MUSHROOMS

Food historians tell us prehistoric peoples most likely consumed fungi and mushrooms. These foods were easy to forage and incorporate into meals. The Ancient Romans appreciated the taste and grew mushrooms. Modern cultivation commenced around the 16th century. Truffles, from the Perigord region in France are considered some of the most delicate and expensive specimens of this particular type of food. Portobello and Cremini are relative newcomers. Mushrooms are a subset of the larger plant world of fungus:

"Fungus in the scientific sense, means any group of simple plants which include mushrooms and similar plants, yeasts, moulds, and the rusts which grow as parasites on crops. Unlike more advanced plants, fungi lack chlorophyll and so can only grown as sprophytes (from dead plants or animals); or as parasites (on living plants); or in a mycorrhizal relationship (symbiosis between fungi and the roots of trees)...The importance of fungi for human food is not limited to those which are eaten as such, or are visible. Many which are microorganisms play an important part in making or processing human food. Yeasts are an obvious example, and are regarded as beneficent because of their role in, for example, the making of bread dough...'Musrhooms', to use the term loosely as applying to edible fungi in general, are far better known as food in the northern than in the southern hemisphere."

(Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 1999 (p. 326))

"Mushrooms and other large varieties of fungus have geen eaten since earliest times, as traces of puffballs in the prehistoric lake dwellings of Switzerland, Germany, and Austria show; but not by everyone and not everywhere. The rarest and finest mushrooms, such as the truffle and the oronge, were highly esteemed in classical Greece and Rome, and have always been expensive...some mushrooms have been successfully cultivated for a long time. In classical times both Greeks and Romans grew the small Agrocybe aegerita...on slices of a poplar trunk. The Chinese and Japanese may have been growing chitake on rotting logs for even longer. Modern European cultivation goes back to 1600, when the French agriculturist Olivier de Serres suggested a method in his work Le Theatre d'agriculture des champs. In 1678 another Frenchman, the botanist Marchant, demonstrated to the Academie des Sciences how mushrooms could be sown in a controlled way by transplanting their mycelia (filaments whcih spread through the soil underneath them like fine roots)."

(Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 1999 (p. 519, 521))


"Fungi have been associated with humans since prehistoric times and must have been collected and eaten along with other plants by hunter-gatherers prior to the deveolpment of agriculture...Although their prehistoric use remains uncertain, they may have been employed as food, in the preparation of beverages, and as medicine. There is, however, no specific evidence for the use of fungi prior to the Neolithic period, when fungi consumption would have been associated with the drinking of mead (yeast-fermented diluted honey) and yeast-fermented beer or wine, and, somewhat later, the eating of yeast-fermented (leavened) bread."

(Cambridge World History of Food, Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Conee Ornelas [Cambridge University Press:Cambridge] 2001, Volume One (p. 314))


"Cave drawings and paintings tell us hardly anything about the plants the cavedwellers ate, and it is even rarer to find them showing mushrooms, which does not mean that the latter never featured on prehistoric menus. Residues identified prove that other vegetables were in fact eaten, even if few felt any urge to depict them on cabe walls. Morever, if we look at the dietary customs of contemporary peoples who are still at the Paleolithic or Neolithic stage of development, there is plenty of evidence of an interest in mushrooms both edible and poisonous. The latter can be used for hunting, fishing, or indeed for homicial purposes...The ancient Egyptians and Romans greatly enjoyed mushrooms...The Bible, although full of references to food of many kinds, never mentions mushrooms, either in praise or otherwise..."

(History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, translated by Anthea Bell [Barnes & Noble Books:New York] 1992 (p. 57))

"The first evidence that mushrooms were used as human food in prehistoric Europe is the recent find of a bowl of field mushrooms in a Bronze Age house near Nola in Italy. Mushrooms were gathered from the wild. Classical Greek authors tend to treat them as famine food, on the level with acorns. By Romans, however, they were so highly regarded that the Stoic writer Seneca gave up mushrooms (boleti) as unnecessary luxuries---an approach to the vegetarianism and asceticism that he toyed with. Recipes are suggested by Diphilus of Siphnos, in the third century BC, and in Apicius in the fourth century AD."

(Food in the Ancient World from A to Z, Andrew Dalby [Routledge:London] 2003 (p. 223))

Why are they called "mushrooms?"

"The word mushroom, first recorded in the early fifteenth century, was borrowed from Old French mousseron. This has been traced back to a late Latin mussirio, a word of unknown origin."

(An A to Z of Food and Drink, John Ayto [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2002 (p. 221))

About mushrooms in America

"...it may seem surprosing that mushrooms entered the American culinary limelight only in the late nineteenth century. Until the 1890s, most mushroom recipes were for ketchups, sauces, and pickles, with occasional stewed mushooms or French-influenced dishes named "champignons." Few Americans included mushrooms in kitchen gardens, which was undertandable given Hannah Glasse's rare and unappetizing instructions for mushroom cultivation...mushroom gathering was fraught with danger, for no reliable American guides distinguished between gustatory pleasure and peril. Typical is The Kentucky Housewife (1839) by Lettice Bryan, which simply warns the cook to "be careful to select the esculent mushrooms, as some of them are very poisonous." Mushroom cultivation began in seventeeth-century France...The techniques were perfected in the 1870s and spread abroad, just as French cookery became fashionable in America. By the 1890s, a veritable fungus frenzy was sweeping America, bot as a fad food and as a scientific curiousity. Mushrooming clubs, were forager swapped tips, spring up quickly. Meticulously illustrated literature educated amateurs and professionals in identifying and cooking mushrooms...The first professional information on mushroom cultivation in America was disseminated on a large scale in the 1890s, mainly through the efforts of William Falconer."

(Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, Andrew F. Smith, editor [Oxford University Press:New York] 2007 (p. 396-7))

In http://www.foodtimeline.org/ adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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