Recommendations of the Editorial team
Mushrooms are one of the most contradictory natural products that a person can put in their mouth. They have been valued as food since ancient times and feared and revered as intoxicants and vision carriers for thousands of years. In Egyptian depictions they are considered the “food of the gods”, in ancient Rome they were both a delicacy and poison, and the death cap mushroom made world history. In the Middle Ages they grew in legends about witch rings and the work of the devil – in monastery gardens they were used as a remedy for melancholy or inflammation.
With the discovery of psychoactive species such as Psilocybe mexicana, the mushroom once again became the focus of cultural debates in the 20th century. In the 1950s, ethnobotanists such as R. Gordon Wasson described Mazatec rituals in which “holy mushrooms” served as a sacrament. The counterculture of the sixties took up these practices and stylized the mushroom as a symbol of consciousness-expanding experience. Between Timothy Leary and hippie iconography, it became a projection surface for utopias. The research criminalized him.
At the same time, of course, the mushroom always remained a luxury item. Both in luxury (truffles) and in connection with the earth (Japanese matsutake ceremonies). Some even see the mushroom as a beacon of hope for an overwhelmed world: as a meat substitute, leather alternative and building material.
So: As a food it can be delicious and as a psychedelic it can shift worlds. Nobody wants it on the body in itchy areas (and anyone who talks about a mushroom cloud even has the end of the world in mind).
The illustrated book The Gourmand’s Mushroom: A Collection of Stories & Recipes (taschen) examines the cultural career of the fungus, with dishes ranging from mythology to toxicology to space travel. The complex-looking structures photographed sometimes make the mushroom appear like a work of art. Images and essays come from, among others, Hieronymus Bosch, Beatrix Potter and the CIA
It sounds like the mushroom topic is hard on the stomach, but that’s sometimes less due to the texts than the recipes that are collected here. Wild mushroom ravioli, anyone?
The Gourmand’s Mushroom: A Collection of Stories & Recipes
- Hardcover, 270 pages
- 40€
- ISBN 9783965635063
- English
