With mushroomed dishes cease to strive;
Nor for that truffled crime inquire,
Which nails the hapless goose alive,
At Strasburg’s fire.
[77] Heberden wisely left it to his patients, except in acute cases of disease or when they were gluttons, “to eat what pleased them, finding that many apparently unfit substances” (which funguses are not) “agreed with the stomach merely because they were suitable to its feelings.” Why quote Abernethy?—but that good sense, backed by personal experience in such matters, are always worth quoting—who says, “Nothing hurts me that I eat with appetite and delight;” or Withers, unless for a like reason, who is “of opinion that the instinct of the palate, not misguided by preconceived opinion, may be satisfied, not only with impunity, but even with advantage.” It is the rule by which the brute creation is taught to shun its poison and to choose its food: to a considerable extent, it should be ours also.
[78] Roques, ‘Traité sur les Champignons.’
[79] Æschines.
[80] “Pratensibus optima fungis Natura est.”—Horace.
[81] Locality has a great effect upon almost all that we eat: our very mutton varies in different counties; compare the town-bred gutter-fed poultry of London with that of twenty miles around; fish vary, the tench out of different ponds are different; fruits vary with the soil; are potatoes everywhere the same?
[82] Persons have fancied themselves poisoned when they were not; indigestion produced by mushrooms is looked upon with fear and suspicion, and if a medical man be called in, the stomach-pump used, and relief obtained, nothing will persuade either patient or practitioner that this has not been a case of poisoning. “You have saved my life,” says the one. “I think you will not be persuaded to eat any more mushrooms for some time,” says the other: and so they part, each under the impression that he knows more about mushrooms than anybody else can tell him.