Mushrooms and edible fungi

This week it’s:

IN general, gardeners think of the word ‘fungus’ as being a problem. Take scab, mildew, wilt and blight – all of these are bad! These are parasitic fungi that live on live plants, and take nourishment from them, which slowly weakens them. But here I want to talk about saprophytic fungi, which live on dead plant material, so are not harmful to living plants. They include all the fruiting-bodied fungi we are familiar with in cooking: mushrooms, of course, with such evocative names as button, chestnut, shiitake, oyster, morel and chanterelle. Let’s take a look at some of the stories about these edible delights.

■ The caveat to anything I say here is that you should never eat a wild fungus if you are unsure what it is.