Aller aux Champignons

Of 2,000 species of mushrooms that grow in France, 39 are poisonous. This slight but real possibility of toxic consequence has little effect on the millions of Frenchmen who cannot resist aller aux champignons--tramping into the woods for mushrooms when the delicacies sprout, with particular abundance, during the first turning of the leaves. Last week, thanks to a wretchedly wet summer, the Gallic countryside was laden with a bumper crop--and some 45 persons were dead of mushroom poisoning. Countless others lay ill at home or in hospitals.

Blame for 95% of the victims was laid on an innocent-looking toadstool with a greenish cap known as Amanita phalloides,* whose tender meat can cause violent abdominal cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, liver damage, intense thirst, convulsions, delirium, and death in from five to ten days. Concerned, Paris officials dispatched special champignon sherlocks to inspect incoming truckloads of wild mushrooms at the central market, and the Pasteur Institute stepped up shipments of an antitoxin serum.

Endeavoring to explode old wives' tales about how to tell a poison mushroom (one wrong example: if it turns a piece of silver black), newspapers warned amateur mycologists to take their harvests to experts for inspection. The appeals for caution had their echo in distant Washington, where Eugene Batisse, French-born chef at Le Bistro, the U.S. capital's popular restaurant and New Frontier hangout, took his family on a tragic mushroom-picking expedition in Rock Creek Park, near their suburban Chevy Chase home. Afterward, Mme. Batisse fried the crop in oil and garlic and served it up at lunch for her husband, ten-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter; by next morning, all the family were in the hospital, and five days later the son died.

To reassure such regular clients as

Pierre Salinger and Ted Sorensen, Le Bistro Manager Camille Richaudeau last week hastened to emphasize that his place serves only safe, cultivated mushrooms bought from commercial sources. Does Chef Batisse ever bring in his own mushroom harvests for the restaurant's kitchen? "No, no, no--never!"

* And in West Germany, where similar mushroom madness has claimed at least seven lives, by the more formidable tag knollenbldtterpllz.

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