This film on the research and mysteries of the mushroom kingdom, both above ground and below, is not a yawnful, but there are moments when you feel you have stumbled into a TED talk, complete with a rapturous audience applauding the speaker. I wondered about this myself and with a bit of reading found out that segments of the film’s main player, as well as his TED talks, certainly abound. Brie Larson supplies a breathy voiceover as the mycelium persona. Despite such distractions, the photography and its orchestral coordination generally sweeps you along. So there is much to enjoy in this documentary that cannot quite separate itself from the sales pitch lobbed by the owner of this website.
This is not a film on how to discern edible mushrooms for that Italian or French recipe you have always wanted to try, but it tries to do just about everything else. It
Even that was a laborious process to produce only slightly larger amounts of the antibiotic. It took the entrance of England into World War II, with its desperate need for easily sourced large stocks of the penicillin spore, that Dr. Florey went to the US for help. A lab in Peoria, Illinois, found the miracle in a molding cantaloupe, which produced the penicillin spore at seven times the rate of the experiments in the UK. Pfizer was one of the first producers of massive amounts of penicillin from the cantaloupe discovery.
I was a beneficiary as a child of this “newfangled drug” as my pediatrician called it. I had suffered from a severe bacterial infection and was bedridden for weeks with a high fever, but with a steady administration of penicillin, the infection receded. I spent many hours comfortably in bed recuperating, and enjoyed listening repeatedly to such new hits as “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window on my father’s radio
Psilocybins have a different scientific research trail and trial, as revealed in Fantastic Fungi. Reading through the very trusty Wikipedia articles, these hallucogenic mushrooms have been ingested by humans for thousands of years with predictably happy results. There has been research on their effects for centuries. Interestingly, research in the US was inhibited by criminalizing their use along with other drugs in the 1960s, and one can easily divine the political reasons why. This ban has been rescinded and research is now once again trying to evaluate its pharmacological use, which this film describes.
While I am too nervous to learn about foraging some of the above-the-earth examples of the mycelium kingdom, I do love cooking with them. This fall, farm markets that are in my area of the DMV are filled with mushrooms, and I hope they are in your area too. Champignons A La Grecque (greek style mushrooms) is one of my favorite ways to present some of the more commonly available varieties. It’s a classic little dish often found on platters of hors d’oeuvres variés in French bistros. This particular recipe is from the editors of Marmiton.org, a terrific French food website, similar to our Epicurious. I used to make this and a few other dishes like carrot salad, assorted olives, pickled onions, a cheese spread, and sort of a Frenchified version of Italian caponata. You just serve a tray of them in little dishes, and everyone just helps themselves. That, with some decent bread, was a great introduction to just about any meal. I need to reintroduce this very retro French classic again in my dotage. A theory is that A La Grecque was a style for treating vegetables that came from Greek refugees fleeing the Ottoman Empire and settled in France.
After owning one of the best cooking stores in the US for 47 years, Nancy Pollard writes a blog about food in all its aspects – recipes, film, books, travel, superior sources and food related issues.
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Nce post, Nancy. My fav recipe of 2020 was Amanda Hesser’s Rigatoni with White Bolognese, which I had been eyeing for years. It’s super especially with some excellent rigatoni. I’m thinking Pasta Setaro. The mushrooms are reconstituted porcini, but result in a bowlful of bliss. The recipe is in Cooking for Mr. Latte, in NYTimes Cooking, and on FOOD52.