Our Edible Toadstools and Mushrooms and How to Distinguish Them / A Selection of Thirty Native Food Varieties Easily Recognizable by their Marked Individualities, with Simple Rules for the Identification of Poisonous Species

by W. Hamilton Gibson

ROUGH-STEMMED BOLETUS

Boletus scaber

This is a very common mushroom in our woods all through the summer and autumn, in reasonably moist weather. It is figured in Plate 21. The cap of an average specimen expands four inches or more, is of a brown or brownish buff color, and viscid when moist. The pore-surface is dingy white, the tube orifices being quite minute and round—not so conspicuously angular or honey-combed as in other species—and with occasional reddish stains, presumably a deposit from the floating spores, which are tawny reddish. The flesh is dirty white, the stem solid, contracting upwards, and rough with fibrous brownish scaly points—whence the name "scaber"—often arranged somewhat in vertical lines. Epicures fail to agree as to the esculent qualities of this mushroom. It is certainly inferior to the edulis.