Went for a nice drizzly walk through our local wood in the early evening. I sold it to OH, who drove us, as a brilliantly therapeutic intervention to help his sore back but really, I was equally keen on finding some edible mushrooms, esp. the summer bolete, boletes being the only mushrooms I feel confident identifying. As soon as I entered the wood, I did spot a mushroom half-submerged under a conifer and dug it out. It was perfectly shaped and textured like a boiled egg on a thin buried stalk. When I cut it in two, it was clear that this was an immature specimen and not one I recognised so I left it there for the animals. There were no more mushrooms anywhere in that wood, which despite the drizzle felt tinder-dry in places.
When I got home, I discovered what my mushroom was -- in its young, ovoid shape, it's commonly referred to as a Witch's Egg. Its Latin name for the fully-grown version is Phallus Impudicus, or shameless phallus or, in plain Anglo-Saxon, a stinkhorn, or Stinkmorchel in German. There's something both disturbing and hilarious about the fact that the
only mushroom that I find in the entire wood should be some
gender-ambivalent growth once used by witches.
Anyway, I should have brought the Witch's Egg home because the centre is apparently a delicacy in France and Germany! There's an interesting mode of preparing the egg from this blog, which also has a great name:"Personal Fermentations" Eating a Witch's Egg
Unfortunately, the post seems to be the only one on the blog so I trust that the writer, having ingested this mushroom, is still hale and hearty...
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