Notes:
The material depicted was used for identification in an amatoxin poisoning. The cook of the curry ate the curry at two successive meals only 2 hours apart. Hence, she received a very large dose of the toxin compared to the her daughter and son-in-law who only tasted the meal very tentatively. Nevertheless, the last I heard they were still being observed in the hospital three days after ingestion. The cook and collector was a non-English-speaking immigrant from the Punjab in India. She collected the mushrooms near a neighbor’s tennis court, where she had mushroomed without negative incident in the past. She prepared a mushroom curry which was dominated by pieces of what was then determined as A. bisporigera. The death of the cook is the second death attributed A. bisporigera poisoning in the eastern U.S. that I know of this year.

For the information of persons doing taxonomic analysis of cooked mushrooms: In this case the cooking was gentle enough so that the typical amanita-structure of the gills was preserved. No stem pieces were used in the dish. The typical acrophysalidic stem tissue of amanitas normally survives cooking well, but there were no pieces of stem available. An attempt to use KOH on a cooked piece of cap (washed thoroughly with tap water) failed because a spice in the curry produced a brilliant red reaction with KOH.

[admin – Sat Aug 14 02:00:34 +0000 2010]: Changed location name from ‘Franklin Township, Somerset Co., NJ’ to ‘Franklin Township, Somerset Co., New Jersey, USA’