Toadstools, Mushrooms, Fungi, Edible and Poisonous; One Thousand American Fungihow to Select and Cook the Edible; How to Distinguish and Avoid the Poisonous, with Full Botanic Descriptions. Toadstool Poisons and Their Treatment, Instructions to Students, Recipes for Cooking, Etc., Etc.

In 1900, a scientist named Charles McIlvaine did something that would horrify modern IRBs and delight any armchair forager: he ate his way through a thousand American mushrooms to figure out which ones would kill him. This book is the remarkable result of two decades of self-experimentation in the West Virginia mountains, where McIlvaine personally tested every species he could find, documenting not just which mushrooms would nourish him but which would hospitalize or worse. The text alternates between rigorous botanic descriptions, practical guidance for distinguishing lookalikes, and surprisingly elegant recipes for preparing the edible varieties. What elevates this beyond a mere field guide is its spirit of adventure and its earnest desire to demystify fungal foraging at a time when Americans had virtually no reliable domestic resources. McIlvaine writes with the conviction of a man who literally bet his life on his observations, and his urgency is infectious. For modern readers, this remains an essential artifact of American foraging history, a window into what our ancestors knew about the fungal kingdom, and a reminder that the line between dinner and death can be thinner than a mushroom cap.