Mushrooms

Appears in
top 1000La Varenne Pratique
La Varenne Pratique

By Anne Willan

Published 1989

  • About

The world over, mushrooms excite passionate devotion. It is said that while on his deathbed, King Louis XIII strung the season’s first morels for drying, and in nineteenth-century Japan, the Empress-Dowager journeyed for hours to the pine woods in search of matsutake. In many central European countries, wild mushroom hunting has been a national pastime, and often a financial necessity, for centuries.

The first breakthrough in mushroom cultivation came in the seventeenth century in France, but it took much experiment before scientists at the Pasteur Institute managed to germinate spores and produce sterilized mushroom spawn in the 1890s. Even today many farmers ban visitors from the beds where the pasteurized compost has been planted with mushroom mycelium under carefully controlled conditions.