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Collecting in canterbury — A cautionary tale
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COLLECTING IN CANTERBURY - A CAUTIONARY TALE H MacANESPIE Dept Community Medicine, RuchilJ Hospital, Glasgow G20 9NB A medical conference at the University of Canterbury in the autumn is a delightful experience (in the main) and one which should be seized. The campus with its magnificent views over the walled city and on over the Downs to the English Channel must surely be one of the loveliest. My sojourn was marred only by a brush with some species of the local flora . Let me explain. For many years I have been confidently picking field mushrooms from various parts of the countryside and have relished these as a wonderful addition to a meal. or as a meal in themselves. On one occasion my gathering evoked some querulous comments from my wife and I there and then decided to become more scientific about identification and cease relying on hunches and guesswork. I bought some books and joined the British Mycological Society which I felt was a good start. Dipping in to the science of edible fungi identification is a sobering business and led me to the conclusion that a lot of people get poisoned, some fatally. So the sooner I know how to positively identify the nasty ones the better. But mushroom gathering is like everything else in life, it is not all black and white, and the grey areas can be very grey indeed. For instance my books failed to agree over the edibility of some species, and in one case, one book categorised the species as edible, another stated that it was poisonous, a third said edibility was not known, and a fourth concluded that it was edible if cooked. The ones I picked from fields on the outskirts of Canterbury were to my best knowledge field mushrooms (Agaricus camp estris), but again wifely words urged caution. So I checked and double checked the macro-characters, placed the caps on plain paper overnight so that I could look at the spore prints. I bruised the stems and caps to check for discolouration (my books told me that the uncommon Yellow Stainer could be my
undoing!). Everything seemed satisfactory. The spore prints were the right size, shape and colour. The smell, gill fixings and consistency on cutting were all correct. And so that evening into the frying pan they went and they cooked beautifully . At the time I was sorry that my wife declined to partake as they were delicious. It was about two hours later that the queasiness started, progressing to nausea, profuse sweating, vomiting, diarrhoea and the most dragging sensation of weakness one could imagine. The acute symptoms were all over in about one hour, but it was a miserable bundle that crawled into bed that night and sank into a fitful sleep. The next day, apart from feeling thoroughly washed out, recovery seemed complete. Fortunately I had kept some of the specimens and spore prints and as we were leaving on the morrow I managed to have these checked by a botanist when we arrived home. The specimens were not complete enough for accurate identification but the verdict was that they seemed to be field mushrooms. Later an expert mycologist checked the spores microscopically and pronounced that they were certainly Agaricus spores and could be A. campestris, but could also possibly be spores of a less common species of Agaricus, for instance A. bernardii, although it seems that this species does not taste very nice. On reflection, I think I was more hurt by my scientific endeavours having backfired than by the physical experience of the poisoning and my confidence certainly took a nasty knock. So where did I go wrong? I did everything by the book and I still came to grief. My wife has the answer, I should have heeded her woman's intuition!
COLLECTING IN CANTERBURY - A CAUTIONARY TALE H MacANESPIE Dept Community Medicine, RuchilJ Hospital, Glasgow G20 9NB A medical conference at the University of Canterbury in the autumn is a delightful experience (in the main) and one which should be seized. The campus with its magnificent views over the walled city and on over the Downs to the English Channel must surely be one of the loveliest. My sojourn was marred only by a brush with some species of the local flora . Let me explain. For many years I have been confidently picking field mushrooms from various parts of the countryside and have relished these as a wonderful addition to a meal. or as a meal in themselves. On one occasion my gathering evoked some querulous comments from my wife and I there and then decided to become more scientific about identification and cease relying on hunches and guesswork. I bought some books and joined the British Mycological Society which I felt was a good start. Dipping in to the science of edible fungi identification is a sobering business and led me to the conclusion that a lot of people get poisoned, some fatally. So the sooner I know how to positively identify the nasty ones the better. But mushroom gathering is like everything else in life, it is not all black and white, and the grey areas can be very grey indeed. For instance my books failed to agree over the edibility of some species, and in one case, one book categorised the species as edible, another stated that it was poisonous, a third said edibility was not known, and a fourth concluded that it was edible if cooked. The ones I picked from fields on the outskirts of Canterbury were to my best knowledge field mushrooms (Agaricus camp estris), but again wifely words urged caution. So I checked and double checked the macro-characters, placed the caps on plain paper overnight so that I could look at the spore prints. I bruised the stems and caps to check for discolouration (my books told me that the uncommon Yellow Stainer could be my
undoing!). Everything seemed satisfactory. The spore prints were the right size, shape and colour. The smell, gill fixings and consistency on cutting were all correct. And so that evening into the frying pan they went and they cooked beautifully . At the time I was sorry that my wife declined to partake as they were delicious. It was about two hours later that the queasiness started, progressing to nausea, profuse sweating, vomiting, diarrhoea and the most dragging sensation of weakness one could imagine. The acute symptoms were all over in about one hour, but it was a miserable bundle that crawled into bed that night and sank into a fitful sleep. The next day, apart from feeling thoroughly washed out, recovery seemed complete. Fortunately I had kept some of the specimens and spore prints and as we were leaving on the morrow I managed to have these checked by a botanist when we arrived home. The specimens were not complete enough for accurate identification but the verdict was that they seemed to be field mushrooms. Later an expert mycologist checked the spores microscopically and pronounced that they were certainly Agaricus spores and could be A. campestris, but could also possibly be spores of a less common species of Agaricus, for instance A. bernardii, although it seems that this species does not taste very nice. On reflection, I think I was more hurt by my scientific endeavours having backfired than by the physical experience of the poisoning and my confidence certainly took a nasty knock. So where did I go wrong? I did everything by the book and I still came to grief. My wife has the answer, I should have heeded her woman's intuition!