I know not to eat them, and I don't have a decent sense of taste, so it's not for me to say... but just supposing you ate one, unwisely — don't do it! — answer this: Do death cap mushrooms taste good?
Nibbling around the edges of research, I think the answer is they taste like fairly ordinary mushrooms, which is why a fool might think they're edible.
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21 comments:
Amazing that she's still on trial. And not in prison. She serves a deadly mushroom lunch to her in-laws, 3 of 4 die. But she doesn't even spend a day in the hospital. And she destroys the evidence.
My wife would ask "WHY would you consider putting ANY fungus in your mouth?" She's consistently anti-mushroom.
served with a side of fugu.
Guilty guilty guilty. She's adept at foraging but oblivious to toxicity? She served her in-laws a dish that she hadn't sampled? True justice would be to sentence her to eat those mushrooms herself.
"Merricat, said Connie, Would you like a cup of Tea?
Oh No, said Merricat, You'll poison me!
Merricat, said Connie, Would you like to go to sleep
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!"
Even when I eat a mushroom from Woodmans -- I get the ones from PA, not the ones from Canada -- I'm wondering if somehow poisoners got into the mix accidentally.
I know just enough about mushrooms to know you want to leave selecting them to the professionals.
From my experience, dramatic music plays just as someone offers you the Death Cap. It's a tell, just like going into the basement with a faulty flashlight.
Every time I hear of someone being poisoned by a mushroom, I think of the early and little known Clint Eastwood movie The Beguiled, which introduced me to the existence of poison mushrooms.
They agree he died of exhaustion, and Amy denies she could ever pick a poisonous mushroom by mistake.
I live on 5 acres of hardwood forest. I get a lot of interesting mushrooms from chicken of the woods, to puffballs, and all sorts of supposedly edible mushrooms. I have tried a puffball and studied it closely upon cutting to make sure it was still good (pure white inside) and i Loved it sautéed with butter. But I'm just not brave enough to try all the others even if I am able to identify them accurately. I have see the poisonous false morels on my property, but never a real one. I do have a dedicated fungus forager who visits the property and takes all sorts of fungus home to eat and has not died.
I do have a dedicated fungus forager who visits the property and takes all sorts of fungus home to eat and has not died.
"Nice guy, big-hearted. He always seems to be adopting a new dog!"
;-)
CJinPA,
No bread for her, eh?
Ah! At last another mushroom post! Hurray!
I have more knowledge on this topic than anyone here, having in fact tasted the Death Cap's close relative, the Western Destroying Angel, Amanita ocreata. Mushroom poisons are dose-dependent, and it is quite safe to nibble a small piece as long as you do not swallow any, but spit it out and rinse out your mouth. The deadly poisonous Destroying Angel is a very tasty mushroom indeed, like many in the genus Amanita.
The Death Cap, A. phalloides, is said to be even better. They take a number of days to kill you, and a man who died of liver failure in California some years ago was able to report that it was the most delicious mushroom dish he had ever eaten.
Kirk Parker said...
She's fine with bread. Not mushrooms.
I have see the poisonous false morels on my property, but never a real one.
Some of the false morels are highly toxic, but there are several species that are delicious and safe if thoroughly cooked. They are best reserved for expert mushroom foragers only.
Even the true morels can be dangerous if they are not well cooked. There was a big poisoning in Canada a few years ago when a fool of a chef prepared a raw morel salad. Something like 70 people got sick and half of those had to be hospitalized.
There's no way that she ate poisoneous mushrooms with three other people and didn't get sick when they all died. She had lots of previous experience with forraging for mushrooms and knew what she was doing. It's just too suspicious that the person who picked the mushrooms and prepared them didn't get sick.
Unfortunately, the victims are all dead so we can't ask them what they knew about the mushrooms. (She may not have told them that they were wild mushrooms that she had harvested and prepared.)
I do have a dedicated fungus forager who visits the property and takes all sorts of fungus home to eat and has not died.
I keep a life list, like a birdwatcher. So far I've eaten 87 species of wild mushrooms without incident.
Where does one find these 'death cap' mushrooms? Asking for a friend. He apparently has some relatives coming over next week. His mother in law among them. I really cannot stand...I mean...he wants to make her feel at home. A nice home cooked meal should do the trick.
CJinPA,
Whatever you do, don't let her learn what kingdom yeast belongs to, okay? ;-)
I wonder whether Ms. Erin Patterson is a fan of Dorothy L. Sayers? Sayers was a mystery writer and contemporary of Agatha Christie. Most of her novels are centered on the character of Lord Peter Whimsey, a wealthy, titled, intelligent amateur sleuth, but in 1930 she wrote “The Documents in the Case,” where the narrator is the son of an expert mushroom hunter who is found dead in his Devonshire holiday (vacation) cottage, apparently from eating a poisonous mushroom. The evidence — a mushroom stew — is still on the stove and there is no question that he perished of muscarine, a poison found in various wild mushrooms like “white funnel.”
The son is suspicious because he knows that his father was too knowledgeable and experienced to make such a serious mistake. His suspicions are deepened when he discovers that rhe person who lived in the flat above his father’s was having an affair with his stepmother, and thst this man is acquainted with an organic chemist who boasted about making muscarine in the lab. But how to prove that the muscarine that killed his father was artificial?
Sixty years ago I minored in chemistry so I know what an optical isomer is, and naturally occurring muscarine is entirely in the form of a left optical isomer while the muscarine that killed his father is a racemic mixture of both left and right isomers. Therefore artificially created, therefore murder. The novel ends with a terse newspaper clipping saying that the man who had an affair with the stepmother had been hanged.
I have no idea whether the plot of the Dorothy L. Sayers novel and this case are in any way related.
Oh, and back when I had a summer job in the mid-1960s one of the guys had been inspired by a coworker who was an experienced mushroom picker to go into the woods and pick and cook his own mushrooms. He brought the cooked mushrooms in to share with his friends. Everyone survived, but those who shared in his cooked mushrooms missed several days of work.
This is up there with the Lindy Chamberlain case, which in that case was a travesty.
Erin testified in her defence today, and will be cross-examined tomorrow. Defendants usually only do this when a case is going badly for them. She's been caught lying more than once.
She's toast. Mushrooms optional.
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