The Complete Mushroom Book : Savory Recipes and Field Guide

Rating:
Summary: A Feast for the Mycophyle and the Mycophagist
Review: This book by an Italian, Antonio Carluccio, transplanted to England covers the botanical classifications of edible mushrooms and fungi, tips on collecting, a guide to identifying edible and toxic mushrooms, and a large collection of mushroom recipes. It has many things to recommend it, but it also should be given more than a cursory thought if you have an interest in purchasing the book.

As a compulsive book collector, I often justify the purchase of a book solely on the presence of one good idea comprising not much more than a page or two, but you may not have such liberal criteria when laying out the long green for a book, especially for bone white plants.

The devil's advocate view of this book is that:

It's coverage of mushroom identification and distinction of culinary from toxic is weak in that the book does not give a consistant photographic coverage to all species. I would be extremely nervous if I knew someone was using only this book as a field guide. A quick comparison photographs for the edible boletus badius on page 33 with the toxic russula emetica on page 71 shows how similar two very different mushrooms can look. The comparison is scarier when you see that the two species flourish at the same time of the year. My main point is that to a non-mycologist, this appears to be a very inadequate field guide. Much better would be one species per page with much more consistant coverage over all species.

While the title of the book refers to all mushrooms, it's emphasis is clearly on wild mushrooms. About 75 percent of all the recipes call for wild mushrooms, primarily morels and many of the recipes calling for cultivated species call for unusual or expensive species, up to and including truffles.

So what does that leave for the non-mushroom hunter living in Brooklyn? Here are some reasons for buying this book:

The well written text and good photography provides a worthy vicarious experience of the thrills of mushroom hunting in Devon, England.

The recipes give several worthy methods for preserving mushrooms, including drying and pickling. This is the material I would pick to primarily justify the purchase. I have not seen it anywhere else.

Even if you substitute the humble Pennsylvania button mushroom or the slightly more upscale cremini for the blue stocking morels and procinis, you get a wealth of recipes to add to a vegetarian diet. The recipes draw heavily from French and Italian cuisine, but they include a broad selection from various oriental cuisines as well. Even a fair number of German and Spanish dishes are included. Oddly, there seems to be practically no recipes for the portobello.

You also get useful practical tips on handling and eating mushrooms. The book makes it clear that almost every mushroom is healthier to eat cooked than to eat raw. I have heard it said that even our darling little Kennet Square button mushrooms have toxins which must be cooked to remove the toxins. Give the raw mushrooms a pass the next time you hit the salad bar. The information on taking special care with raw mushrooms and alcohol is pretty chilling, but again, as testified by the long popularity of Coq au Vin, this danger is eliminated by thorough cooking.

In general, I would rate the culinary advice on mushroom technique to be very useful.

Since I am very fond of cookbooks on single subjects, I recommend this book for the recipes and techniques and background on mushroom culture and collection in the wild, as long as you keep the wild part to your armchair. The price is a bit high, so I would not click on the order button without some check on alternate titles, especially the volume by Jane Grigson, 'The Mushroom Feast' which I have not yet had the pleasure to sample.