BRICK-TOP
That man was not only an item in the reckoning when the world was made, but that his attributes were anticipated too, is everywhere attested by the way nature makes use of his wreckage. She provides bountifully for his comfort, and, not content with this, she takes his refuse, his waste, what he has bungled and spoiled, and out of it fashions some of her rarest, daintiest delicacies. She gathers up his chips and cobs, his stubble and stumps,—the crumbs which fall from his table,—and brings them back to him as the perfection of her culinary art.
So, at least, any one with an imagination and a cultivated taste will say after he has eaten that October titbit, the brick-top mushroom.
The eating of mushrooms is a comparatively unappreciated privilege in our country. The taste is growing rapidly; but we have such an abundance of more likely stuff to live upon that the people have wisely abstained from a fungus diet. All things considered, it is a legitimate and wholesome horror, this wide-spread horror of toadstools. The woods, the wild fields, and the shaded roadsides gleam all through July and August with that pale, pretty "spring mushroom," the deadly Agaricus (Amanita) vernus; yet how seldom we hear of even a child being poisoned by eating it! Surely it seems as if our fear of toadstools, like our hatred for snakes, has become an instinct. I have never known a mushroom enthusiast who had not first to conquer an almost mortal dread and to coax his backward courage and appetite by the gentlest doses. And this is well. An appetite for mushrooms is not wholly to be commended. Strangely enough, it is not the novice only who happens to suffer: the professional, the addicted eater, not infrequently falls a victim.
The risk the beginner runs is mainly from ignorance of the species. In gathering anything one naturally picks the fairest and most perfect. Now among the mushrooms the most beautiful, the ideal shapes are pretty sure to be of the poisonous Amanita tribe, whose toxic breath throws any concentrated combination of arsenic, belladonna, and Paris green far into the shade. There is nothing morally wrong in the mushroom habit, yet for downright fatality it is eclipsed only by the opium habit and the suicidal taste for ballooning.
There are good people, nevertheless, who will eat mushrooms-toadstools even, if you please. The large cities have their mycological societies in spite of muscarine and phallin, as they have kennel clubs in spite of hydrophobia. Therefore, let us take the frontispiece of skull and crossbones, which Mr. Gibson thoughtfully placed in his poetic book on toadstools, for the centerpiece of our table, bring on the broiled brick-tops, and insist that, as for us, we know these to be the very ambrosia of the gods.
The development of a genuine enthusiasm for mushrooms—for anything, in fact—is worth the risk. Eating is not usually a stimulus to the imagination; but one cannot eat mushrooms in any other than an ecstatic frame of mind. If it chances to be your first meal of brick-tops (you come to the task with the latest antidote at hand), there is a stirring of the soul utterly impossible in the eating of a prosaic potato. You are on the verge all the time of discovery—of quail on toast, oysters, beefsteak, macaroni, caviar, or liver, according to your nationality, native fancy, and mycological intensity. The variety of meats, flavors, and wholesome nutrients found in mushrooms by the average mycologist beggars all the tales told by breakfast-food manufacturers. After listening to a warm mycologist one feels as Caleb felt at sight of the grapes and pomegranates: the children of Anak may be there, but this land of the mushroom is the land of milk and honey; let us go up at once and possess it.