Amanita Muscaria, Iconic, Magic, and Edible too

Mushrooms are a gift of the forest. On the luckiest of days they spread out between the trees like meadow flowers –– yellow, red, russet, white, blue, and grey. And then there is Amanita muscaria, the most striking of all, a tall robust mushroom with a red cap with white spots. There is no other mushroom like it. And no other mushroom that has entered culture with such force. It is the iconic mushroom -- the mushroom of myth, of children's books, the mushroom at the base of concrete gnomes, and its pattern of red with white dots a favored motif of a myriad of commercial products. It is a mushroom with a cult following. To those who consume it for its power to inebriate it is a magic mushroom. It also happens, though, that if A. muscaria is parboiled its psychoactive properties are washed away rendering the mushroom edible. In fact, properly prepared A. muscaria is not just edible it is incredible. It has a fine texture and a sweet taste. In my estimation it is up there with porcini, chanterelles, and morels as a prime edible mushroom. But mushroom field guides almost universally list A. muscaria as "poisonous". This is odd because it isn't, or at least isn't if par boiled. But, then, what does "poisonous" mean in the context of mushroom field guides. In fact, what is the basis for the edibility guidelines in mushroom field guides? Are they based on science? Or are they ethnographic? Or some combination of the two? Can we rely on edibility guidelines in the way we rely on field guide nomenclature and taxonomy as windows into deep knowledge? One of the points of collecting wild mushrooms is to eat foods that cannot be purchased in shops -- to find flavors and textures that will enrich our meals -- and the pleasures of the table. A. muscaria is a mushroom with an extensive literature -- one that goes back to the early 1700s. I will talk about what the first European explorers said of A. muscaria use that they found in Siberia, of the scientific tests of the 19th-century that proved its edibility if parboiled, and the shift to deep suspicion in the 20th-cenury. I will talk about evidence of a country tradition of eating the mushroom as an esculent, including in the African American communities of the South in the early 20th century. And all the while, my talk will challenge the way in which edibility guidelines make cultural assumptions -- and in many cases -- the case of A. muscaria for one -- misdirect our steps when we are out collecting mushrooms.F

Speaker: William Rubel