Steve ate it

[desperance]

Who is Steve, you ask, and what did he eat? I don't actually know who he is, tho' I know where he hangs out; and what he ate was tree-brain, aka sulphur shelf, chicken of the woods, laetiporus. It's a wild mushroom. Grows on trees, looks (a bit) like brain. Tastes (a lot, apparently) like chicken.

I mention this not only for its intrinsic interestingness, but also because I did myself last week eat mushrooms that I'd picked on a walk. As Steve says, DON'T DO THIS! IT'S STUPID! But I was out with a friend, and he was cheerfully telling me about the time he misidentified a puffball and had a hallucinatory & vomiting experience that was utterly euphoric - and then he pointed with his toe and said, "See? Puffballs! Those really are puffballs. Perfectly edible..."

And I - who know only the giant puffball by sight, which is a different thing entirely - picked them and brought them home and spent a little time with my mushroom book, decided he was right, and made an omelette.

Nom-nom-nom.

And spent the next hour or two thinking "Do I feel all right? Am I entirely myself? Whoops, I smiled - is this euphoria? Someone walked by the window - or did I hallucinate them?" etc. But all was well. I do wish I actually knew one mushroom from another, though, because my judgement is not to be trusted, even with a book in hand.

Comments

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

To paraphrase Pratchett:

All mushrooms are edible.
Not all mushrooms are edible more than once.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

*laughs*

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

My ex-husband picked some white field mushrooms, usually easy to identify and harmless, off the lawn of my apartment.

He became very, very ill.

I was ready to kill him myself, if the mushrooms didn't, for being that dumb--he's always picked incidental mushrooms, I've always been wary of them. Luckily, IMO, I don't like mushrooms overmuch.

It turns out that they *were* the harmless sort of mushroom, but they had absorbed chemicals from the lawn treatments--I live above an office building, and they have a service that takes care of the landscaping. He doesn't eat mushrooms from my house anymore.

[readwrite.livejournal.com]

All puffballs are edible IF AND ONLY IF they are white all the way through, and IF they are indeed not the "button" stage of a gilled mushroom. The only way to tell this for sure is to slice each one through the middle.

The giant puffballs (Calvatia gigantica and Scleroderma) are hard to mistake for anything else, but still you need to slice them through to make sure they're OK on the inside. The smaller puffballs like Lycoperdon perlatum are also pretty hard to miss once you know them, but you have to get to know them...

Your friend is very lucky. White buttons can be deadly amanitas. Eat one of those (and they're reasonably common), and you'l die slowly and painfully over the course of a week or so. Or, if you get the right medical attention, you'll live, but have serious medical problems for the rest of your life. See Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle for details.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Damn - now I'm sitting here trying to remember the other book I loved that featured - aha! Got it! "The Debt to Pleasure", by John Lanchester. Highly recommended.

And thanks for this. We did know about the insides, and I did check quite scrupulously. My friend is actually quite scrupulous and quite well-informed, and still hasn't figured out what went wrong the other time.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Peyote doesn't grow in England, does it?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Not under normal circs. There are a few serious hothouse cacti collections of my acquaintance, but if they've got peyote they're keeping it quiet...