I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get back to this until today. It’s been a very busy couple of days. Daughter moved out, sick dog, life in general.
As far as the poisonings go, yes, I do seem to recall that they were immigrants and there was mention of amanitas. So, mea culpa on that one. Please forgive me.
I used to be able to get chanterelles quite easily by the Lacey/Olympia area. Also near Yelm, Shelton and Orting. However, and this is only in my experience, as developments grew, and the forests were cut down, I was not able to get to the mushrooms. I’ve had to go much further afield now, for example, clear down by Mt. St. Helens and I live in the Puyallup area. There are also areas around Mt. Rainer. However, I do not and will not enter someone’s private property to pick them, and more and more of the land is posted as private.
I’ve been picking chanterelles since 1970. The most common in the areas I’ve picked in have been the golden chanterelles. As far as the false chanterelle goes, yes, to ME they’re easy to distinguish from the real chanterelle. However, a friend of mine couldn’t, so I had to sort through her mushrooms and tossed out several.
At any rate, I sorely miss having a ready supply. I’m down to one bag in my freezer. I love them in scrambled eggs and on top of steak and in gravy.
No worries! I was just surprised because my mushroom professor (the inimitable Mike Beug) called chanterelles a 60 mph mushroom, meaning you should be able to recognize them if you drove past them on the highway. He was very careful to warn us about eating anything we found–plenty of delicious shrooms can only be distinguished from their deadly lookalikes through work with a microscope–but he reassured us that chanterelles (along with oyster mushrooms and a few others) were safe pickings.
I picked them around The Evergreen State College in the mid-nineties, and they were very plentiful. My all-time favorite find, though, was a cauliflower mushroom that my housemates and I found on a hike. We cut off half of it and brought it home to make a spectacular mushroom lasagne.
Around NC, chanterelles tend to be tiny, the size of marbles, and you have to pick dozens for a single meal. But once in awhile I can find the spectacularly earthy horn of plenty around these parts, which almost makes up for it.
I agree (and find myself having to argue this fairly frequently with people who assert that it’s just never possible to be sure) - there are quite a few good edible fungi that are absolutely and unmistakably identifiable even to the amateur, given a careful, sensible approach and access to decent reference materials.
And the term ‘60mph mushroom’ rings wonderfully (and literally) true to me. I once had a job that involved a good deal of travelling by car and I trained myself to be able to recognise a wide range of wild plants/trees, crops, and a few fungi from the passenger seat of a moving car.
Comes in handy when on foot too - I can recognise some of my favourite wild foods at quite a distance now.
The analogy that finally worked for my father was with berries. Poke berries are deadly poison, and they’re pea-sized dark purple berries that grow on bushes, just like blueberries. But he doesn’t freak out when I go collect blueberries, thinking I’m going to pick poke berries by accident: that’s a mistake nobody would make who knows what a blueberry actually looks like.
Exactly - and I’m certain (even though I’ve never seen poke berries) that there will be some way to describe both plants (and anything else that resembles a blueberry, but isn’t) in such a way as to make mistaken identity impossible to anyone who bothered to read it properly.
Absolutely there is, although if I wrote a description, it might make your eyes glaze over–especially if you’re not the sort of nerd who likes reading plant (or fungus) identification guides. However, if you’ve seen both a bunch of times, you’re never going to mistake one for the other, just like you’re never going to mistake a jack-o-lantern mushroom for a chanterelle if you’ve seen both a bunch of times.
When I’m out foraging, it’s not at all unusual to be stopped by people asking me what on earth I’m gathering - I’ve even encountered people who didn’t know what blackberries were.
I forage for all sorts of things - leaves, flowers, fruits/berries, nuts, roots, fungi and shellfish - there are certainly inedible or toxic examples in every one of those categories, yet only in cases where my basket contains fungi do people say “Oooh! are you sure you know what you’re doing? Isn’t it terribly dangerous?”.
People have either an abnormal and irrational fear of poisonous fungi, or an ignorant lack of fear about all the other things out there that can kill you. I don’t really understand it - it seems that with fungi only, some people believe that conclusive identification is simply unattainable.
Mangetout, I’m curious. Could you share a few examples of foods other than mushrooms that have killed people who collected them? I read two or three stories every year about people eating poisoned mushrooms and dying. Other than cases of botulism from canning or salmonella in prepared/restaurant food, I don’t recall reading about anyone else dying from eating something toxic. That’s why I associate death with self-picked mushrooms rather than other toxic foods.
I expect I could dig up some accounts of death from eating poisonous berries, certainly some cases of sickness from eating contaminated shellfish such as cockles or oysters.
But even if the cases of death from eating poisonous fungi are more common (and I wouldn’t be surprised), that still doesn’t make it impossible to really know what you’re doing - it probably just means inexperienced people are more likely to say “hey, look! mushrooms! - let’s eat them” than they are to say it about other kinds of things that look kinda edible.
The one that comes to mind is water hemlock. People think they’re collecting wild carrots, get a water hemlock plant by accident, and die die die.
There are also some tropical fruits that look and taste delicious and will mess your shit up if you eat them. I have a book upstairs somewhere, an encyclopedia of unpleasant plants, that goes into all kinds of juicy details.
In the south, people sometimes eat young pokeweed, which is supposed to be delicious (in fact I think my mom prepared it for us when I was young, cooked like any other green), even though the mature plant is deadly.
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I’ve heard of this one - although it’s supposed to be cooked to remove the toxins, the name of the dish (‘poke sallet’) misleads some uninformed people into eating it raw.
Known as Pfefferlinge in Germany, those mushrooms are the ONLY ones I eat and like, and to be quite serious, send me an email and I will buy them from you and pay for shipping (FedEx) to Las Vegas!
I love them in scrambled eggs and on top of steak and in gravy.
No worries! I was just surprised because my mushroom professor (the inimitable Mike Beug) called chanterelles a 60 mph mushroom, meaning you should be able to recognize them if you drove past them on the highway. He was very careful to warn us about eating anything we found–plenty of delicious shrooms can only be distinguished from their deadly lookalikes through work with a microscope–but he reassured us that chanterelles (along with oyster mushrooms and a few others) were safe pickings.