Listening this morning to Amanda Palmer reading The Mushroom Hunters on Radio 4 I was intrigued by the mention of twice cooked mushrooms.
Boil them once and theyre still poisonous. They need cooked a second time before they're safe to eat.
How could someone have discovered that?
Imagine some caveman, or woman, boiling a pot of mushrooms only to see the dinner guests dropping like flies when they'd eaten them.
'I know', the cook thinks, 'what these need is boiling again'.
Maybe there are no such mushrooms.
I think it was the Lapps who discovered the hallucinogenic properties of the fly agaric because they noticed that their reindeer were behaving strangely after grazing on them.
Most so called poisonous mushrooms are not nearly as harmful as supposed. But many are simply inedible unless you boil them well :-)