Esculent. Cordier.
P. badia is frequent on bare ground, along wood roads, etc. In the West Virginia mountains it occurs where there have been brush fires. It is a meaty plant, without much flavor. It must be cut fine and slowly cooked if stewed, or can be quickly fried in a hot buttered pan. It has more flavor fried crisp than stewed.
P. cochlea´ta—spiral. Sessile, cespitose, variously contorted and plicate, fleshy, brittle, disk umber-brown, externally paler and pruinose, sometimes altogether paler and leather-color or pale dingy-ochraceous, 2–3.2 in. diameter; when solitary or almost so, at first globose, then expanding with the margin involute, finally spreading and irregularly plicate; excipulum spongy and cavernous, due to the loose weft formed by interlacing, hyaline, thin-walled, flaccid, septate hyphæ, cortex compact, running out into irregular groups of cells that form the scurfy exterior; asci cylindrical, apex slightly truncate, 8-spored. Spores obliquely 1-seriate, hyaline, continuous, smooth, usually 2-guttulate, 16–18×7–8µ; paraphyses slender, septate; tip slightly clavate, often curved and sometimes branched.
The entire substance is brittle and rather watery, and usually assumes a yellowish tint when bruised. Smell and taste almost none.
Sometimes the ascophores are closely crowded, hence irregular and much contorted, and resembling a foliaceous Tremella or a small specimen of Sparassis crispa. Massee.
New York. Ground in woods. Helderberg mountains and Greenbush. June. Peck, Rep. 23; Alabama, Peters, Ala. Bull. No. 80; North Carolina, Curtis; Massachusetts, Frost; Ohio, Lloyd, Rep. 4.
This species is quite insipid and somewhat leathery, but Mr. Berkeley has seen it offered for sale under the name of Morell. Badham.
Esculent. Cordier, Cooke.
P. lepori´na Batsch.—lepus, a hare. Cup 1–3 in. high, 1–3 in. broad, gregarious, often cespitose; margin involute, divided to the base on one side; disk even or rarely wrinkled, a shade darker than the exterior; paraphyses slender, hardly thickened at the summits, but almost invariably crooked. This fine species grows as large as O. onotica at times, but is not so brightly colored, being throughout of a sober tan-color, resembling common wash leather used for cleaning plate. Phillips.
Asci cylindrical, 8-spored. Spores obliquely uniseriate, hyaline, smooth, continuous, 1–2 guttulate, elliptical, 12–15×7–8µ; paraphyses filiform, septate, apex slightly swollen, and usually strongly curved.