agaricus5 wrote:
Boletus edulis has several names in English. The name I'm familiar with is called "Penny Bun", although I think it is also known as "Cep". What do you know it as in German (I'm interested in foreign names for the same mushrooms)?
In German it's called "
Steinpilz"
, literally stone mushroom, maybe because of the colour of the cap resembling a smoothed river stone. I don't think it could come from the hardness. They don't rank very high on the Mohs scale.
There were some "Pantherpilze" (for once the translation is simple), but they are pretty easy to keep apart if you have a guide. There were also some armillaria mellea, but mostly we only found xerocomus subtomentosus and suillus luteus, which are fine but no big catch. In Germany the (somewhat erroneous but generally accepted) rule is, you can eat anything with tubes (not sure that's the right term) but beware of everything with gills (ditto).
I suppose it's probably because there are more mushrooms identified with gills than with pores, and so ones with gills are "more likely" to be poisonous or inedible, but certainly, many of the Boletes are edible.
I've read of some mushrooms with pores (have to remember that word) that aren't edible, but apparently they aren't very common. Like I said, we eat all of the ones we find, and I haven't died of it yet.
This year for some reason there were a bunch of agaricus campestris behind my parents'-in-law (parents-in-law's
) house, which is really unusual.
That is very lucky. Agaricus campestris, or the Field Mushroom, usually can only grow on fields and pastures that have not been sprayed with chemicals, so are becoming increasingly rarer to find, at least for people who live in densly farmed/urban areas.
Agaricus campestris = "
Feldchampignon"
in German. They just sprung up everywhere. The field is well fertilised in an organic manner, so you have to watch where you step. I think the reason was a couple of warm, wet cycles seperated by a couple of days of dry weather that let the rhyzomes (I guess that's the right word) develop well.
Another of our favourites is leccinum scabrum, but you can't find those very often.
I'm not very acquainted with this one. Could you tell me more about it?
Check the link below. It's called "
Ziegenlippe"
in German (goat's lip), and it's a not-very-ostentatious pore mushroom. It is easily recognised by the yellow flesh of the cap.
I read an article recently about several deaths as a result of kidney damage in France after having eaten mushrooms previously considered harmless (tricholoma equestre) due to a sensitisation to an antigen in the mushroom.
I can't read it at the moment - I need to subscribe or make an account with them. I'll look into it later.
Try
this for a fairly complete list of Latin and corresponding German names of common european wild mushrooms. Eh, the lists don't really correspond, since they are both alphabetical, but click on the Latin name and you get the mushroom page. The pages contain some really nice photographs. And if you look
here, you will find a link to the article. Look at the last link embedded in the text called "
englischen Originalartikel"
. I'm not quite sure about the copyright issue there since the article doesn't seem to be free, but there's the link anyway.
I'd be glad to take you mushroom hunting; I'm sure you could teach me a few things.
Really, you'd be the one who would teach me more about identifying them in the wild and knowing where to look because I haven't really been able to go out looking for mushrooms much in the past - I have learnt more about them reading about them and looking at photographs than actually through finding them - many of the species that you've mentioned I know about, but have never actually seen in real life. You see, I live in suburban London, far from unspoilt or unpolluted forest/grassland habitats where many of these grow, and because of the lack of mushrooms in the area, I really can't find anybody that organises such forays into the little forest that there is in the area of London I live in. Most of the mushrooms I do find are usually the really small brown ones that can't be identified without a magnifying lens, or really small and nasty-looking bracket fungi on trees, although I have found many good-size clumps of Common Ink Caps
Coprinus atramentarius and Shaggy Ink Caps (Lawyer's Wigs)
Coprinus comatus and large balls of
Daldinia concentrica around my school. Once, just once, I found a rather large Field Mushroom
Agaricus campestris on our field, but it, unfortunately, just appeared one year, but never returned afterwards.
A couple of the
coprinus family are edible as far as I know, though I have never collected them. An interesting fact is that
coprinus atramentarius is edible, but if you drink alcohol shortly before or up to several hours after eating the mushroom, it can cause a severe reaction.
In Germany, collecting mushrooms is a fairly common thing. Although a few things are eaten in this country that rank as garbage elsewhere. I guess there are good historical grounds for that. In Germany there is a law requiring forests, even private ones, to be open for public use in most cases. I don't suppose British lords and bishops can still hang farmers that poach on their land, but the general impression I have is that private land is a lot more private in Great Britain. That would make a big difference. Anyway, I am not enough of an expert that I seperate each mushroom sort and cook it alone in a special way, we just throw everything together and cook them. We have a few bags in the freezer right now just waiting to be warmed up. That's one of the nicer sides of an otherwise dark, damp German autumn.
leroy
____________________________
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street -- footless, dressed in red.
-Jimi Hendrix, "
The Wind Cries Mary"
