Species flashcards

Description

Cap: Convex, then flat, rarely funnel-shaped, 7-14 cm, but can be much larger. Thick-fleshed. Its margin is slightly infolded, rolled in when young. Color grayish, mouse-gray, brownish-gray. On young mushrooms, a powdery white coating and often a circumferential powdery pattern are visible. A more slender, thinner-capped, funneling variety also occurs locally.

Gills: Easily separable from the cap. Color yellowish-white, pale yellowish. Spore print white.

Stem: Thick, rigid, solid, elongated, slightly tapering upwards, 4-12 cm long, 1-4 cm thick. Color pale gray, whitish, downy at the base, surface fibrous, striated.

Flesh: White, firm, fibrous in the stem, tearing into strands. Smell and taste: Strikingly strong, pleasant, very characteristically spicy smell, slightly sweet, sourish taste. If you know its smell, you can recognize it by that alone.

Spore: Whitish-cream; 6-7.5 x 3.5-4.5 µm; elliptical, smooth.

Occurrence: On soils of deciduous and coniferous forests, mostly only on thick leaf litter, in autumn, until snowfall. Frost-resistant. Appears singly, but mostly in groups or fairy rings. One of the country's largest.

Edibility: Good, edible, crunchy-fleshed mushroom. Suitable for sauce, soup, stew. Its smell is even more noticeable during cooking. Due to its strong aroma, some people do not like to eat it, while others like it precisely for that reason. If the strong smell bothers you, consume it after scalding. Best mixed with other mushroom species, as a flavoring for meat or mushroom sauce. Dries well and beautifully. Good for mushroom powder. Older specimens may harm overly sensitive individuals.

Confusion: Quite similar to the poisonous frosty funnel, especially in late autumn. However, its cap and gills are whitish, its cap is silvery, silky at the margin, and its stem is often curved. Can be confused with the poisonous entoloma, but its gills are not even slightly decurrent, and on mature mushrooms they turn pinkish, flesh-colored. Very similar, and therefore easily confused with the equally edible clustered domecap, but its gills are rather white, and the mushroom appears strikingly in groups. It can also be similar to the late autumn faded wood blewit, but on it we still find a lilac shade somewhere, and its relative, the good-smelling and good-tasting, rarer flowery blewit, which, besides its smell, is characterized by the whole mushroom being uniformly pale brownish.

Note: If you are not sensitive to this mushroom, but are bothered by its strong, aromatic smell, scald it before use. Clitocybe means: crooked head, nebularis comes from the Latin noun nebula - foggy, cloudy. The meaning refers to the color of the cap, which has a foggy or smoky appearance.

Species description: In 1789, Johann Georg Karl Batsch named it Agaricus nebularis. In 1871, it was transferred to the Clitocybe genus by the famous German mycologist Paul Kummer, who renamed it Clitocybe nebularis. It has been reclassified into several other genera, but today Kummer's proposed classification is definitively accepted.

Taxonomy

1. PhylumBasidiomycota
2. ClassAgaricomycetes
3. OrderAgaricales
4. FamilyTricholomataceae
5. GenusClitocybe

• Species: nebularis
• Described by: (Batsch) P. Kumm.
• Hungarian name: szürke tölcsérgomba
• Lifestyle: soil saprotroph
• Edibility: edible