Is this Mushroom wives tale for real?

Question

After going out and finding wild mushrooms, my mother in laws dad wanted her mom to cook them for him to eat. Her mom was afraid to cook them because she was afraid they might be poison. The dad said "When you put them on to boil, put a dime in with them" he said "If the dime changes color, then you know they are poison".

This may have been way back when dimes were made of a different material than they are made of now. How accurate is this information?

Answer 1

If I had a deathwish, I would take this as a serious scientific method.

Answer 2

If he's of Eastern European/Baltic heritage he may know what he's talking about.  But I wouldn't eat an unidentified mushroom just because a dime didn't change colour!  Get a book and identify what you've got before you eat it - and make sure you know the subtleties, some shrooms look very similar but one may be ok and the other deadly.

Oh yeah - and who would boil a mushroom anyway???

Answer 3

Whether for real or not, I would not risk any body's health by following something  like that.  

Answer 4

There is an old belief that rubbing a cut poisonous mushroom with a silver coin will turn the coin black or tarnish it in some way. Boiling the silver coin with mushrooms might have the same effect, or using sliced white onions. There is a belief that the toxic substances in the mushroom are released when cut or boiled.

I would consider this to be completely unreliable at best - it's best to be safe than sorry even if there was a chance it worked. I am not sure if it could ever work, it's bad judgement to assume all poisonous mushroom species will react in the same way to a silver coin. Carry a mushroom handbook with you that identifies what kind of mushrooms you are coming across. Be very careful and, if need be, pick only a few and take them to a botanist to make sure.

Frankly, stick to ones you can easily identify otherwise, and in reliable growing areas. Go with someone that has experience. And bring your handbook too.

Here is a great little snappy answer to your question from the Illinois Mycological Foundation, experts on mushroom if there were any, who know their mushrooms like the backs of their hands:

http://www.ilmyco.gen.chicago.il.us/TopT...

They dismiss the coin test as a myth, and use the most common poisonous mushroom (45% of all poisonings yearly) as proof - it passes all the "tests", like the silver spoon and silver coin test.

Answer 5

not accurate.

sorry!

Answer 6

never heard of that. just buy them from the store , it is safer.

Answer 7

Bad, bad, bad advice based on old superstition. There are many toxic mushrooms and they don't all have the same toxin, so it's impossible that a simple coin test would work for all of them.

Here in the San Francisco area, a dozen or so people die every year in mushroom hunting season. Amanita phalloides is the worst, as the only treatment is a liver transplant.