If you do an image search for ‘world’s biggest mushroom’ you come up with a lot of pictures that look like fakes, though obviously not all.
This one seems real enough and the feet belong to Gina Gershon – helluva gal!
Mushrooms have been on my mind since I bought this substantial, though hardly record-breaking, mushroom in the Co-op in Manningtree. It’s a locally grown Portobello mushroom from Suffolk, and record-breaking or not I do believe it’s the biggest mushroom I’ve ever used in cooking.
But we need to go back before this, when I saw and bought this packet of mushroom sauce mix in the Co-op:
It’s Polish-ish (in fact made by Nestle) and contains, in powered form, four kinds of mushroom: boletus, champignon (which, essentially monoglot as I am) I thought was just the French word for all mushrooms but maybe not), suillus, and xerocomus. Xerocomus looks like this (not the world's biggest):
I did wonder whether adding mushrooms to a mushroom sauce was a mistake – and on balance I think it was. I should have added chestnuts or sprouts or at the very least lemon juice, but we live and learn.
Here’s John Cage doing stuff with mushrooms (note the lemon):
