[1876]

'A Plain & Easy Account of British Fungi' is an improved 3rd edition of the book first published in the 1860s and, as the author himself says in the preface, it has been updated, both in terms of the text and of the botanical illustrations. While the book deals with the economic and esculent qualities of our native edible fungi, the text does broaden outwards to review what the Europeans were doing with some of the same species. Having a slightly more botanical slant to the text (but not overly so) Cooke also points out that his work cannot possibly touch on the nearly 4,000 species of fungi to be found in the British Isles. One interesting slant is the social one and there are numerous references to various edible wild mushrooms being sold in London's Covent Garden market, and which perhaps goes to show that the Victorians could be quite adventurous. Although there is passing mention of how to cook various species there are not the copious recipes as can be found in his 'British Edible Fungi' [1891].         The contents of the cased CD-ROM run like a website from the disc, so if you have a modern PC (or Mac) and a recent copy of a web browser you should be able to run the CDROM.

UK Price: 6.00 + £1.50 UK P&P.

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