The Complete Mushroom Hunter, Revised: Illustrated Guide to Foraging, Harvesting, and Enjoying Wild Mushrooms - Including new sections on growing your own incredible edibles and off-season collecting Introduction Not long ago, it was possible to believe that the only edible mushroom came in a can. The common cultivated mushroom was something that was, essentially, a condiment. It could be put on pizza, served in a sauce over steak, or added with bacon bits to a spinach salad. It was a novelty food, a side dish, something for occasional use, but of no nutritional value (or so it was believed). It held no interest at all as an entrée, and was most frequently seen on dinner tables in that ubiquitous can of cream of mushroom soup. Pictured: Russula xerampelina Chapter 1: Mushrooms: The What and the Who Mushroom hunting is an activity that comes to us out of prehistoric times. The “Iceman,” the man dubbed “Ötzi” whose body was found frozen in a glacier near the Austrian-Italian border, has been dated as being 5,000 years old, and he was carrying two mushrooms in a pouch. One was the birch polypore (Piptoporus betulinus), a common bracket fungus found on birch trees, which is believed to have been used by him medicinally against intestinal parasites or as a styptic or compress to stanch bleeding. Pictured: Collecting chanterelles Chapter 2: Mushroom Hunting From searching out mushrooms in grocery stores and farmers’ markets to finding exotic kinds listed on menus in restaurants and sampling the diversity of flavors and textures available in many world cuisines, it’s a small but significant step to noticing them on your front lawn and in your backyard. Once your curiosity is aroused, there’s no turning back. It’s on to your local parks to see what treasures can be found there. Pictures: The author discussing mushrooms. The Complete Mushroom Hunter, Revised: Illustrated Guide to Foraging, Harvesting, and Enjoying Wild Mushrooms - Including new sections on growing your own incredible edibles and off-season collecting Chapter 3: Mushroom Identification In a newly greening spring woods peppered with morels, on a summer mountain slope carpeted with golden chanterelles, or driving past an autumn meadow and seeing a fairy ring of soccer ball–size giant puffballs—how can you know for sure that you’ve identified these mushrooms correctly? How can you be sure that they’re edible? People who know the names of hundreds of different kinds of plants, even professional botanists, will tell you that they can’t tell one mushroom from another, that they all look alike, and that just one mistake can kill you. Pictured: A cauliflower mushroom Chapter 4: Medicinal Mushrooms Although mushrooms have been used as medicines in Asia for centuries, it is only since the turn of this century that people in the West have taken seriously the idea that mushrooms can have medicinal value. Although everyone recognizes the value of penicillin as a fungal antibiotic, except for ergot, a fungus that parasitizes grasses, which has been used successfully to treat migraines and cluster headaches, mushrooms—or more generally, fungi— have been overlooked by Western medical science. Pictured: Reishi (Ganoderma lucidum) on buried wood overgrown with ivy Chapter 5: Bringing Home the Harvest: Mushroom Recipes What Julia Child did for home cooking in 1965, with her groundbreaking Mastering the Art of French Cooking, that is, giving it a new identity, a taste, a texture, a passionate presence in the kitchen and at the dinner table, Jane Grigson did for mushrooms a decade later. Her 1975 The Mushroom Feast began an awakening love affair with all kinds of mushrooms cooked and used in all kinds of ways. That was even before wild mushrooms and exotic cultivated mushrooms began showing up in stores. Pictures: Preparing chanterelles
✔ Author(s): Gary Lincoff
✔ Title: The Complete Mushroom Hunter, Revised: Illustrated Guide to Foraging, Harvesting, and Enjoying Wild Mushrooms - Including new sections on growing your own incredible edibles and off-season collecting
✔ Rating : 4.7 out of 5 base on (1411 reviews)
✔ ISBN-10: 1631593013
✔ Language: English
✔ Format ebook: PDF, EPUB, Kindle, Audio, HTML and MOBI
✔ Device compatibles: Android, iOS, PC and Amazon Kindle
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