Foraging forumagers

Picked a bucket-full of mushrooms today in Scotland.

Can anyone recommend the go-to guide for identifying them and ensuring I dont poison myself?

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http://www.gallowaywildfoods.com

Roger Phillips mushrooms book is my go to. I wouldn't eat anything i wasn't 100% positive.
Ill be honest and say that there doesn't look like one mushroom fit for the pot in that pile but i could be wrong.
Going out with someone that is knowledgeable is the best way to find and identify culinary fungi.

Looks like potentially some boletes and field mushrooms in there, no?

But yeah, Roger Phillips 100%

If you do eat some, (not suggesting you should), it’s good practice to keep one uncooked specimen of whatever you eat so that if you react badly you can show doctors what it was.

If you're set on trying to eat some it's best to ID them as soon as possible and make some spore prints on black paper also. I'll send you some photos of the boletus pages of the Roger Phillips book, as they're one of the easiest family to ID. Oyster mushrooms and the couple of edible tree polypores are pretty safe also.

But yeah, don't do it if you're not sure, and finding someone to guide you is well worth it

Be 100% sure that you're 100% sure before you eat any.

Here's some of the deadliest ones in a book I use (Food for Free, Richards Mabey) for reference.

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I always find it helpful to read Nicholas Evans’s account of poisoning himself and his family with a cortinarius species.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8675690/Nicholas-Evans-I-wanted-to-die.-It-was-so-grim.html

Really though, you should ID mushrooms before picking as location and other helpful identifiers (ie, the sack from which the death cap appears) will not be present once picked.

Thanks for all the help folks. It looks like I've tried to sprint before I can even walk.

I'll order a book and do my research before attempting again. I had really believed that the poisonous ones would be the odd ones out and the majority would be fair game.

Good job we found some chestnuts on the way home.

Good job we found some chestnuts on the way home.

Every cloud n'all that. Glad you hadn't scoffed any unknown ones.

It looks like you've got some Boletus in there and possibly a yellow swamp brittlegill. The former are worth checking out. The latter is part of the Russula family, which are possibly my favourite to see, because they come in wonderful colours. Quite a lot of the remainder appear to be in the family "little brown mushroom", which could include something that will happily kill you, or at least make you very unwell.

TBH I think the best way of mushroom foraging is not to pick everything and then try to ID it, but to be absolutely fucking rock solid on your identification of just a handful of species that are (i) edible, (ii) actually tasty and so worth looking for, and (iii) impossible to confuse with anything else that might do you a mischief. My shortlist for that is:

1. Cep/Penny bun
   
2. Chanterelle (can be confused with false chanterelle, which is not deadly but can cause hallucinations apparently - worth getting someone to show you them side-by-side)
   
3. Morel
   
4. Hedgehog fungus
   
5. Shaggy Inkcaps (not to be eaten with alcohol)
   
6. Amethyst Deceiver
   
7. Chicken of the woods
   
   

I don't even pick field mushrooms, because there is unpleasant stuff that looks similar, but that is me being hyper-cautious.

As always, the best thing to do is find a local expert and buy a good book.

Impeccable advice!

Parasol/Shaggy parasol are pretty easy to ID and good to eat too. There's a book which focuses on 7 or so varieties that are good to eat and goes into some depth. I also found it helpful to get very well acquainted with the most poisonous species as well as reading accounts of how people came to eat poisonous mushrooms and understand the mistakes they make. The Evans story I posted above is incredible because he's clearly intelligent, they have an actual fungi ID book with them but no one takes responsibility for doing a 100% ID. As soon as they do it's completely obvious they've eaten a poisonous mushroom. Either way, be careful, because getting poisoned by mushrooms is by all accounts horrendous.

My issues with parasol mushrooms is that, apparently, they're best eaten when they're relatively small. At that stage I find them less distinguishable from other things (compared to when they get comedically huge).

That story is, rightly, pretty well known. It illustrates beautifully that 2 people being 50% sure does not add up to 100% certainty. That two intelligent people can making a fuck-up of that magnitude (despite Boletus and Cortinarius being like chalk and cheese) is definitely a reason to check and double-check and then still err on the side of caution.

I've read that too, but I've only picked and eaten them when they've opened out a bit and they're still very tasty. Once any fungi gets too old it's pretty unpleasant. Beefsteak fungus is really not very nice to eat, but chicken of the woods is fantastic and pretty much 100% misidentification proof.

There's some community fruit trees near me. The Quince has done well this year so I made quince jam for the first time.

Never eaten quince before but wow it makes delicious jam!!

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I love quince. Make some cheese as well, it’s amazing.

I think this is halfway between jam and cheese as I grated the peeled fruit and left the pulp in, it's really thick. Need to try the proper quince cheese recipe though.

If anyone has any jam or chutney for swaps I'm in Dalston and work in central London.

@Cazakstan @richardshill and anyone else with Quince expertise.

A couple of years ago we made some 'quince cheese'. We kept it in the fridge in virtually full take-away containers, next to dairy cheese. We found the quince cheese containers slowly leaked.
It seemed that even at the low temperatures in the fridge, the fibre/cellulose/lignin within the quince continued to absorb water and expanded, forcing open the take-away container lids and leaking onto the fridge's glass shelf.
Anyne else ever noticed this?

Noob here, I've not noticed... yet!

Put mine into small earthenware casserole thingy dishes as I didn’t know what else to use. Maybe that helped?Also, only covered with baking paper so was never sealed as such. Haven’t died yet eating it.

Jesus, that's not even chalk and cheese. That's more like double decker bus and a double decker bar.

Kate was playing in a concert in a village church and we heard there were some good mushrooming woods nearby. Spectacular haul just from the churchyard and along a footpath. The vicar spotted us and asked us to look at some shrooms on his compost pile, and scored some horse mushrooms there too.

Total edibles: shaggy parasols, horse mushrooms, field mushrooms, common funnels and a few common puffballs.

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Mushroom and mushroom (quorn chicken) cobbler

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Good work.

We took the kids out to the woods near Chartwell yesterday, for our annual mushroom walk. Hit the motherload, with a huge array of fungi on display everywhere you looked.

All this moisture recently has clearly brought ideal conditions for mushrooms.