But on to the serious business of actually eating the delicious, safe morsels. In cooking, mushrooms have the power to gently excite, beautifully display, and brazenly take center stage. Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking cites, "...fungi have an abnormally high content of glutamic acid, which makes them a natural version of monosodium glutamate." Arrigo Cipriani of Harry's Bar says, "At Harry's Bar we use lots of mushrooms in our cooking, especially to give a secret taste to many sauces -- and now I've given away the secret." Thanks, we'll use it.

In most urban produce markets, a few varieties can be found: shitake, a deep brown generally flat-topped mushroom with a skinny stem; cremini, stout roundish, more brown than white; portobello, the huge white-brown mushroom whose cap can be cooked and eaten in place of a steak! (also makes a great sofa for a mouse); oyster, a lovely bouquet of pale white or yellow mushroom petals; wood's ear, a slippery brown, skin-like sheath of a mushroom; and the easy to find cultivated white mushroom and smaller button mushroom. You can also find bags of the dried porcini -- expensive, but each little bag can be used for two or three recipes as "a secret taste." When mixed with other mushrooms, say, the cultivated white, the porcini actually raises their taste volume (the MSG effect, I guess). Feel free to mix and match. Mushrooms are so accommodating.