At about age 24 I discovered that mushrooms are not all thick white umbrellas with pink gills underneath. We gathered and ate those from the pastures in late September and early October after a rain. My husband trusted only morels, ranking them along with heaven’s ambrosia, but I’d never tasted a morel.

Then Uncle Lawrence and Aunt Ethel came on a warm spring day to hunt “sponge” mushrooms -- morels. We drove to the river bottoms to look in places where people had been finding grocery bags full, but we found not one mushroom! Then, as we turned in our driveway, someone yelled, “Stop the car.” There, at the foot of the hill, was a cluster of the elusive morels. In 5 minutes we had picked enough to make a nice platter full for supper that night.

They were good, but I still sang the praises of the white umbrellas with pink underneath, the variety we now buy at the store. “Why don’t they propagate and sell morels?” I wondered, suspecting it’s because finding morels in the woods is such fun on a warm spring day after rain. The weather was just right for that about a week ago.

More than 1,000 varieties of mushrooms are edible. The saucer-size white umbrellas we picked on a sheep farm in Wales were delicious white umbrellas -- with pink gills like our small pasture ones. Joyce Lewis served a typical Welsh breakfast of bacon, eggs and two big broiled mushrooms.

In Michigan we learned to cut bright orange “~shelf” mushrooms from old standing trees. We’d slice them into long strips and fry them. G~reat flavor was there as it is when I fry snowy white slices of young puff balls. As they age, puff balls deteriorate, and if you kick them, green dust puffs out.

Long ago, people called field mushrooms “toad stools” to keep children from playing with the poison ones. The poisonous ones have a “death cup” surrounding the stem at ground level, as if to catch the rain, and their gills underneath are not pink. It’s best to ask an authority before eating a new kind. That was the case last week with our neighbor Therion Hinshaw.

Therion was in the woods looking for a heifer when he discovered a huge mushroom, an edible red morel weighing 91/2 pounds! Eight people enjoyed a mushroom supper on that one delicious plant! Hinshaw’s huge morel had a firm and meaty reddish brown top. The hollow white stem was about 5 inches in diameter and 10 inches tall, too tall to hide!

Woods mushrooms hide under dead leaves and are leaf color. They thrive on dead or decaying wood. Some say “under elm trees”~; others say “in old orchards.” In Michigan, bright orange mushrooms grew like thick shelves on old trees; we sliced and fried them.

The wine cellars at Hermann were converted into mushroom cellars during prohibition years because mushrooms grow well in that temperature and humidity. Some are grown in natural caves. Early Greeks and Romans enjoyed mushrooms as do people in Europe, South America and Australia. They’re almost 90 percent water but are enjoyed b~aked, stuffed, creamed, fried and raw. Mom taught me to saute them in a little butter, spoon them and their juice onto buttered toast, then pop them under the broiler for a few minutes. That’s ambrosia!

What difference does it make that the World Book says “mushrooms contain no more food value than a thin cabbage leaf”? Cabbage leaves are good food, too.