Mushroom Books

A collection of French wild mushroom recipes by British cooking writer Jane Grigson. This book is an excellent source of recipes and inspiration for the use of wild mushrooms, for chefs and experienced home cooks alike. The book has over 200 recipes for wild and domesticated mushrooms of all kinds, both as a main part of the dish and as an accompaniment to meat, fish, and fowl. Particularly useful is a section at the beginning covering some 20 species of mushrooms, describing the unique culinary properties of each and listing the recipes that would suit them best. I particularly like the fact that this book covers not only the "usual suspects", that is, cultivated agaricus, porcini, chanterelles, morels, truffles, etc, but also covers less well-known wild mushrooms like fairy-ring mushrooms, blewitts, grisettes, russulas, etc.

The recipes in "The Mushroom Feast" bear the unmistakable stamp of pre-nouvelle French haute-cuisine (though the book also has a whole chapter of Asian-inspired recipes as well). This has its good and bad sides - good in the sense that the mushrooms are used in in the context of tasty "gourmet" European cooking that I find does justice to the intense flavor of wild mushrooms, but not so good in the sense that it often calls for sauces that are richer in butter, cream, and roux than they need to be. However, with a basic knowledge of sauce-making technique, one can easily turn these into simple reduction sauces that don't overpower the rest of the ingredients.

Some of the editorial reviews mention that this book is a useful guide to distinguish edible and poisonous mushrooms. This book is not, in fact, useful as a field guide and inexperienced persons who go out and gather mushrooms for the table using this book as their only guide do so at their peril! If you are going to be cooking with the mushrooms in this book, one first needs to get some experience in identification of wild mushrooms, or stick with the wild mushrooms you can buy from your local gourmet grocery or farmers' market.

All in all, this is a book that belongs on the shelf of anybody who likes to cook with wild mushrooms.

Loved this book! It is full of beautiful illustrations and interesting facts about mushrooms, interwoven with a story of a family going into the mysterious woods searching for mushrooms. The little girl stomps on puffballs and brown spore dust bursts out. The little boy pulls up a large gray mushroom and sees threads of fungus under a pile of dead leaves. The family walks home under the moonlight. There are full page illustrations of the woods in autumn, and smaller drawings of various mushrooms, very beautifully done.

Lovers of the hard-boiled genre of crime fiction have something to cherish here. Steve Holland crafts an amazing overview of the British crime paperback as published in the days after World War II. A copy of this book belongs on the shelf with PAPERBACKS U.S.A.

Gorgeous in a quiet way. The friendship formed between the solitary man and his one true friend: the mole, feels sacred and crucial and the stuff of what it means to be someone's home.
An unusual and lovely book.

John Morrow:
David Cole, the author of this novel, lives in the beautiful state of Tasmania, where he lectures in Literacy and English Education at the University of Tasmania. He bases his writing on life experiences and his travels throughout the world.

The author's obvious knowledge of South America formed the basis of this novel which is set in Colombia. Not only is this story about love and desire but it transports the reader into the romantic and passionate world where rhythms of South American music beats wildly.

Music such as the salsa, reggae and mambo has seen the beginnings of many a love story, I would hazard to guess. There is something steamy and passionate about whirling bodies, long looks and swinging hips that certainly cause the blood to stir, even in a man who is referred to by his wife as `tradeinable'.

Panaiota is a flirty and sexy young woman who has beguiled the young man Sebastian. Meanwhile, a young European man is about to meet his destiny when he falls under her spell as well.

As the story develops, you soon become caught up in the myriad of rich characters described by the person telling the story, the young man who falls under not only Panaiota's spell, but the spell of Colombia as well.

This novel is a sensuous one and I would probably not recommend it to my dear old granny or my mother-in-law as a `must read' novel. They would probably become a little shocked at the sexual undertones in the novel.

However, if you, like myself, approach every novel with an open mind, you may find this novel extremely entertaining.

This novel also provides many insights into the daily life, countryside and lifestyles of the Colombian people...warts and all. More than any of the content, this was what made this novel particularly interesting for me.

"Hot Colombian nights, hot South American music and some hot characters star in this novel about love and relationships in Colombia".

CA Cranston:
Like Alice Through the Looking Glass, this novel gets curiouser and curiouser. Is this novel about a young woman's journey from hell into a healing, alternative life-style? Or is she to be read as the embodiment of deeply embedded social practices, imprisoned by the constructions that others write upon her? This, Cole's first novel, is post-modern playfulness set against the background of contemporary Colombia and the legacy of colonisation: Columbian, Indian, Indonesian, political and spiritual. His title `A Mushroom of Glass' itself engages in textual colonizing: the literary portal that allows Lewis Carroll's Alice to cross Through the Looking Glass into paradoxical situations and inverse logic are in Cole's novel further complicated by the inclusion of shamanic portals (facilitated by the guru-figure Shean) along with the computer portals of the technological age which ensnare the central character, Panaiota, in a Q&A blueprint for dystopia.

The first half of the novel explores the external realities of the Colombian political situation specifically through speech-action pastiche filtered through the daily activities of Panaiota, a privileged young female lawyer--the glue in novel's spine. But the nineteenth-century literary conventions that haunt about the novel (the narrator's collusion with the reader; his reference to `our heroine'; the promise of romance and exoticism) evolve textually into post-modernity subjectivity in the second half of the novel. Here Panaiota comes unglued: here the fragmentary quality of glass provides the motif for exploring multiple perspectives, while the hallucinogenic property associated with mushrooms provides, metaphorically, the logic driving subjective exploration. Dream becomes the meta-narrative; dead philosophers argue absolute truths; unpublished writers defend their creativity to the deaf ears of the publishers.

The manipulating writer character/narrator, Gregory, though in love with his heroine, is no White Knight; and whereas Lewis Carroll's Alice tells the White Knight `I don't want to be anybody's prisoner. I want to be a Queen', Gregory's heroine is imprisoned by social militants; Panaiota is transformed into the body politic, she becomes a writerly construct for national psychological distress and ancestral shame of Spanish colonization and Colombian oppression. Alice and the White Knight leave happily, together. Gregory, however, abandons his character to powerlessness and subservience. Perhaps the ending (Panaiota, earth-mother figure, wife number three, in Shean's shamanistic community) is to be read as socially positive, or perhaps it is to be read as a failure of the postmodern social project in which gender and class is integrated and replaces the master narrative.

The book is full with very beautiful color pictures, about the Agaricus diseases and pests. This book is very helpful for mushroom growers, teachers and scientist too, if they are work with fungi.

As a lover of mushrooms and the out doors, i just had to have this book.
My friends and family spend many hours hiking in the woods Having this book as a sort of reference guide to take along,has made our hikes more interesting and productive.
The photos and detailed descriptions of the mushrooms are quite helpful when trying to identify an edible species.

This is one of the most amazingly creative stories I have read in a long time. The author really draws in his audience with the development of his characters. He uses stunning descriptions to really make you feel the strange and sometimes familiar setting in this story. The story line is highly creative and fantastic while still staying down to earth. There is a character for every person to relate to in this book that just absolutely blew my mind.

This is such an incredible (and true!) spy-story. The writing is sharp, and keeps you turning the page. I usually don't read non-fiction narratives, but I loved this book. It is such a great story, and it is so well written, that you can't do anything but be caught up in this tale.

I bought Phillips' pioneering Mushrooms and Other Fungi of Great Britain and Europe (A Pan Original) when it came out in the early 1980s for identifying British fungi. At the time it was revolutionary in the use of photographs that allowed the author to depict mushrooms much more accurately than the paintings of earlier guides. Until recently, it was still one of the top field guides to this region (also check Courtecuisse & Duhem's Mushrooms and Toadstools of Britain and Europe (Collins Field Guide) and Jordan's The Encyclopedia of Fungi of Britain and Europe: Indentifies 1,000 Species With Color Photographs). I still use this volume a lot for identifying American fungi, both in the tropics and northward. Although I have over 200 field guides of different sorts on my shelves this remains one of my all time favourites.

This current book, Mushrooms (ISBN 0330442376), supersedes the older Phillips guide. It follows the format of the original book quite closely, but is now slightly smaller to make it more of a field guide - about the same size as Skinner's Colour Identification Guide to Moths of the British Isles and, although still won't fit into a pocket, it is much more manageable than the older A4-sized book. There are 1,250 photographs, all of the excellent quality one associates with the author. Some 200 extra species are treated. Taxonomy and text has been brought up to date and into line with the standard taxonomy and nomenclature of lists published by the British Mycological Society.

If you're interested in fungi, don't hesitate - this book must be on your shelves. When you consider how much work went into this project, this represents tremendous value for money.

Chris Sharpe, 8 September 2006. ISBN: 0330442376