The flesh of the pileus is not compact at the disk and abruptly thin at the circumference, but equally attenuated toward the margin. The flesh of the stem is white. The gills never turn bluish-gray. Taste mild. Stevenson.
Spores pip-shaped, 9×7µ Cooke.
A very common and prolific species in West Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina. McIlvaine.
Pushing from the earth in great clusters it raises the mat of leaves above it into hut-like mounds through which it seldom bursts. Yet side openings to its huts show its coziness, and reveal the ground thickly dusted with its spores. Detecting these mounds is part of the woodcraft of a toad-stool hunter.
Where clusters are not dense, or the fungus is solitary, the stem is frequently swollen at the base, even bulbous.
Both caps and stems are edible, but the stems are not equal to the caps. It is a valuable food species, because of its lateness and quantity. It is not of best quality.
C. tur´malis Fr.—turma, a troop. (Plate [LXXXII], fig. 4, p. 306.) Pileus yellow-tan, most frequently darker at the disk, not changeable, compact, convex then plane, very obtuse, even, smooth (sometimes obsoletely piloso-virgate), when young veiled with pruinate but very fugacious villous down, soon naked, viscid. Flesh white. Stem sometimes 3 in., sometimes 6 in. long, 1 in. thick, solid, very hard, rigid, cylindrical, here and there attenuated at the base, shining white when dry, when young sheathed with a white woolly veil, naked when full grown. Cortina entirely fibrillose, superior and persistent in the form of a ring, at length ferruginous with the spores. Gills variously adnexed, rounded or emarginate, even decurrent with a tooth, crowded, serrated, white then clay-color. Fries.
I find it edible and of great value, being plentiful in pine woods, Maryland. I have collected a bushel in less than an hour in October. Under pine needles forming mounds. Taylor.
The localities and the habit of C. turmalis are very like that of C. sebaceus. The leaf mat broods the clusters.
C. turmalis is on a par with C. sebaceus. Personally I prefer the latter.