You have to be careful though. For example you can get liver fluke from watercress if the stream flows through fields where sheep graze. And mushrooms scare a lot of people, for very good reasons. Some of them are absolutely lethal.
Here in France you can, in principle, take a fungus to your local pharmacy, and they will identify it for you and tell you if it is safe to eat. In principle. The last time I tried this the pharmacist turned to the only other customer in the shop and asked "Qu'en pensez-vous?" (What do you think?). Slightly defeated the purpose I decided, made my excuses and left.
That doesn't mean that I don't find and eat wild mushrooms. It just means that (a) I consult one (or more) of my four mushroom books and (b) I tend to go for things that are unmistakable.
Which leads me on to supper.
I was walking through the local woods when I found a beefsteak fungus. It is a bracket fungus and it looks like this:
It is called a beefsteak fungus because it looks remarkably like meat. When you cut it it even bleeds a bit. All this is rather disconcerting for a vegetarian, but anyway. I took one third of the fungus, thinking that I would in this manner not piss the fungus god too much, but on my way home I realised that, since the fungus is a parasite on the tree, I had probably displeased the tree god as well. Oh dear.
The photograph above is one I found on Google Images because I hadn't taken my camera with me. However the following is of the actual fungus and you can see (have a click) just how like meat it is.
That's a proper dinner plate, so you can see these things are big. I sliced it up ready to fry:
And fried it:
Delicious!
You will remember I like to go for fungi that are unmistakable? Well the clincher for beefsteak fungus is that it has a slight taste of lemon on the finish. Taste that, and you are home and dry.
In passing, another fungus that comes into the 'unmistakable' category is the unfortunately named "Trompette de la Mort" or Trumpet of Death. It is brown/grey/black and trumpet-shaped, so you can see the point. Still, I often feel that the poor thing could do with a better agent, since it too is delicious. Photo when Autumn arrives.
