Food for Free - the 'Death Cap' mushroom
Well, it's pretty much my favorite time of the year. The Wine Harvests are being celebrated across the regions, fruit trees are full and the woods are full of free food. For this it's worth enduring those lousy hot Summer days.
Best of all the forest floors and verdant fields are ripe with fungi. Of course, you can find mushrooms any time of the year (e.g. oyster mushrooms in the heavy frosts of Winter), but now the countryside is packed with them.
I'd normally be heading off to some part of the British Isles round now as those fools just leave the things to rot. Deep down in their subconscious is some primeval link between mushrooms and goblins, water spirits and the other side. Best summed up by their belief that there is such a distinct thing as a Toadstool (from the German 'die Tode Stuhle' or "seats of death" and nothing to do with amphibians).
But that is the trouble with mushrooms, you can make fatal mistakes. The consequences of which are just appalling. So the story last week of a 6 people from Magyarpolányi being poisoned after eating Amanita phalloides (the 'Death Cap' or 'gyilkos galóca' in Hungarian) didn't look hopeful.
Saying it didn't look hopeful is putting it mildly. Even a small amount of the Death Cap can be deadly and for the hours that the poison wracks your body you probably want the end to come all the quicker. A brief description of the symptoms are:
For the first 24 hours you won't have a clue the misery your body is going to be put through. The Death Cap gives very few warning signs. Then it hits you with diarrhoea, nausea, vomiting, and cold sweats. This gets worse, so bad in fact that you start to suffer from dehydration - which can lead to heart failure. If you're 'lucky' to survive this you may think the worst is over. These symptoms die down, meanwhile your internal organs are being trashed. The poisons destroy the liver and kidneys. Finally you die of 'massive organ failure'. All the time you are lucid and can feel everything that is happening to you, right up to the last convulsion.
Truth is there is no known cure for Amanita mushroom poisoning (caused by choleriform). In some cases even complete blood transfusions, dialysis, and liver and kidney transplants can't help. And it only takes one or two mushrooms to kill a healthy adult. Your chances of dying is generally around 20-30%, which increases depending on how much you eat.
So the news that the six people have survived is amazing. Their story is a model in how not to collect mushrooms. One guy picked them and handed them round to his friends. From experience I have seen this happen to others. Bits break off, mushrooms get mixed with others in the collecting basket. They lose track of what exactly they have picked and where they found it. The point is his friends couldn't check the provinance of each mushroom. Also as a group you always have one idiot that doesn't check every detail of what they are selecting. I don't trust anyone apart from myself, and I don't give myself the benefit of the doubt. They wanted to pick Agaricus Campestris (the 'meadow mushroom' or 'csiperke' in Hungarian), which looks like an enormous version of your standard shop bought brown mushrooms. But someone managed to mistake the Death Cap for one of those and added it (or more than one) to the basket.
There are normally clear differences between them. The two most important is that at the foot of the Death Cap is a white sack (as in the picture) and their gills are pretty white. So also pick up the whole mushroom right from the very base, if it has anything around it's feet, don't even chance it. And don't believe any rubbish about poisonous mushrooms smelling bad or anything else. Truth is a lot of poisonous mushrooms taste wonderful. This is how Claudius, the Roman emperor, was thought to have been murdered by including the poisonous Amanita phalloides in a dish of his favourite mushrooms, the rather similar, Amanita caesarea (Caesar's Mushroom).
Each year the Death Cap poisons about 25-30 people in Hungary, with local death rates of about 20% (>50% for children). This is just the start of the Mushroom picking season, so let's hope it focusses everyone's attention.
So your Hungarian word is 'halálosztó' meaning 'bringer of death' or 'death dealer', from halál (death) and osztó ('dealer' as in a game of cards). If you're out picking, and especially if you are just starting to master the art, double check every little detail, don't be dealt a bum hand!
p.s. Bad joke warning ('fa vicc' in Hungarian) Why did the vegetables like to go to Mr. Mushroom's house for dinner? Because he was a fun-gi.
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