Old Man of the Woods

The old man of the woods (Strobilomyces strobilaceus) is the shaggiest, most unmistakable of the cep's woodland cousins — a blackish-grey bolete draped in coarse, overlapping woolly scales that stand up from cap and stalk like the shingles of a fir cone or the whiskers of a grizzled old forester. It shares the porcini's family plan: a spongy layer of tubes rather than gills beneath the cap, whose pale grey pores open as a soft mass and, when pressed or cut, flush first pinkish-red and then slowly to sooty black — a startling two-stage bruise that, together with its ragged black shag, makes it one of the easiest wild mushrooms to name and one of the hardest to confuse with anything dangerous. A single, widely distributed species of the Northern-Hemisphere forest, it is a specialist forager's find rather than a market staple: uncommon, thin-fleshed and, at its best only when young, it darkens and softens with age into a wet grey mop. Its flavour is mild, earthy and mushroomy rather than grand, but its looks — and the theatre of that colour change — have long made it a prize of the autumn woods.