Mushroom: A Global History

Description

Known as the meat of the vegetable world, mushrooms have their ardent supporters as well as their fierce detractors. Hobbits go crazy over them, while Diderot thought they should be "sent back to the dung heap where they are born." In Mushroom, Cynthia D. Bertelsen examines the colorful history of these divisive edible fungi. As she reveals, their story is fraught with murder and accidental death, hunger and gluttony, sickness and health, religion and war. Some cultures equate them with the rottenness of life while others delight in cooking and eating them. And then there are those "magic" mushrooms, which some people link to ancient religious beliefs. To tell this story, Bertelsen travels to the nineteenth century, when mushrooms entered the realm of haute cuisine after millennia of being picked from the wild for use in everyday cooking and medicine. She describes how this new demand drove entrepreneurs and farmers to seek methods for cultivating mushrooms, including... Cover......Page 1 Mushroom: A Global History......Page 5 Imprint Page......Page 6 Contents......Page 7 Introduction: The Importance of Being Mushroom......Page 9 1. Anatomy of the Mushroom......Page 15 2. The Quiet Hunt: Mushroom Foraging......Page 28 3. Take Ye Faire Mushrooms: Cooking......Page 41 4. Preservation......Page 70 5. Nutrition, Medicine and Religion......Page 81 6. Cultivation......Page 101 7. A Mushrooming Future......Page 119 How to Grow a Mushroom......Page 126 Among the Mushrooms: The Major Players......Page 130 Recipes......Page 137 Select Bibliography......Page 149 Websites and Associations......Page 151 Acknowledgements......Page 153 Photo Acknowledgements......Page 155 Index......Page 156