British fungal prejudice – a history

By Daniel Butler, author and forager

Almost all our Continental neighbours have conspicuous gastronomic traditions of not only using mushrooms in the kitchen, but of widespread communal foraging. In contrast, there is very little evidence of much mushroom collecting and culinary use in Britain.

I’ve outlined my theories for these contrasting approaches, but there is still a frustrating lack of historical evidence of fungal consumption in the British Isles. This seems to be because throughout the Middle Ages they were regarded as a food of the poor. They therefore rarely featured in aristocratic feasts, so there are few records in the household accounts of stately homes. These are one of the main sources of dietary information after the Norman Conquest.

There is a fair amount of evidence of an innate fungal suspicion of fungi, however. The Catholic Church treated mushrooms with suspicion, perhaps because they seemed to appear spontaneously, often during the ‘witching hours’ (night). Some fungi, notably truffles, were thought to provoke lustful urges – as evidenced by the great 17C polymath, Francis Bacon, who called them “venereous [lustful] meat”.

John Gerard was not a mushroom fan

(Photo: Frontispiece of 'Herball'

At about the same time (1597) John Gerard remarked “few of them are good to be eaten, and most of them do suffocate and strangle the eater. Therefore, I give my advice unto those that love such strange and new-fangled meates, to beware of licking honey among thornes, least the sweetnesse of the one do not countervaile the sharpnesse and pricking of the other.”

Half a century later his views were echoed by Nicholas Culpepper ‘Inwardly [field mushrooms] are unwholesome to eat and unfit for the strongest constitutions . . . it loads the stomach, distends the viscera, causes a nausea and causes vomiting.’

Legends say Welsh goblins dined on poisonous mushrooms

(Photo: Seventeenth century pamphlet)

Popular attitudes, are more difficult to fathom, but there is some folklore which suggests they were treated with suspicion across the social spectrum. In Wales, elves were supposed to live on witches butter (Exidia glandulosa) and toxic fungi or bwyd ellyllon (meat of the goblins), both of which were regarded as toxic to humans.

There was also a widespread British belief that mushrooms growing near iron, copper, or other metals, are poisonous. Another myth was that they could be made safe by boiling them with a piece of metal, the idea being that it would attract and draw out the toxins.

There is actually a nugget of sound science here. Mushrooms are fantastic agents of decay. Normally they feed on organic matter, breaking it down into its chemical components and rebuilding these to create fungal tissue which is totally different to the starting matter. Thus it is safe to eat chicken of the woods growing on a highly-toxic yew tree because the resulting mushroom is just like another COTW growing on an oak: neither contain any traces of their host.  

Things are very different when it comes to substrates full of toxic elements. As most people will recall from school science lessons, one of the definitions of an element is that it cannot be broken down (with the exceptions of a few radioactive substances).  Thus, a mushroom growing on a heavily-contaminated site might well absorb elements such as lead, cadmium or arsenic. If so, these toxic chemicals cannot be transformed into harmless tissue.