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Each one of us has his own stomach; it is not the stomach of
another. Lois Long likes lamb chops. Esther Dam doesn’t. Ralph
Ferrara prefers the way his aunt cooks mushrooms to the way anybody
else does, to wit in olive oil with garlic. As far as I’m concerned
they’re cooked in butter, salt, and pepper and that’s that. (Now
and then with the addition of some cream, sometimes sweet,
sometimes sour, and less often a little lemon juice.) Once I
followed a recipe for stuffed morels under glass. When we got
around to eating them we couldn’t tell what we were tasting. The
dish suggested fancy restaurant food. ¶ Henry Cowell told me that
years ago in Palo Alto two Stanford botany professors assured him
that a mushroom he had found was edible. He ate it and was very ill.
Realizing he had eaten other things at the same meal and believing
that the teachers knew what they were talking about, he tried the
mushroom not once but twice again, becoming seriously sick each
time. ¶ Charles McIlvaine was able to eat almost anything,
providing it was a fungus. People say he had an iron stomach. We
take his remarks about edibility with some skepticism, but his
spirit spurs us on. Alexander Smith, obliged as a scientist to
taste each new mushroom he finds, is made ill by almost every one
of them. Mushroom poisoning is nothing to laugh about. Nancy
Wilson Ross told me of a gardener on Long Island who had always
eaten mushrooms he collected, who made a mistake, nearly killing
himself by eating one of the amanitas. He recovered and lives but
has never been the same since. He is more or less permanently
debilitated. I went out in the woods in northern Vermont without
any breakfast. (This was about eight years ago.) I began to eat
several species raw. Among them was Boletus piperatus, which is
said to be edible even though it has pores with red mouths, a
danger sign according to many authorities. By noon I was ill,
wretchedly so. I was sick for twelve hours. Every now and then I
managed to tell the Lippolds, whose guest I was, not to worry, that
I wasn’t going to die. |