Toadstools, mushrooms, fungi, edible and poisonous; one thousand American fungi / How to select and cook the edible; how to distinguish and avoid the poisonous, with full botanic descriptions. Toadstool poisons and their treatment, instructions to students, recipes for cooking, etc., etc.

by Charles McIlvaine; Robert K. Macadam

Like most of the hygrophanous Cortinarii, the taste is more or less that of rotten wood. The flavor is flat and undesirable.

C. furfurel´lus Pk. Pileus thin, convex, furfuraceous with minute squamules, hygrophanous, watery-tawny when moist, pale ochraceous when dry. Lamellæ broad, thick, distant, adnate or slightly emarginate, tawny-yellow, then cinnamon. Stem equal, peronate, colored like the pileus, with a slight annulus near the top. Spores subelliptical, minutely rough, 8–10×6µ.

Plant 1–2 in. high. Pileus 1–2 in. broad. Stem 2–4 lines thick.

Moist ground in open places. Gansevoort. August. Peck, 32d Rep. N.Y. State Bot.

Haddonfield, N.J., Mt. Gretna, Pa. McIlvaine.

Strong woody flavor—like rotten wood. Not poisonous, but not desirable.

Hygrocybe.

C. casta´neus Bull.—chestnut. Pileus fleshy, thin, campanulate or convex, then expanded, dark chestnut-color when moist, paler when dry. Lamellæ rather broad, violet-tinged, then cinnamon. Stipe fibrillose, stuffed or hollow, lilac tinged at the top, white below.

Height 2–3 in., breadth of pileus 1–2 in., stipe 3–4 lines thick.

Ground under spruce or balsam trees. Catskill mountains. October. Edible. Peck, 23d Rep. N.Y. State Bot.