A richly illustrated guide to edible mushrooms by one of Europe's leading fungi experts

In this beautifully illustrated introductory guide, Jens Petersen shows how to successfully identify and forage for edible mushrooms, and then how to prepare them for the table to ensure a delicious culinary experience, even if you are a first-time collector.

Accessible and user-friendly, the book opens with a substantial introduction to fungi-what to look for, where to find them and how to collect and cook them. Other topics include edible and poisonous fungi, conserving mushrooms and other uses of fungi. The book then covers the most common major groups, including morels, wood cauliflower, polypores, boletes, tooth fungi, chantarelles, horn of plenty, brittlegills, milkcaps, agarics, puffballs and jelly fungi. For many of these groups, notable subkinds are given their own treatment. With practice, the book will enable you to identify mushrooms such as yellow chanterelles, blueing boletes with orange tube mouths, green brittlegills and milkcaps with orange milk.

With more than 400 stunning colour photographs and more than forty black-and-white illustrations, this book will enhance the experience of every mushroom forager and wild-table chef.

Jens H. Petersen is a mycologist, graphic designer and photographer. He taught mycology at Aarhus University in Denmark for more than twenty years and is the author of The Kingdom of Fungi and the coauthor of Fungi of Temperate Europe (both Princeton). Petersen cocreated the online identification tool MycoKey (www.mycokey.com).