Is It Edible?

This is how you go mushrooming: You take a picnic basket and follow someone who knows what they’re doing into the woods and ask over and over again, “Is it edible?” Follow-up questions involve psychedelics, medicine, the proximity of bears, and where the car is. 

Some are, most aren’t—that’s the basic answer. I learned this answer from my friend Lisa. I’ve also learned how tolerant she’d been during the years of me asking “What’s this?” so persistently and retaining the answers so poorly. Some mushrooms really are delicious and even valuable. Some are lethally poisonous. Some are lurid and others are elegant. 

Lisa learned about mushrooms from her then mother-in-law in Norway who had been a nurse imprisoned in a German POW camp during WWII. She was allowed to forage the compound for mushrooms to feed fellow prisoners. So, for instance, when asked if a type of suillus is edible, instead of saying, “Yeah, if you’re a squirrel,” Lisa would say that those were end-times mushrooms and starving people ate them in the camps.

In Norway, there’s a mushroom called the svigermor sopp—the mother-in-law mushroom. It causes lethal kidney failure weeks after it’s eaten—good for getting away with murdering your mother-in-law. In 2022, in Amherst, Massachusetts, a mother and son nearly died from eating Amanita phalloides—death caps—which are unremarkable looking white gilled mushrooms that grow in my yard every summer. 

It’s a little hard to talk about mushrooms in the US because they don’t have so many common names. Not only that but the binomial scientific names are changing due to reclassifications based on genomic sequencing that had not been possible before. If you were to ask Lisa, as I have many, many times, “What’s this?” she might well say, “that’s a steinsopp or that’s what we called it in Norway. A Boletus edulis. I’m not sure what Americans call it.” In the US, we might call this a king, or by its Italian common name—a porcini mushroom (which means “little pig”) or the British cep, which is from a French word. Then Lisa might explain that recently mycologists have reclassified some of the species from the edulis clade and that the mushroom you are asking about may now be a nobillisimus or a variipes. There’s a lot more to identifying mushrooms—does it have white reticulation? Are its pores stuffed? What color and shape are its spores? Does it bruise, and if so what color? What trees are nearby? What month is it? What part of the continent are you on? What does it taste, smell, feel like? If your only question is, “Is this edible?” and you are standing in a bog being bled dry by mosquitoes and ticks, you might not want this whole teachable moment to occur. But if you master this, you might be allowed to put the mushroom in Lisa’s basket, because only mushrooms she is certain about go in her basket. Eating mushrooms is often a tertiary pleasure, after finding and identifying them. 

Tricholoma (which sounds like a disease but is Greek for “hairy-fringed”) is a genus of mushroom with many species, some of which are edible and one of which, the Tricholoma matsutake, is valuable. Matsutake is Japanese for “piney mushroom.” We could call these “hairy-fringed piney mushrooms” in American English, but we use the Japanese word. On this continent, they grow in the Pacific Northwest and are exported to Japan, where they have a cultural value that doesn’t have much of a correlation here. I’ve never seen one—it’s not even in my Mushrooms of the Northeast field guide. The mushrooms supposedly smell like foot sweat and cinnamon and are a classy gift to bestow on someone in Japan. Hunting for these mushrooms can be so competitive and remunerative in the Northwest woods that people get shot at and robbed. Lisa had heard that they’d been found on Cape Cod and elsewhere in this region and wanted to try and find one. 

We parked at an old graveyard on a dirt road in the town of Shutesbury. Our destination was a sandy piney area we’d wanted to explore anyway. This cemetery is near two stone chambers—or three, actually; there’s a crypt in the graveyard. Stone chambers are like fungi in that they are not well understood, have esoteric lore attached to them, and are seen as sacred by some and mundane practicality by others. And like mushrooms, they are secret—ask someone where they found their porcini mushrooms or where to find a stone chamber, and you’ll often just be told “the woods.” 

This whole area has lots of stonework, much of it being walls, cellar holes, and dams from old mills. Hidden in the hills, though, there are more enigmatic stacked stone structures that many consider to be Native ceremonial sites. Their locations are kept secret by academics and archeologists. People attribute them to Native Americans, Colonial-era settlers, Irish monks, Phoenicians, Basques, Vikings, aliens. They were used for ceremonial gatherings, spiritual retreats, dungeons, treasure hoards, wayfinding, astronomy, warfare, trysting, corpse and ice and rutabaga and potato storage, depending on who you ask. 

The Shutesbury cellar chambers are built into hillsides with small entryways. They’re big enough to hold two crouching adults. They are domes constructed of stacked and corbelled field stones. It’s cool and damp and dark inside. If you stay inside long enough to let your eyes adjust, you’ll see roots and spider webs reaching out into the void. You’ll see hordes of drowsy mosquitoes and patinas of luminous mold, lichen, and leeching minerals. Salamanders, slugs, and snails, too. The rocks are damp and the cellar smells like petrichor and rotted duff. 

In the 1920s, a secret study codenamed “Cellar Holes” (to evoke abandonment) was performed on the residents of Shutesbury. Eugenicists funded by the state, Harvard University, and other colleges chose Shutesbury because they felt it was “so uniformly decadent that a normal comparison is lacking.” The book that resulted from the study is called The Case for Sterilization. At that time, the population was down to under 300 people. Now its houses are pricey because Shutesbury teens go to high school in Amherst, a town known for its colleges. 

The better-known chamber here is called “The Monk’s Cave.” It’s at the base of a hill that once held a hotel for people to come “take the waters” in mineral springs. Now there is an off-the-grid silent meditative retreat at the top of the hill and one is asked to strike a gong on approach to warn the guests staying in the cabins there. We were at the other, nameless chamber behind the former summer camp now Christian retreat and conference center’s old dump. The area is handsome; it’s next to an active beaver bog. There’s interesting old trash here and there, and I once saw a labyrinth here trampled into the snow by snowshoers. 

Lisa felt this might be a great place to find Tricholomas, maybe even the matsutake. I clambered into the chamber and described the big ruffly cave-pale mushrooms growing from the walls as if I was reading mysterious hieroglyphics. Then gunfire interrupted my narration of the hole. Very loud, very rapid, very nearby gunfire. Someone was emptying clips from an AR-15 in ten-shot bursts. This was not a can plinker or a hunter.

I was in an actual fortified bunker. Lisa was a school nurse and had been through plenty of live shooter drills at school. I could have pulled her in and hid there. But I chose to scram. I climbed out and hissed to Lisa, “Let’s go!” and we loped, half-bent-over to the road. I just didn’t want to be near that gun, even if we weren’t the targets. Lisa kept her head. I was riled, heart hammering, but grateful I’d made the only reasonable decision, which was to shut up and leave. 

We were both adrenalized by this and decided to drive to another site and keep looking—Lisa’s basket was still empty. Walking it off helped. We found a very pretty, purple Cortinarius iodes marking the head of a trail we’d never taken. 

As we walked and I yammered about guns to Lisa, she pressed me with more questions about the mushrooms in the chamber. What was the stem like? What about the gills? Did it look like the ones from yesterday? I didn’t think to take one, did I? Grown underground with no sunlight; it would be an excellent specimen. We could go back later, she said. She wanted a look at that mushroom in the chamber herself.