Mexico and Mushrooms



Mexico and Mushrooms

By Anna Pleasonton

David and Pat Lewis and I joined a small group of enthusiasts on the 2001 Mexican Mushroom Tour in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Tlaxcala is a state, with its capital of the same name, about two hours east of Mexico City. It is very green , mountainous and fertile. The group came from all parts of the US, Canada, and Mexico. We were housed in an old hacienda, La Escondida, on the outskirts of the city of Huamantla, and transported by vans to the foray sites on the slopes of La Malinche volcano, at altitudes of 10,000 to 12,000 feet. We were accompanied by Mexican mycologists Dr. Arturo Estrada Torres, Alejando Kong Luz, and Adriana Montoya Esquivel.

The foray sites were beautiful; the first one, a short uphill hike from the highway, was an alpine meadow with an incredible profusion of flowers in all colors, sizes, and shapes. The others were pine forests, burn areas, and an impressive canyon. From everywhere, views of valleys, mountains, and volcanoes shrouded in clouds. We did extremely well with the species collected, and ate a large part of our bounty, namely morels, boletes, amanitas, collybias, ramarias, and hebelomas.

Adriana Montoya, who stayed with us for the duration of the foray, is an ethnomycologist, whose thesis consisted of a study of the mushrooms eaten traditionally by the natives (Indians and mestizos) living in various areas of the country. She divided the collections gathered at each foray into edibles and non-edibles, based on the knowledge acquired, and to our amazement, a majority of the amanitas collected – besides Amanita caesarea – were placed into the edible pan. Unfortunately, they were not labeled before they were cooked. A great many of the mushrooms which our books label as not edible are eaten in Mexico.

Most of our meals at the hacienda and on forays were prepared by the hotel and some of the tour organizers. On one special day, ladies from a local village prepared a feast of mushroom dishes common to their village: after a lunch of mushroom tamales, we dined on six different dishes, with amanitas, boletes, ramarias, colybias… plus local ingredients and spices. Amanita rubescens and Collybia dryophila were singled out for dishes because we found so many of them. We cannot report on the taste of the mushrooms themselves because of the added spices, but the dishes were excellent. The morels were served separately the next day (Dave, Pat and Anna contributed at least 20 of them to the pot).

Besides lectures by our accompanying mycologists, we were also privileged to hear a presentation on hallucinogenic mushrooms by Dr. Gaston Guzman, whom many of you met at a summer foray several years ago – he prefers to call them sacred mushrooms - and one on research on the use of mushrooms for medicinal purposes by Dr. Francisco de Diego Calonge, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens of Madrid, Spain. Later we also enjoyed their (unscheduled) singing. Finally, we were treated to a banquet incorporating mushrooms in all dishes except desert (orange chocolate cake) by a former famous New York chef, now a professor at the University of Puebla.

The tour organizers, Gundi Jeffrey and Erik Purre, Canadian expats living in Tlaxcala, made all the arrangements to provide us with a most satisfying experience. They solved our problems, faced emergencies, met us in Mexico City and delivered us back to whatever bus we needed to depart, and generally smoothed our way most efficiently and pleasantly. What impressed me most on this trip – besides the wonderful scenery and flora - was the recognition and use of the generations of experience among the local inhabitants to further scientific investigation.

Adapted from an article that appeared in The Boleten, the newsletter of the Gulf States Mycological Society.

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