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Elio Schaechter’s In the Company of Mushrooms (Harvard University Press,
£16.50/$24.95, ISBN 0 674 44554 6) is a delight from start to
finish, a truly splendid account of an obsession. It’s everything about
mushrooms: their extraordinary biology, history, appearance, flavours, folklore,
cuisine, gathering and more. A passionate work, admits Schaechter. Laced with
stories and arcane knowledge (did you know that truffle-hunting pigs are all
sows, chasing a sex hormone the fungus secretes?), this is a dream of a
book.