Experience: I nearly died after eating wild mushrooms

A few weeks ago I interviewed a lovely man from New York called Richard Eshelman for the Guardian Weekend magazine. The Guardian's online article can be seen here.

Richard talked openly to me about his experience of eating some of the most deadly wild mushrooms on the planet: a handful of destroying angels.

Luckily, Richard survived, but came very close to death. He is still a keen wild mushroom forager. He admits that the mistake he made was to not identify the wild mushrooms he had picked properly before he ate them. Here is his experience:

Richard Eshelman: I ate deadly wild mushrooms

"Four years ago, a few days before my 56th birthday, I went to one of my favourite spots – a park about a quarter of a mile from my home in Ithaca, New York.

"That summer had been hot and humid, and there were mushrooms everywhere. I saw some on the ground I thought were edible ink caps – white, with their caps down. I also spotted a bigger mushroom nearby with its cap open – it looked poisonous to me. I should have remembered that mushrooms grow in colonies: it was likely that the lone bigger mushroom and the smaller versions were the same. But I didn't think. It was a glorious day and I felt invincible. I picked three or four of the small ones and took them home.

"As a young man, I used to look for morels and meadow mushrooms. At college, I'd taken a course in mushroom hunting. I didn't consider myself an expert, but I did know that there was a very toxic mushroom called the destroying angel, one of the most deadly mushrooms in the world.

"At home, I spent some time looking for my mushroom book to identify what I'd picked, but couldn't find it. I was in a rush because I was going out, so I thought, "It's OK, I know what I'm doing. These are definitely ink caps." I fried them with butter and ate them as a side dish. Ink caps usually give out a residue when you cook them. These didn't, which should have been my first clue that they weren't what I thought they were. They didn't taste great – in fact, there was something quite bland about them. "I won't bother eating these again," I thought.

"That night, I told friends I'd just eaten wild mushrooms. One asked if they'd had white caps and gills, and I said, yes. She told me her mother said never eat mushrooms that are white all over. I shrugged it off and said I knew what I was doing. But she planted the first seed of doubt.

"The next morning, I woke up about 4am, ran to the bathroom and started throwing up. Then the diarrhoea began. I thought, perhaps my friend was right; maybe I've eaten poisonous mushrooms.

"I went again to look for my mushroom book, which I now found. I looked up the destroying angel – and there were my exact symptoms: eight hours after eating, it will cause vomiting and diarrhoea. And then it destroys your liver – there's no antidote and 60-80% of people don't survive. I realised I'd made the biggest mistake of my life.

"The scary thing about the destroying angel is that it tricks you into thinking you are making a recovery. After the vomiting and diarrhoea, you start to feel better. Knowing this, I acted quickly and called the hospital. They recommended going back to where I picked the mushrooms to see if I could find another so they could identify it – which is what I did. Then I drove myself to the emergency room. As I left my house, I thought, "Look around, you may never be back here."

"At that point, I hadn't told anyone else that I suspected I'd poisoned myself. I called work, because I had a shift that night. Eventually, I called my girlfriend. I felt embarrassed that all my friends and family would know I'd made such a terrible mistake.

"The doctors ran some tests and confirmed I'd eaten the destroying angel. I was the third person that year to be admitted after eating one. The two before me hadn't survived. I was sent to another hospital a few hours away; it was the best place to be if my liver failed and I needed a transplant.

"I was still vomiting and the diarrhoea was constant. I had tubes down my throat, and the doctors took blood samples every hour to monitor my liver. They asked me questions to check I was lucid. The critical night was on Friday, three days after I'd eaten the mushrooms, when I went into intensive care. I was given high doses of penicillin and the next morning my liver began to recover. I didn't need a transplant, but my kidneys were badly damaged. I was kept in for another week. All I know is that I survived – one doctor said it was a miracle.

"I haven't had the courage to pick wild mushrooms since – I don't trust myself – but my experience shouldn't deter others. The mistake I made was assuming I knew what I was eating. I wasn't paying attention and I'm lucky to be alive."

Mushroom girl

I just had to post a picture of this amazing mushroom-themed card that my good friend Amy drew for me for my birthday at the end of October. Think she was inspired by our birthday foraging adventure (and the fact that whenever she comes round to our flat, there's always some form of mangled mushroom half decayed somewhere in the kitchen, aka 'being identified').

Wellies on, mushroom book in hand, basket brimming, with what I hope are boletes, I'm trying to find the mushroom that will make me younger... (cheeky lady)!

It's so lovely, I think I might have to change my profile photo...

Marco Pierre White’s favourite wild mushroom recipe

During my interview with Marco Pierre White, he told me about his favourite wild mushroom recipe, using freshly foraged mousserons (also called fairy ring mushrooms).

Mousserons look like this:

Mousseron mushrooms (or fairy ring)

It's a great late lunch/brunch dish: basically posh eggs on toast with wild mushrooms. It sounds delicious, but not very healthy — poached oeufs in butter, anyone? (me, me, me!)

“My favourite wild mushroom recipe uses mousseron mushrooms,” says Marco Pierre White, “which I think are also called fairy ring champignon.”

After you’ve found a basketful of the lovely mushrooms (and properly identified them), Marco says: “Clean them off and remove their tough stalks.

“Drizzle a little olive oil over them and put them on a tray and pop them under the grill. Never put these mushrooms in a pan, as you will flatten them,” he advises. “Grill them gently.”

In a new pan, melt a large amount of butter, “I'm talking half a pack,” he says seriously.

“Then crack six eggs, or however many, into the melted butter and gently poach the eggs in the butter.”

Don't let the butter bubble though, “that is very important,” he says.

When the eggs are ready, season them with salt and pepper and transfer onto some (unbuttered) toast.

“You can drizzle some of the butter from the pan if you want to. And sprinkle the grilled wild mushrooms on top of the eggs. Serve it with some fresh salad leaves.

Well, my taste buds are tingling! “I'm not saying this recipe is good for the heart,” Marco says, “but it is pleasing for the heart.”

I'm looking forward to finding a big haul of mousserons so I can try this recipe out for myself.

Would you mess with Marco and Simon?

Marco Pierre White is wild about mushrooms

Earlier this month I interviewed the infamously hot-tempered celebrity chef Marco Pierre White at the Box Tree restaurant in Ilkley. The Box Tree is the place that Marco calls his "spiritual home". It's where he started his career as a young man — leading him to become the youngest chef ever to earn three Michelin stars.

Me with Marco outside the Box Tree

It's a lovely place. The interview was going well, until I interrupted the flow of Marco's monologue – and he wasn’t happy. In fact, he glowered at me.

The bit of croissant I was attempting to eat stuck firmly in my throat as he sternly said: “If you’d be polite enough to let me finish my sentence...” he stared at me pointedly.

Yikes. For the rest of the interview I sat as politely as possible, nodding and smiling and let him say everything he had planned to say. Finally he looked at me, waiting. I could ask a question. 

And what did I ask? The only thing I really wanted to know: "You may be a world-renowned chef, perfectly capable of cooking up the most wonderful meal. But could you survive in the wild, fending for yourself, eating wild foods?"

After his brief pause, he responded that yes, of course he could fend for himself. He'd been hunting and fishing for years, and was a competent forager of wild food.

“I've always had a fascination with forgaing. I go collecting mirabelle plums every year with my daughter, Mirabelle. We make tarts, or mirabelles and custard. It's also good now to go and pick elderberries, which are delicious with wild duck or venison.”

"And do you like mushrooms?"

I’d tapped into something, and for the first time in the interview (perhaps ever) he smiled: “Mushrooms are quite magical things,” Marco said slowly. I probed further...

“My fascination with mushrooms started as a child. If you think back to your childhood, mushrooms or toadstools played a magical part – gnomes, fairies, they all seem to hang out around mushrooms in a deep forest; so they capture you're attention at an early age,” he said.

Marco went on to talk for a while longer about his love of wild mushrooms: he said his earliest memory of picking wild mushrooms was being taken by his grandfather: “He used to take me and we would pick lots and lots of mushrooms. Finding something as a child was always exciting. We would collect button or field mushrooms, horse mushrooms. It was always fascinating, something of a ritual and I loved that.”

Marco explained that he was brought up on a council estate on the outskirts of Leeds. But as a young boy he explored the rolling grounds of a nearby stately home. “I was very fortunate that my playground was the grounds of Hareweood House and along the River Wharfe, where I would fish.”

He said: “I used to pick blewits. Mousserons are delicious; really beautiful mushrooms, with an intense flavour. And I picked lots and lots of birch boletes, orange boletes, chanterelles, porcini. There's something quite beautiful about the amount of time you invest to find just a few; although the other day I did find 4kg of mushrooms in just half an hour.”

What's more, Marco hints that his early experiences of foraging contributed to him becoming a chef: “Those experiences as a child influenced me as a chef. But really it was mother nature that inspired me and captured my imagination. It was a natural love affair, of respect and admiration.”

So mushrooms saved the day. Who would have thought, that after such a spectacularly bumpy start to the interview, I would end up charming him with my mushroom chat...

Happy birthday foraging (continued)...

The woods where it all began...

Looking for mushrooms

We found some!

Dead man's fingers (great name!)

The sickener?

Mina talks us through how to pick them

Voila!

Not quite Sex and the City...

Our haul

My brown birch bolete!

Birthday foraging!

At the weekend I went on a birthday forage (for my birthday, which is today!) with Mina Said, in a secret location in Leeds...


We met there at 9:30am with a group of my friends (and another birthday group) and we spent a good few hours in the woods, finding lots of lovely mushrooms, including wood blewits, dead man's fingers, a few boletes (including a perfect brown birch bolete) and other strange things like the possibly edible tawny grisette.


Mina was being interviewed by BBC Radio Leeds during the walk, and I was also asked to say a few words. I was a little inarticulate, but you can listen to me on Bob Walmlsey's show again on iPlayer until 30th October.


I found the perfect brown birch bolete (which was a highlight), which was turned into a wild mushroom lasagne later in the evening. (For a starter James made a Swiss roll with left over chicken of the woods.)


And this is the cake Mina made me: a home made elderberry and apple cake with elderberry icing, yum.

Trees, leaves and wild mushrooms

Today's post is about leaves. All the ones below were picked in my garden yesterday.

No, I've not diverted from mushrooms entirely (just yet). It's just that knowing what trees grow in a given area can help you identify mushrooms more accurately.

Plus, my enthusiasm for mushrooms is about more than simply eating them. It's about the process of finding them — being a magpie — and yes, engaging with nature. 

So understanding the relationship between mushrooms and trees is important. It's good to know if you're looking in a hardwood forest (oak, birch, beech) or a softwood forest (which is made up of needle-bearing trees, such as spruce or pine).

When I picked these leaves, I really struggled to put a name to each and every one of them, so this has been eye-opening. I'm hoping I got all of them right! And as I learn more about what mushrooms typically grow near, on or under which trees, I'll update the list...

Oak

Oak leaf

You are likely to find lovely juicy red Beefsteak Fungus and my favourite, Chicken of the Woods, on hardwood trees like the magnificent oak. It's also possible to find Chanterelle mushrooms growing near oak trees (or pine). White truffles can also be found in the roots of the tree.

Some boletes grow on the ground near oak trees, too: like the  Red Aspen bolete, chestnut bolete and summer bolete. And if the oak is growing on sandy soil, there might be a Caesar's mushroom or two. Also look out for the wonderful Cep mushroom.

Beech

Beech leaves

These are the ones that go all lovely different shades in autumn. Under the soil of beech trees, near the roots, it is possible to find summer truffles. Above ground, expect Gypsy mushrooms and Charcoal Burners. 

In the leaf litter, there may be deceivers, like the Amethyst Deceiver, Aniseed funnel caps and Yellow Swamp Russulas. Also look out for the wonderful Cep mushroom.

Ash

Ash leaves

Morels — which are delicious — have a tendency to grow near ash trees, though ash is mostly associated with Black Morels. 

(Morels can also be found under apple trees).

Hawthorn

Hawthorn leaves

Parasol mushrooms may grow in fairy rings around mature Hawthorne trees, so keep your eyes peeled. Also, thimble morels can be found under hawthorn scru

Holly

Holly leaves

Around holly bushes you are likely to find the wonderful Horn of Plenty mushroom.

Sycamore

Sycamore leaf

Dryad's saddle often grows near sycamore trees.

Horse Chestnut

Horse chestnut leaf

 It's also possible to find Beefsteak Fungus on Sweet Chestnut trees.

Hazel 

Hazel leaves

Food for free - wild mushrooms in Leeds

Here's a selection of some mushrooms that I found on one mushrooming forage at the end of summer. 

I have tried to identify them, but my skills still leave a little to be desired...

This is very likely to be a Common Earthball. Not edible: 

A Common Earthball?

This is possibly a Beechwood Sickener. It had a strong smell of coconuts:

A Beechwood Sickener?

This is certainly a bolete, perhaps a Dotted-stemmed one?

A Dotted-stemmed Bolete?

And this is the inside of the bolete. The yellow quickly turned brown/grey:

The inside of a Dotted-stemmed Bolete

Lots of brittlecaps — which grow in mossy areas:

Blackening Brittlecaps?

These could be Ochre Brittlegills — they do indeed have brittle gills that crumble when you run your finger over them:

Ochre Brittlegill?

A lovely bolete specimen with clear white flesh. Name suggests they're inedible:

Bitter Bolete?

And this one I'm certain about — beefsteak fungus! So juicy and read, it's looks just like steak. Is edible and can be eaten raw...

Beefsteak Fungus!

Chicken of the Woods mushroom tempura

While we're on delicious recipes perfect for fungi, here's the one my lovely boyfriend whipped up last week (out of pure desperation, he'll admit, as there was absolutely nothing left in our cupboards, fridge, and the final thing in the freezer was a bag of Chicken of the Woods foraged in the summer) 

chicken of the woods mushroom tempura

It's salt and pepper Chicken of the Wood with watercress and green chilli soy dip. He assured me it was incredible and having been suspicious about the odd-looking fungi, is now a firm convert.

Main ingredients

500g of Chicken of the Woods

2 tablespoons of fish sauce

3 cups of vegetable oil

bunch of watercress

2 limes

Batter
2 and a half cups of rice flour

2 tablespoons of plain flour

1 tablespoon of corn flour

300ml of chilled water

Salt and Chilli seasoning

A tablespoon of sechuan peppercorns

A tablespoon of white peppercorns

A tablespoon of black peppercorns

And six tablespoons of sea salt

Green chilli dip

A third of a cup of soy sauce

One and a half tablespoons of sweet soy sauce

A table spoon of lemon juice (or rice vinegar)

Four chopped green chillis (deseeded) and a quarter of a teaspoon of ground white pepper

1. Make the salt and pepper seasoning first. The ingredients will make more then you need, but can be kept for at least two weeks. Dry roast all the ingredients until fragrant. Remove from the heat and ground using a pestel and mortar into a fine powder

2. Next prepare the chicken of the wood by cutting it into strips and frying gently in butter

3. Put the fish sauce on the chicken of the wood and put in fridge while preparing the rest

4. To make the soy dip, combine all the ingedients and set aside

5. For the batter, sift the flour into a bowl and slowly add the chilled water until you have a smooth consistency, with no lumps — you might not need to use all the water

6. Heat the oil in a wok to a high temperature and dip the chicken of the woods in the batter then put it in the hot oil (you may need to do this in two batches)

7. Once the mushroom is browned, remove and drain on paper towels and season with the salt and pepper mix

8. Garnish with limes and serve with watercress

It apparently took around 20 minutes to prepare and cook. I'm looking forward to him making it again so I can try it!

Wild mushroom and chicken pie

So last night I ate my first foraged dinner, where the identification of the mushrooms was entirely in my hands — a delicious pie of chicken, wild foraged mushrooms, leek, carrots, shallots and celery. Here's the meal in progress:

At the start, the raw ingredients

Note the tub of shaggy inkcaps and field blewit

On the go

You can just about make out the lilac stems of the field blewit

And the finished product. I didn't have to use my backup oyster mushrooms, bought from Morrisons...!

Fungi Pie!

 

And despite a mild unfounded panic last night that I might have eaten something deadly, it all well and me and my dinner guests are all alive and kicking and keen for the next foraged feast...

Wild mushrooms in my belly!

Today I've spent a few hours transcribing the interview I did with the talented forager and mushroom know-it-all, Mina Said. Listening to her talk about the wonders of mushrooms all afternoon has got me inspired (and feeling hungry!)

So it's with excitement that I prepare to cook my first-ever foraged mushroom feast: a chicken and wild mushroom pie.

I found a few fungi yesterday that I'm 100 percent certain about, including four shaggy ink caps and a single Field Blewit, which has a spectacular lilac-tinted stem.

A Field Blewit

I've also got some Chicken of the Woods in the freezer from a couple of months ago, and some oyster mushrooms, foraged from, er... Morrisons (I hate to admit it, but needed a back-up in case I didn't find anything edible, and to make sure it wasn't just plain old chicken pie).

The recipe comes from the Edible Mushroom Book: a guide to foraging and cooking, and needless to say, it has loads of great recipes that make my mouth water.

If it goes according to plan, and tastes as good as I hope, I'll post the recipe.

Mud in my gold shoes

My foraging shoes!

Today was a sunny Sunday with nothing on the cards.

So after losing at squash and a quick swim, I walked home through the university, via the lovely old graveyard behind the geography building (which is a wonderfully-kept secret), and Hyde Park – or Woodhouse Moor, depending on how long you've lived in Leeds.

With the gold and red autumn leaves, it was a wonderful walk back, browsing under hedgerows, through the leaf litter and behind the odd grave... I got some funny looks from people – and got a shoeful of mud.

The first thing I found was a lovely shaggy cap (pictured below) in the grass – very edible and very easy to identify.

A Shaggy Inkcap

I also found some other edibles, like the lilac-coloured mushrooms that I think are wood blewits, but could perhaps be Lepista Sordida.

And some huge, perfectly-formed and rather impressive Clouded Funnel, mushrooms, which are said to be edible, but are known to cause gastric upset in some people, so I'm putting those to the back of the fridge for a few days, until I feel confident/brave enough to try a little piece...

On Friday after work I also stumbled across some huge swathes of the wonderfully-named Shaggy Scalycaps, which are alas, inedible...

Tomorrow night, I'll be cooking up a chicken and wild mushroom pie. Recipe and images (and verdict) to come soon...

After the forage: muddy soles — my feet were worse

My favourite mushroom: Chicken of the Woods

A tree oozing Chicken of the Woods

I have to talk more about my favourite mushroom.

Chicken of the Woods: it's the one I obsessed over from the moment I understood it existed; I dreamed about finding it; talked about it constantly.

This summer, I naively went foraging in the hope of bringing home a hoard of the stuff; became despondent after gathering but two boletes and a shrunken, fetid earthball.

Then, like a woman dying of thirst in the desert, just as I gave up hope, saw a flash of coral-shaped yellow in the distance growing at the stump of a tree. 

Not believing my eyes, I kept tramping on...

Finding my first bounty of the unearthly-looking Chicken of the Woods, that at first sight looks like that ungodly foamy industrial wall-filler stuff, oozing out of a tree, was the most exciting moment of my foraging life so far.

I found it in the forests of Meanwood, Leeds, in late summer, with my friend Laura. We cut it from the base of the tree and found a branch long enough to knock another lump from higher up the old tree. 

We cycled home, slowed down with the pure weight of it.

The wonderfully-named fungi (for a long time my friend thought I was talking about actual chickens that happened to be in the woods) is the perfect mushroom for the new forager. 

It's so easy to identify and there's no risk of confusing it with anything else. 

And it tastes delicious! (More on that to come in my next post...)

A fungi warning!

Never eat a poisonous Panther Cap!

It is worth mentioning, and it will be a recurring theme in this blog – that you should never eat a wild mushroom without being 100 percent sure that it is exactly what you think it is!

If not, you might be in for an uncomfortable night, staring sickly down the toilet bowl, or worse – a night in A&E. 

Horror stories have been going around about the author Nicholas Evans (who is now more famous for seriously poisoning himself and two others by wrongly identifying and eating a mushroom on a foraging trip a couple of years ago, than for any of his novels...)

These kind of stories terrify my mother and she never refrains from warning me about the dangers of wild mushrooms and all the horrible things they could do to me...

But while they may be enough to scare you into never exploring the world of edible fungi, which would be a shame (as there are lots of mushrooms out there which are very easy to identify and taste delicious), at the same time, it's good that people are terribly aware of the dangers of eating something that could do them damage.  

I've thrown away baskets full of lovely mushroom specimens just because I wasn't entirely certain they were what I thought they were, after hours of identification and spore prints.  

The only wild mushrooms I have eaten are Chicken of the Woods, which you cannot easily confuse with any other species of mushroom (but does have to be cooked before being eaten) and some wild mushrooms that we collected in the Forrest of Dean with an expert forager.

Recently-published statistics say that the number of hospital admissions for people with suspected mushroom poisoning has doubled in the past year – mainly due to this year's bumper crop and the new-found popularity of foraging. 

"They received 209 calls this year from NHS staff attempting to treat suspected mushroom poisoning — a steep rise on last year's 123 enquiries and the 147 in 2008" 

 So don't let yourself be one of them (please)!

A mushroom obsession: how it all began

My passion for mushrooms is a new-found obsession: I first entered the fabulous world of fungi a few months ago, around May, when I went on a Food for Free walk in Meanwood Park, Leeds, with the forager extraordinaire, Mina Said.

There aren't loads of mushrooms that grow at that time of year. But Mina introduced me to one or two, and my attention was instantly caught by the oozing bright yellow larva that is Chicken of the Wood (which I went on to dream about several times, like a woman possessed, until I found my own magnificent hoard a month or two later).

Since then, I’ve been spotting mushrooms everywhere! One of the most exciting discoveries I’ve made is that bloody loads of mushrooms grow in the gardens and patch of woods of my home in Leeds. Two spots in particular are teeming with a whole variety of mushrooms, including boletes, ink caps and some slippery ones that have the texture of a dog’s wet nose. 

On my way out, or coming home, I'll often spend five or ten minutes mooching around dark corners of the garden, poking at the leaf litter with a stick, and generally examining the odd stuff that I find (the most bizarre being the fungi, surely not edible, that's growing out of the cracks in an old wooden bench).

What's interesting is that I've lived here for nearly three years now, and this summer was the first time I've seen a single mushrooms here (or any where else for that matter). 

It's not that they didn't exist before, it's that I had never looked close enough at the wild spaces around me to notice this whole other fungi world going on, having a party all of its own...

My first hoard of wild mushrooms