Share This PageField Guide to the Wild Mushrooms of Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic
by Bill Russell
Preface
How far
back can your memory reach? If I really stretch, my earliest memory is of hunting
mushrooms as a toddler with my parents, early on a misty summer morning, in
an old graveyard near our home. Mushrooms grew everywhere. To me, they looked
like big white buttons hiding in the grass. My parents carried tomato baskets
and kitchen knives. Because I was so small—and thus close to the ground—I
spotted a few tiny ones that my parents had overlooked. Afterward, I sat in
my high chair near the kitchen table, impatiently waiting while my mother cooked
the mushrooms we had brought home. She served me a little dish with three small
sautéed button mushrooms—the mushrooms that I had found. To this
day, I remember the earthy, sweet taste. From that moment I became hooked on
mushroom hunting.
After I learned to read, my father bought me a wild mushroom identification book. Over the winter I memorized many of the mushroom descriptions. The following summer I studied the mushrooms that were growing in the woods, fields, and backyards around my home. My parents knew only one edible mushroom species (the one that grew in the graveyard), which they called a field mushroom. No one else in the area knew any others. I realized that if I wanted to discover other edible mushrooms, I would have to do it on my own.
Discover them I did. The first edible mushroom I identified by myself, with enough certainty to sample, was the glistening inky cap. Because it appeared in large crops in my backyard several times a season, I had plenty of opportunities to examine it closely and consider its edibility. The first time I ate it, I followed the advice in my book and sautéed a small sample. It was delicious, with a flavor very different from those of the supermarket white button mushrooms and the field mushrooms. I was eager to learn more about edible mushrooms, but I knew that it was important to move ahead slowly and carefully. Within a couple of years, I learned on my own to identify several edible species confidently.
My parents constantly felt torn between encouraging their budding mushroom hunter and saving their lives. Thanksgiving Day marked the beginning of velvet stem mushroom season where we lived. Lots of them grew on a log pile in the woods not far from the house, and every year I gathered a big basketful for the turkey stuffing. Every Thanksgiving morning, I would bring the basket into the bustling kitchen and proudly announce that I had the mushrooms for the turkey stuffing. Every year I would be greeted with silence. Yet every year I went ahead and stirred the velvet stems into the turkey stuffing mix. When dinner was served later in the day, a mountain of stuffing covered my plate. For days after, I had stuffing for breakfast, stuffing sandwiches for lunch, and warmed-over stuffing for dinner. Every year I had all the Thanksgiving turkey stuffing I could eat—because no one else would eat it.
By the time I graduated from high school, I had learned to pick about fifty edible mushrooms. Then, as an undergraduate physics student, I made a wonderful discovery: the library had a huge collection of mushroom books. Over the next four years I learned about dozens of other edible mushrooms. A year after graduation, I began an extended period of postgraduate studies in the biological and botanical sciences that further expanded my knowledge and understanding of mushrooms.
There’s no end to learning about mushrooms. You could study them over several lifetimes without knowing everything there is to know about them. My mushrooming friends and I get together several times a year to share each other’s knowledge and experiences. You can do the same. Form a circle of friends who are interested in mushrooms, and you will all learn faster. To meet other mushroom enthusiasts, you may want to check out the North American Mycological Association. Find them on the Internet at www.namyco.org.
The difficulty of reading a mushroom guide often puts off a beginner. To make it easier, I have avoided using many technical terms in the mushroom descriptions. You don’t have to be a botanist in order to use this book. You only need to have an interest in nature and the willingness to look closely at the mushrooms growing around you. You will discover that certain mushrooms are easy to identify, while others need your time and attention. With a bit of dedication, you should soon be able to name many of the wild mushrooms that you meet in your backyard, on your walks, and on your outings. You will also find directions for transplanting wild mushrooms into your backyard, suggestions for gathering and using certain species, and fun things to do with mushrooms. Even experienced mushroomers will benefit from the tips and personal observations I offer based on many years of mushrooming.
This book is not intended to be your only guide to identifying, gathering, and using mushrooms. To learn a new mushroom, you need to become a detective, gathering clue after clue from your observations and from mushroom books that will lead you to a positive identification of the species. It’s well worth the effort to seek out a knowledgeable teacher. But when your teacher is not available, you will have to rely on as many mushroom guidebooks as you can get your hands on. Each author has his or her own photographs, illustrations, descriptive details, and comments that will help you, and experienced mushroomers know that all sources of clues are important. The more information you have, the better.
Happy mushrooming!
Bill Russell
Mushroom Basics
What is a mushroom? Your answer depends on who you are, where you come from, and what you think about mushrooms. For Americans, the white button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) of the supermarkets likely pops to mind. After all, it was the mushroom of our cookbook recipes and restaurant menus before the supermarkets carried a selection of gourmet mushrooms. To people of certain other countries, a mushroom is any edible fungus. Authors of most mushroom field guides apparently use a definition I learned a long time ago: a mushroom is simply “a large fleshy fungus.” Defining a mushroom this way opens the door to a broad range of fungi, some with distinctly strange features.
In many ways, fungi are peculiar living things. They have certain characteristics of plants and animals, but they are neither. They have their own biological niche. Botanically, fungi are classed as a kingdom, alongside the plant kingdom and animal kingdom. This distinction indicates the vast differences between fungi and other living things.
Most plants contain chlorophyll, the green coloring matter that uses sunlight to make the sugars that the plant uses for energy. Mushrooms and other fungi, by comparison, don’t depend upon sunlight for an energy source, so they don’t contain chlorophyll or other such chemicals. (Many mushrooms have green coloring, but not from chlorophyll.) Instead of using sunlight, fungi, including mushrooms, have developed clever ways to make a living. Many are saprophytes: they get their food and energy from digesting dead organic matter. Some are parasitic and draw their nourishment from other living things. Others have a mycorrhizal relationship with other plants, which means that they survive only through a biological companionship with them.
Mushrooms and other fungi play an important role in the balance of nature. They are natural recyclers, helping dispose of dead organic matter and nourishing the soil. Without fungi, dead vegetation would pile up to enormous depths in our forests and elsewhere. The soil would eventually become so depleted of nutrients that green plants could not grow. Without plants, the earth’s atmosphere would lose oxygen. Indeed, life couldn’t exist without mushrooms and other fungi. (Have you thanked your mushrooms today?)
In other times and places, mushrooms were associated with mysterious creatures of the night, and such folkloric fantasies have not been limited to toads sitting atop toadstools. (How you define a toadstool depends, again, on where you come from geographically. Where I was born, any inedible mushroom is called a toadstool; in other places, people call any mushroom with a cap and a more or less central stem a toadstool. For people with active imaginations, that particular fungal shape is an ideal seat for a toad, should a toad ever be so inclined.) Old and modern fairy-tale books depict pixies, fairies, elves, and other whimsical creatures perching on mushrooms, dancing around them, or loitering in their vicinity. We feel that such creatures are somehow attracted to mushrooms. This old belief probably relates to mushrooms’ fast growth—they sometimes pop up almost overnight—and their strange looks. Feeding the fanciful association with little folk, certain mushrooms tend to grow in arcs or circles in pastures, lawns, or other mowed places. In earlier times, these patterns were called “fairy rings,” believed to mark the places in which fairies danced. Common names of mushrooms often reflect these quaint beliefs. We still call Marasmius oreades the fairy ring mushroom because it tends to grow—you guessed it—in distinct arcs and circles.
Given the right conditions, you can find mushrooms growing almost anywhere and at any time. Woods, lawns, fields, and pastures are their usual habitats. But they can appear in strange places. Although the oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) prefers dead softwood trees like aspen and elm, it can also grow on the wooden frameworks of houses, weakening the structure by digesting the wood fibers. Honey mushrooms (Armillaria mellea) can attack fruit trees with devastating results. Other mushrooms, such as certain Cordyceps species, live only on insects.
Some writers include corn smut (Ustilago maydis) in their mushroom field guides. You may have seen this common parasite’s large, unattractive, sooty black globules on the ears of corn in your vegetable garden. Many feel that including corn smut in a mushroom book pushes the boundaries too far, but it does fit our definition of a mushroom: it is indeed a large, fleshy fungus. Remarkably, it is edible when young, but may be poisonous when it matures and turns black. People of Mexico, the southwest United States, and many other areas consider it a delicacy. In certain places, it is canned and marketed as an expensive gourmet treat. I know no one personally who has eaten it, but I’ve read comments from people who call it delicious.
A few authors go to the outer limits of the mushroom world and put slime molds in their guidebooks. These peculiar entities aren’t true molds, but they are certainly slimy. A slime mold is an organized multicelled mass of jelly-like goo, frequently brightly colored, that slowly creeps along like a giant amoeba, eating dead vegetable matter in its path. It eventually stops moving and develops a spore-producing stage that usually doesn’t resemble its former mobile form. Many people find slime molds weird or creepy, but they are interesting to watch and are beautiful in their own way. I’ve wondered if they inspired those old science fiction catastrophe movies with names like The Slime That Ate Tokyo.
Identifying Features
Many wild mushrooms are formed like the white mushrooms of the supermarket. Others look outrageous, even amusing. The yellow morel (Morchella esculenta) looks so much like a pinecone that new mushroom hunters often overlook it. The giant puffball (Langermannia gigantea) is often mistaken for a soccer ball. Grifola frondosa, the hen of the woods, resembles a ruffled chicken!
Certain mushrooms are truly beautiful. The amethyst coral mushroom (Clavulina amethystina) resembles purple undersea coral. Earth stars, species of Geaster, look much like stars that fell to earth. Certain Hericium species resemble miniature frozen waterfalls with cascades of icicles. Mushrooms can indeed look good enough to eat—but beauty is no guide to edibility. Some of the most poisonous species are pretty and even taste good, according to survivors.
Mushrooms display almost any color you can imagine. The true chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius) radiates a brilliant egg-yolk yellow. Cinnabar chanterelles (Cantharellus cinnabarinus) decorate the forest floor with bright orange-pink colors. The bitter-tasting Tylopilus plumbeoviolaceus has a violet-gray color, as its scientific name indicates. The parrot mushroom (Hygrophorus psittacinus) puts on a spectacular show of rainbow colors.
The tissue of certain mushroom species changes color when you cut or bruise it. Strobilomyces floccopus, the old man of the woods, displays white flesh when first cut, but the flesh soon becomes reddish and then later turns black. Boletus bicolor, the two-colored bolete, bruises blue. Such color changes are important elements in identification.
When some milky mushrooms (species of Lactarius) are cut or broken, they ooze a milky fluid that is often brightly colored. Lactarius indigo, the edible and delicious blue milk mushroom, exudes strikingly bright blue milk. The fluid of certain other milky mushrooms changes color when exposed to air. The juice of the yellow milk mushroom (Lactarius vinaceorufescens) is white at first, for example, but it quickly turns bright yellow before your eyes.
Other mushrooms glow in the dark, brightening your nightly walk through the woods during warm months. The astringent panus mushroom (Panellus stypticus) is a small species that appears abundantly on dead wood. When it grows in vertical columns on a stump, in near darkness, it looks like a miniature skyscraper scene with some of the lights turned on. The inedible but beautiful and well-named jack o’ lantern mushroom (Omphalotus olearius) forms big orange clusters at the base of dead stumps. Its undersides glow brightly in the dark. Luminescent mushrooms are fascinating. Take them home and put them in the bedroom for an all-night light show. You may have to wait a while, letting your eyes adapt to the dark, before you see the mushrooms glowing. Use them as a ploy to get the kids to hit the sack early.
Mushroom odors are surprising. The edible golden chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius) perfumes a whole room with a rose-apricot scent. Sweet clitocybe (Clitocybe odora) smells like anise. Others have peculiar odors. The brown milky mushroom (Lactarius volemus) smells fishy after it sits for a while. Eastern matsutake (Tricholoma caligatum) can have a distinctly musty aroma. Odors can help you identify a species, but you can’t determine edibility from smell alone. Mushrooms with unappealing odors may be good to eat, while others with appetizing smells aren’t necessarily edible.
For centuries, Europeans have trained pigs and dogs to find the truffle mushroom, which grows underground and is among the most expensive mushrooms. Finding this fungus would be a hit-or-miss endeavor without the help of the animals’ keen noses, and its cost would be astronomical.
Though many edible fungi have a texture like the white button supermarket mushroom, others do not. Shaggy mane mushrooms (Coprinus comatus), for example, dissolve into a mush often before you get them home. This process, called autolysis, is the product of an enzyme reaction. The shaggy mane is considered to be a delicacy around the world, but because of its soft, delicate texture, practice and skill are required to handle it properly.
You can’t chew or digest the firmest textured mushrooms properly, but you can boil them to extract the flavors. Tough parts of certain polypore mushrooms, such as the black staining polypore (Meripilus sumstinei), make a delicious broth that can be the beginning of a fine mushroom soup.
Mushrooms come in a wide range of sizes. The bell-shaped fuzzy foot mushroom (Xeromphalina campanella) is the size of a shirt button—so small and delicate that you’ll need hours to gather enough for a good meal. Some species, on the other hand, grow too large for one person to carry. Several years ago, my friends and I found a forty-two-pound hen of the woods (Grifola frondosa). Unfortunately, it was too old to cut up to eat or preserve. Otherwise, we might still be eating it.
Mushroom Love
Many mushrooms appear almost unearthly, like the imaginings of science fiction writers. Daring thinkers have wondered if they truly originated on earth. They speculate that mushroom spores from distant home planets drifted through space. True aliens, some of these spores reached Earth’s atmosphere millions of years ago and landed on a suitable nutrient source, grew, reproduced, and thus found another home. It’s fun to ponder, but this scenario has had virtually no support from the scientific community until recently. A few scientists now believe that they have found evidence of simple life forms carried here long ago in meteorites. Stay tuned.
On this planet, at least, mushrooms have a strange and wonderful method of reproduction. When mature, they release a huge number of spores, which are microscopic single-celled reproductive units about the size of human blood cells. Wind, rain, animals, and insects spread them over long distances. If a spore is lucky enough to fall upon a suitable nutrient with the proper moisture and the right temperature, it germinates. At first it extends a finger- or rootlike projection called a germ tube, or hypha, that quickly grows and branches out into a weak cottony mass, the hyphae. Hyphae that grow from a single spore contain only half the genetic material necessary to reproduce the mushroom species. If hyphae of two compatible (yes, mushrooms have compatibility issues, just as we do) spores of the same species find each other, magic happens. As the music swells, they merge to form a hypha whose cells contain the combined genetic material of both parents. Sexual union is now established and the new hyphal tissue is called mycelium. This ordinarily invisible, cotton-like fungal mass grows quickly, expands, and eventually gives rise to the mushrooms we pick and put in our baskets.
Mycelial masses can be quite extensive, invading large logs and stumps or covering vast underground areas up to hundreds of feet in all directions. For most mushroom species, the mycelium is white, but for others it is brightly colored. The blewit (Clitocybe nuda) has beautiful purple mycelium. The mycelium of the honey mushroom (Armillaria mellea) is luminescent. If you have spent much time in the woods on warm summer nights, you have probably seen “foxfire,” rotten wood infected by this fungus, glowing with a soft, eerie green light.
Over the centuries, mostly through trial and error and with a good dose of insight, people around the world have learned to harness fungal libido and developed ways to cultivate mushrooms. These techniques have expanded into a worldwide business today. Pennsylvania is the leading commercial producer of mushrooms in the United States, itself one of the largest producers of mushrooms in the world. (On a smaller scale, kits for home mushroom gardens are widely available. Check the Internet for suppliers.) And people everywhere in this country are “discovering” mushrooms. We have never before had such a wide selection of mushrooms available in gourmet food shops and grocery stores; restaurant menus list a variety of fascinating wild mushroom dishes. People are buying mushroom guidebooks and recipe books, joining mushroom clubs, and looking for mushroom training classes, workshops, and walks.
What are mushrooms? They are many things to many people: objects of mystery and fascination, gourmet delicacies, natural recyclers, bases of income, and much more. To those who study and admire them, they are a lifelong source of exploration and adventure.
Collecting and Identifying Mushrooms
Perhaps you have found a colony of delectable-looking mushrooms growing in
your backyard recently. Or perhaps you are unfamiliar with mushrooms but
would like
to know about these backyard visitors. You want to know their names and whether
they are good to eat. (Perhaps they inspired you to pick up this book.)
Before we go any further, let me define some frequently used terms in this book. A mushroomer is a person who is interested in mushrooms—mainly from a hobbyist’s point of view. Many mushroom guidebooks call this kind of person a mycophile (that is, a mushroom lover). On the other hand, a mycologist is a mushroom scientist, often a college or university professor. Mushrooming refers to the varied activities of mushroomers. Some simply want to learn the names of mushrooms they find; others engage in mushroom photography, painting, or drawing; still others study mushroom cultivation. Most mushroomers hope to learn how to recognize edible species and prepare them for the table.
In the following pages, I will often refer to this region, meaning the general geographic area covered by the book. When I use the word local, I specifically mean the central part of this region, an area around the middle of Pennsylvania. (My turf.)
First Steps
When you find a mushroom, notice how, where, and when it is growing. Certain species prefer to grow singly or in sparse groups, while other species tend to grow in larger numbers, in clusters, groups, circles, and other arrangements. Many grow in woods. Some prefer lawns, pastures, and other places. Notice what the mushroom is growing on: live or dead wood, garden compost, leaf litter, soil, and so on. What season of the year is it? Any information you can get before you collect the mushroom will be helpful in figuring out what it is.
When you collect mushrooms for identification, you will need several specimens in various stages of development. Be sure to cut the mushrooms well below the base of the stem, because important identifying features may lie at the bottom of the stem or even concealed beneath the ground. Don’t let the mushrooms you collect sit around too long. Fresh mushrooms are easier to identify than old ones.
Before you put the mushrooms in your collecting basket, smell a couple of specimens to see if you can detect an odor. After the sniff test, cut them lengthwise through the cap and stem. Sniff again. Notice the color of the cut flesh. Watch for a minute to see whether the cut flesh changes color from exposure to the air. Do these tests right away, because they may work only with fresh specimens. You may cautiously want to touch your tongue to the cut mushroom tissue for a brief taste test. No mushroom is so poisonous that a slight touch of your tongue will hurt you. Several mushroom species have an excruciatingly hot taste, however. When you touch your tongue, even briefly, to one of these peppery mushrooms, you won’t forget it. (Read more about these hot-tasting species in the section of this volume on edible and non-edible mushrooms.) All of these immediate outdoor tests will help you when you sit down later to identify the species you have collected. Often, mushroomers carry a notebook on their collecting trips to record their on-the-spot observations.
Parts of a Mushroom
To identify mushrooms, we need to know details of the parts that make up their structure. Mushrooms come in a great variety of forms, but to keep things simple, let’s begin by examining the common supermarket white button mushroom. The white buttons we buy are the immature stage of a mushroom species that scientists have named Agaricus bisporus. As they mature, they lose their button look and develop distinct stems and caps. This is a good one to start with because most people are familiar with it, and many wild mushroom species have a similar form.
The cap is usually the first thing we see when we find a mushroom. Because the caps of the various mushroom species can appear vastly different from each other, they help with identification. For example, you can find species with caps whose surface may be smooth, slimy, sticky, scaly, covered with warts, or with a combination of features. Cap colors run the range of the rainbow. The white button mushroom has, obviously, a white cap. Most mushroom books refer to the cap by its scientific name, pileus (pronounced PILL-e-us).
The details of the mushroom’s stem, too, are important in identification. One thing to look for is the position of the stem. Is it more or less central, or positioned in or near the middle of the cap, as it is for the white button mushroom? Is it eccentric, or off-center? Is it lateral—that is, at the edge of the cap? Often you will find mushrooms that lack a stem and are attached to a log or stump by the edge of their caps. In this case, the stem is absent or sessile. Guidebooks often refer to the stem as the stipe or stalk.
Aside from the position, many other aspects of the stem—such as the texture, color, and other surface details—are important to notice. What does the bottom of the stem look like (even that part that is buried in the ground)? What about the interior appearance of the stem? Sliced lengthwise, it can show a solid, pithy, or hollow inside.
Does the stem have a ring? A ring is the remnant of a veil, a membrane that extended from the edge of the cap to the stem when the mushroom was immature. As the cap matures, the veil tears, and part may be left on the stem as encircling tissue. Veil remnants may remain on the top or edge of the cap and at the base of the stem, too. White button mushroom stems have distinct rings. The scientific name for a mushroom’s stem ring is annulus.
Gills line the underside of the white button mushroom’s cap. These are the narrow parallel plates that radiate outward from the stem. In identifying a mushroom species, it’s important to note such features as the color, relative spacing, and breadth of the gills. Notice, too, what the gills do near the stem of the mushroom. Are they free from the stem? Do they contact the stem but remain unattached? Are they attached to the stem? If so, do they form a notch or indentation near the stem attachment? For the white button mushroom, the gills are free from the stem; they are a pale pink color when the mushroom is young and become chocolate brown with age. The scientific name for gills is lamellae (pronounced la-MELL-ee).
Mushroom gills produce spores on their surfaces. As noted above, spores are tiny one-celled reproductive units, and a single mushroom can produce millions of them. Spores of the various mushroom species come in a wide range of colors and aid in identification. While the colors of the cap and other parts of a mushroom species can vary as a result of environmental influences, the spore color is much more stable. (You’ll need a good microscope to see the spores well, though.) Air currents carry them over great distances because they are so lightweight. If they land in the right place, they will have the food, moisture, and temperature they need to germinate and grow. If all works out well, new offspring of the parent mushroom will be born.
Many mushrooms described in this book lack gills. Some look particularly strange. Puffballs, for example, can resemble golf balls, baseballs, and even soccer balls. Spores form inside these round structures. Morels form spores on the wrinkled netlike surface of the cap. Others have many tiny spore-bearing toothlike projections. This book also includes a number of mushrooms that develop spores inside a layer of pores, which are densely packed, open, hollow tubes.
A look through any guidebook will show you that mushroom species have one or more distinctive features. It pays to learn how to examine the specimens you collect in minute detail, because these distinctions are critical to correctly identifying a mushroom.
The Spore Print
In order to use this or any mushroom book to identify your specimens, you will need to know the color of the spores, especially for gilled mushrooms. You can only be sure of the spore color by collecting a mass of them and looking at them in good daylight. An easy and fun way to do this is to make a spore print.
First, cut off the mushroom’s stem just below the gills. Next, lay the mushroom cap, gill side down, on a piece of clean paper. Now cover the cap with an inverted jar or bowl to keep the air currents from disturbing the spores that will be released. After a couple of hours, lift off the cover and carefully remove the mushroom cap. You will see a beautiful radiating gill pattern printed on the paper by the mushroom’s fallen spores. Note the color. If you make a spore print from a white button mushroom, the color will be chocolate brown. Spore prints are fragile. If you want to keep them, mist them with hair spray. After that, you can put them in an album, if you like.
If you don’t see a spore print, or if you get a weak one, perhaps you didn’t wait long enough for a sufficient spore fall, or perhaps the mushroom was too old and released its spores before you set it out to print. Sometimes, too, it is difficult to distinguish the spore color from the background color of the paper. To avoid this problem, knowledgeable mushroomers make spore prints on a two-toned sheet of paper: one half of the sheet is white, and the other half, black.
Making a spore print from mushrooms without a spore-bearing surface under the cap can be a challenge. First, you have to determine what part of the mushroom produces the spores. Then you have to find a way to position it over the paper in a way that permits a spore deposit. Sometimes a support, such as a screen or pin, is necessary.
Gathering Mushrooms
Because mushrooms tend to be fragile, it’s best to avoid picking them with your bare hands if you can avoid it. Fingernails don’t work well. If you try to gather them in this barbaric style you can end up with a basket of unattractive, torn, broken, abbreviated, smashed specimens. With mushrooms in that condition, identification can be difficult. Besides, crushed mushrooms look unappetizing, and you can waste edible parts of the mushrooms if your fingers can’t reach the bottom of the stem. So you’ll need a good knife for decent collecting. It doesn’t have to be a big knife, but the blade should be at least three inches long. I prefer to use a sturdy pocketknife. Many mushroomers keep a large knife in their collecting basket so that it’s always on hand for collecting. The knife doesn’t have to be extremely sharp, because the mushrooms are easy to cut. For really tough and woody species, such as the artist’s conk (Ganoderma applanatum), you will need a more aggressive tool. If you are determined to collect this kind of mushroom, you’d better get serious about it and carry an ax.
Mushroomers are particular about their collecting baskets. Most prefer a flat-bottomed basket with a handle. I know mushroomers who use beautiful wide, flat handwoven baskets made of wicker, reed, and other traditional materials. Frequently, these baskets are quite old and have been handed down in the family for generations. Between mushroom hunts, they are carefully stored in a safe place. I like to use an old-fashioned slatted tomato basket made of thin wood. It will last a long time if no one mistakes it for a chair. You can still find these around, but they are rapidly being replaced with cardboard versions. (These modern replacements work just as well, and may even last longer if you remember to keep them out of the rain.)
The mushrooms that you gather in your flat-bottomed basket stay in good condition because they don’t crush each other. I like to line the bottom of my basket with a brown paper bag that has been cupped open. You can use newspaper instead. Black-and-white printed pages are the best to use because the paper and ink are harmless. Newspaper print, however, can be transferred to certain mushrooms. It can be disconcerting to sit down at the table and read yesterday’s weather report from your dinner. Colored pages in modern newspapers are most likely nontoxic, but they may stain the mushrooms with rainbow colors. Avoid using colored pages from other kinds of publications unless you know that the ink is safe. Be careful when using plastic bags to line the bottom of your basket; they can encourage excess moisture to build up and make a mess of your mushrooms. Many plastic bags are printed with inks that contain lead, too, so if you do use plastic, make sure that any printing on the surface of the bag doesn’t contact your mushrooms. If you need a container to carry mushrooms and you don’t have a basket, a paper bag will work in a pinch. These can cause the mushrooms to crush each other, but they are better than plastic bags.
Careful mushroomers carry squares of wax paper in their baskets. When they find a mushroom, they immediately wrap it in a piece of the wax paper to keep it clean, separated, and padded. The mushrooms don’t crush each other when wrapped in this way. Paper napkins and tissues don’t work well for this purpose, though. They can cling to the surface of sticky or moist mushrooms, posing a cleaning problem when you get back home.
Don’t take chances. Whatever kind of collecting container you use, be sure to keep the mushrooms you intend to eat well separated from those that you plan to identify. It’s a good idea to use separate containers. Don’t leave mushrooms unintended for food lying around where people or pets might find and eat them. Animals can be attracted to certain mushrooms. The poisonous fly mushroom (Amanita muscaria), for example, is attractive to cats and can be deadly to them, especially as it dries.
You may want to carry a small brush for cleaning your mushrooms before you put them in your basket. Mushrooms tend to pick up debris that’s usually easy to brush off while you have them in hand. Soil that gets trapped in the gills can be especially difficult to remove. (Because mushrooms ordinarily grow with the gill side down, you rarely find them with dirty gills until after you mishandle them.) Putting dirty and clean specimens together in your basket will also create cleanup problems. Indeed, cleaning can be so difficult that you may feel like throwing the collection out with the garbage and warming up a pizza for dinner instead. I’ve found that each minute spent cleaning mushrooms in the outdoors, as soon you pick them, saves up to five minutes at the kitchen sink. Kitchen supply stores often have cute mushroom-shaped cleaning brushes that you will love to carry in your basket and give as gifts to your mushroomer friends who seem to have everything.
Aside from your guidebooks, you may want to pack a snack, a bottle of drinking water, sun-blocking lotion, and bug repellent for your mushroom collecting trips. Take a cloth to clean the mushrooms, especially if you don’t have a mushroom brush with you. If you are planning a mushroom picnic in the woods, you’ll need a heat source, such as a portable cookstove or charcoal grill. Don’t forget the cooking accessories and tableware. I carry a compact emergency mushroom kit in my car’s trunk. It consists of a large paper bag or two, a knife, a few kitchen napkins for cleaning, and sheets of newspaper. If I should come upon a crop of edible wild mushrooms, I have the bare essentials to collect them and get them home. (I’ve used this kit many times.)
If you plan to eat mushrooms you collect, be sure to collect them in unpolluted areas. Certain fungi take up soil contaminates. Because auto exhaust over the years has contaminated the soil near heavily traveled highways, it’s wise not to collect within fifty feet of roadway. Avoid picking in areas that have been sprayed with chemicals. As with any food gathered from the outdoors, be careful of contamination from animal waste.
Identifying Your Mushrooms by Name
Most of us don’t have access to a full-time mushroom expert, so we have to rely on our guidebooks to identify the species we find. Because no two authorities describe and illustrate mushrooms in exactly the same way, it’s important to have a number of guidebooks on hand—so check your local library or bookstore.
Before we can name the mushrooms we find, we need to know something about how fungi are named by the scientists who study them. As with all living things, mushroom species have a two-part scientific name. (When you see this name in writing, it is printed in italics.) The first part of the name, always capitalized, is the genus. A genus represents a group of mushrooms with certain similar characteristics. The second part, the species name, is given to a mushroom that is distinctly different from the other members of its genus. Some species names are capitalized, but most are not. These scientific names are mainly in Latin—the common language of science—to help scientists around the world communicate.
Most mushroom field guides and identification books use the scientific names. People who know the mushrooms that grow around them, though, also use common, or familiar, names. Although most guides also include a number of common mushroom names, this practice can cause confusion. The name for a mushroom species can vary from place to place. If you want to be accurate in your communications with other mushroomers and to use guidebooks with ease, you will need to become comfortable with scientific names.
The white button mushroom’s scientific name is Agaricus bisporus. (It’s also named Agaricus brunnescens in some books.) All mushrooms included in the genus Agaricus have a ring on the stem and grow only on the ground or in rich compost. They also have pink or pale gills when young that become dark chocolate or blackish brown colored when mature. In addition, their gills are unattached to the stem and have chocolate brown colored spores. The species name, bisporus, refers to the way in which the spores are produced on the gills. You’ll need a good microscope to see this feature. This species has other distinct characteristics that allow it to be identified without the use of extreme magnification. For one thing, it rarely grows in the wild in our area, but you can find it growing in mushroom compost—the rich soil/manure mix used by commercial mushroom cultivators to grow white button mushrooms. When spent and no longer able to support large mushroom crops, it is sold for enriching vegetable and flower garden soil. It often produces small crops of white buttons for a while where it is spread around plantings.
I don’t know many mushroomers—even those who can identify hundreds of mushrooms—who own or use a microscope. If you get deeply into the study of mushrooms, you will eventually find that you will need a microscope to distinguish very closely related species. But don’t run out and buy one tomorrow. When you decide to get a microscope, be sure to buy a good one. Toy microscopes or most student microscopes simply won’t do the job for mushroom identification work. You will need one of laboratory quality that offers about 1000x magnification with an oil immersion lens. New ones can be quite expensive, so consider shopping for a used one. An older model in good condition will do nicely.
If you want to know more about the botanical classification and naming of mushrooms, you will find many books in libraries and bookstores that cover the subject in detail. In this book, we will be mainly concerned with three categories of mushrooms: the gilled, the pored, and a few of those with neither gills nor pores. To use this book to identify the mushrooms that you find, go on to the next section, “One Hundred Pennsylvania Mushrooms.”
© 2006 The Penn State University