Stinking BrittlegillRussula foetens
Edible only after thorough cookingTraditionally collected in: Russia, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Sweden
Description
A large brittlegill with a cap of eight to twelve centimetres, up to fifteen in big specimens. It is spherical at first and then flat, ochre yellow to yellowish brown, and very sticky in wet weather. Once open, the cap margin is plainly striate, with radial grooves running in from the edge. The gills are cream and crowded and weep droplets in damp weather, leaving brown spots behind. The stem is white with brown blotches, six to twelve centimetres, and hollows out with age. The flesh is white, browns where cut, and is brittle: it crumbles like any brittlegill rather than bending.
Where it grows
Mycorrhizal with both broadleaved trees and conifers. It keeps to shady, damp ground: wet birch and aspen woods, hollows, the edges of forest ditches. It often fruits in large troops and returns to the same spot year after year. The season runs from July into October, longer than that of most brittlegills.
«Stinking Brittlegill — or something like it?»
If the description above leaves you unsure, do not guess from memory and do not compare by eye with a picture off the internet. Our photo identifier shows several likely candidates with percentages, and names the dangerous lookalikes if there are any — rather than one confident answer.
In detail
Season
Fruits from early July to mid October.
What to do with it
This species may not be picked (see «Caution» below), so storing and cooking do not belong here. If you find one: photograph it where it stands, do not cut or dig it up, and remember the spot for your own records — the mycelium fruits there year after year.
Take care
British and most western field guides treat this mushroom as inedible. Raw it is acrid and causes stomach upset, and old fruitbodies smell of rancid oil or fish. In Russia, eastern Europe and Scandinavia it is salted, but only after the skin is peeled off and the young unopened buttons are soaked in several changes of water for days and then boiled. Nothing on this page is a recommendation to eat it.
Nothing on this page is an expert opinion, and nothing here confirms that the mushroom you found is edible. Photo identification in this service is a probabilistic hint, not permission to pick or to eat.
Lookalikes
Poisonous: vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal cramps some hours after eating. Its English name says the important part before any text does, and so does its Russian one, which means "false valui".
A photograph cannot settle this pair. Young, both are a sticky yellowish-brown ball, and in damp weather the gills of both weep droplets. What decides it are two checks absent from any image: whether the flesh crumbles or bends, and the colour of the spore print. Size and the striate margin help only on opened fruitbodies, and it is the unopened button that gets picked.
Edible on the same terms as Stinking Brittlegill, which is to say only salted after long soaking. A mistake in this pair leads nowhere.
- ·In the wood there is next to nothing to go on: both are large, ochre, sticky, striate-margined and smell the same.
- ·What separates them reliably is a chemical test: the base of the stem of Least Stinking Brittlegill turns yellow with KOH, that of Stinking Brittlegill does not. This is a bench check, not a field one.
- ·Least Stinking Brittlegill averages smaller and paler, but the sizes overlap completely.
Edible on the same terms. There is no danger in this pair; the difference matters only for naming what you have.
- ·Smell: plainly of almonds or marzipan in Russula laurocerasi, of rancid oil in Stinking Brittlegill.
- ·The cap margin of Russula laurocerasi is striate even more strongly, with tubercled grooves.
- ·It grows more often under oak and beech, Stinking Brittlegill under birch and aspen.
Check whether this one is out near you
The foraging forecast changes daily — with rainfall, temperature and the phase of the flush, rather than «it ought to be the season».
Your comment
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Updated from the FungRadar species reference · not a specialist's determination