The milky mushroom (Calocybe indica) is a large, snow-white tropical mushroom and the major warm-climate cultivated fungus of India, prized for thriving in the heat that defeats the button mushroom and oyster mushroom. It has a thick, fleshy, milk-white stem and a smooth rounded cap that ripens from creamy white to a pale straw-buff, giving the whole mushroom the pure milky colour that names it. Firm, meaty and remarkably long-keeping for a fresh mushroom, with a mild, faintly sweet-earthy flavour, it is a staple of Indian home and restaurant cooking — sliced into dry-fried "mushroom pepper fry," folded into masala gravies and biryanis, and grown by smallholders across the hot lowlands of southern and eastern India.