britain was almost ready for How to Identify Edible Mushrooms, which I wrote with my great friend Tony Lyon. The book is still in print and has been joined by a plethora of others (including Need to Know? Mushroom Hunting, published in 2006) on the subject of edible fungi.
For many years local natural history societies paid lip service to fungi with just a single annual foray, but following the upsurge of interest in mycology many groups now have a separate fungal section. In addition, since the 1990s many local fungal recording groups have been formed (see here for details) while journals such as Field Mycology and British Wildlife keep mycologists up to date with new developments. An interest in fungi is no longer considered unusual; penny buns have become accepted.
The Vegetable Market: detail from 15th Century Italian fresco
(Giraudon/BAL)
The Grete Herbal, written in 1526, had this to say about what it called ‘mussherons’:
There be two manners of them, one manner is deedly and sleath them that eateth of them and be called tode stoles.
Given that the other ‘manners’ were the edible ones, it is interesting to note that this indicates that the group of organisms termed mussherons (mushrooms) included the poisonous tode stoles (toadstools). Over the following 400 years the word mushroom came to be restricted to edible species, separate from the inedible toadstools, although it was realised that not all of the latter were poisonous. The title of Edward Step’s early 20th century book Toadstools and Mushrooms of the Countryside is indicative of the use of the two terms at a time when the common names of edible, if unrelated, species included field mushroom, parasol mushroom and oyster mushroom.
The meaning of the two terms continued in this way until the end of the 20th century, as evident in Gem Mushrooms and Toadstools (1996). As the British public became more interested in fungi and in gathering edible ones, so a subtle change occurred. The second edition of the Gem book appeared under the simpler title of Mushrooms, as did an updated version of a book by Roger Phillips previously entitled Mushrooms and Other Fungi of Great Britain and Europe. After almost 500 years the word mushroom has once again become an all-embracing term for the macrofungi (those that produce fruitbodies that can easily be seen with the naked eye); a group that includes the toadstools.
Scientists also lumped mushrooms and toadstools together, in a group known as the Agaricales. The ‘agarics’, as they became known, include all species with a fleshy, umbrella-shaped fruitbody as typified