Product Description

In the first of an exciting new River Cottage Handbook series, mycologist John Wright explains the ins and outs of collecting, including relevant UK laws, conservation notes, practical tips and identification techniques. He takes us through the 72 species we are most likely to come across during forays in Britain's forests and clearings: old friends the Chanterelle and Cep, as well as a whole colourful host of more unfamiliar names - edible species including the Velvet Shank, the Horn of Plenty, the Amethyst Deceiver, the Giant Puffball and the Chicken in the Woods, and poisonous types such as the Sickener, the Death Cap and the Destroying Angel. The handbook is completed by more than 30 simple and delicious mushroom recipes from the River Cottage team. With colour photographs throughout, line drawings, a user-friendly Key and an introduction by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, The River Cottage Mushroom Handbook is a comprehensive and collectable guide, destined to be an indispensable household reference.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #193 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Review
'The best guide to gathering and eating wild mushrooms there has ever been' Independent

BBC Country File
He gives plenty of vital tips about identifying different species and how not to poison yourself.

Highland News
This new book on mushrooms is one of the best I have read.

Customer Reviews

A hunting we will go...
My wife had a mushroom epiphany last year when stood in the middle of a wood in the Chilterns surrounded by all sorts of Fungi: If we were able to tell which was deadly poisonous and which deliciously edible, we could pick away to our hearts content, dash home and make soups and pâtés and all sorts of mushroomy things for weeks to come! As it was, we didn't know a toadstall from a chanterelle and returned home empty-handed, but therein resolved to investigate what guidebooks were on offer. We were rather disappointed by the rather earnest, flatly-written books we found, often with rather dated illustrations or an absence of recipes (surely the point of cooking them is eating them!) and absolutely no sense of the fun and excitement that might be had foraging for your dinner of an autumn afternoon. So we never got around to it. But as this autumn approaches, we were reminded of the coming mushroom season by the Guardian's River Cottage Mushroom guide (bascially a little taster of the book itself) and immediately realised that the handbook was just what we were looking for. And so it arrived in the post full of lovely pictures, concise descriptions and brilliant recipes all bound together by John Wright's strangely humourous writing style (parts are actually laugh-out-loud funny.) We went out to Hampstead Heath yesterday and immediately found a good hoard with which which we made some fantastic mushroom tart. We're hoping it will become a regular jaunt over the coming months and it's all thanks to this great little book.

An excellent book - and small enough to carry in your pocket..
I have most of the funghi and mushroom guides available and I've been mushrooming for over 20 years. The photos are excellent and John Wright's writing is really entertaining - he actually made me laugh out loud!
Probably the best written guide around.
It even surpasses my other favourite right now, 'Setas de Galicia' which does beat it for lurid fungal photos, but is so heavy that it slows me down on the chase for a particularly good cep.

A sheer delight - though necessarily brief
This River Cottage Handbook, `Mushrooms' by John Wright, is a genuinely funny and hugely informative guide to mushroom and toadstools with some useful cooking tips and recipes too. (Some are even simple enough to try!)

Although this is a River Cottage book it's not by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall; he does write a short introduction which viewers of the series will recognise as an account from one of the River Cottage shows. Fortunately, John Wright is a worthy (and appropriate) River Cottage author.

The book is divided into five sections:

Starting Out (p8-39)
Edible Species (p40-135)
Poisonous Species (p136-179)
Recipes (p180-245)
The End - comprising: index, useful addresses, etc. (p246-256)

`Starting Out' briefly addresses such things as mushroom collection, conservation, identification methods, glossary, etc. and includes the obligatory `key'. While Wright's key is about 10 pages, he notes `... it is not as daunting as many others - I have one that is nearly 500 pages long', it is still nearly impossible to use for extreme fungi novices like my wife and I. Still, it seems to be a necessary evil as fungi identification is supremely difficult.

As noted in other reviews, Wright's approach has been to identify just the edible and poisonous species so if the specimen you have is not one of the hundred or so here, don't eat it! This, of course, means that when you go out looking you will see lots that you can't identify. (Indeed (as extreme novices), we could only indentify about 10% of what we saw from this book.)

So this book is small enough to take out on a forage but can't cover most fungi species. However, it is easily good enough and entertaining enough to read cover-to-cover, unlike most others. While it'll make you laugh every now and then, it'll also teach you masses about mushrooms and toadstools. We love it.