Ashy's
on-line vegetarian cookbook
Gathering mushrooms is fun. It gives you a good day out in the country-side and you get to eat the mushrooms at the end. Wild mushrooms taste better than shop ones and different species can have quite distinct tastes and textures. Many people are afraid to go out and gather mushrooms because they fear they may gather poisonous ones by accident. In practice, it isn't difficult to learn to distinguish the good from the bad and it's not just a case of visual identification. Some mushrooms which are very similar in appearance, don't grow together either in a spatial or a temporal sense. A particular poisonous species may resemble an edible species which you want to gather, but if it only appears a month or two later or it grows in grassland, whereas the edible ones grow in forest, you can gather the edible one's without danger of confusion. There are also other indicators to consider when identifying mushrooms. Paying attention to the smell, for example, is often a good additional means of identification. Many poisonous or inedible species have a distinct, often unpleasant smell. Cutting into the flesh of a mushroom and observing the colour and, especially, any colour change when the flesh is exposed to air can often provide another reliable indicator. There is also spore colour. Leaving a mushroom cap on a piece of glass for a few hours will usually produce a spore print that is another useful aid to identification.
Taking these points into consideration, it is possible to gather mushrooms from the wild completely safely. Not only must you learn how to spot the good ones, you must also be aware of the likelihood of any similar looking bad ones being in the area and know how to tell them apart. The key to safety is having accurate and complete knowledge, not just confidence. There are lots of very good books available to help you and you have a duty to yourself and the people you are going to feed, to be thoroughly familiar with all the available information before you go out and to take every precaution while you are gathering. Take an identification guidebook with you and only pick a mushroom when you are absolutely sure you have identified it correctly and have eliminated all possibility of it being a similar poisonous species. Never take a chance. IF IN DOUBT, LEAVE IT OUT!