When I was a small child back on the farm, I heard folks talking about "mushroom eggs". We were often told to "make sure to get the egg" when we were ridding a garden of the mushrooms. Mostly, we were on the lookout for "Devil's Toadstools" or stinkhorns. Mom hated those things so if any started popping up in the gardens, she assigned the younger kids to the job of getting rid of them. As a kid, this was a bit confusing but, hey, I accepted that mushrooms were like chickens and they came from eggs. I knew that chickens, ducks, turkeys and geese all laid eggs so why couldn't mushrooms? Plus, we had proof! While grubbling around under the mulch to pull the toadstools, we were sure to find lots of the white, round "eggs".
Well, a long time has passed since then and I have not thought too much about mushroom eggs until a nephew made reference to them. It seems that it was his task to get the toadstools and their "eggs" from his grandmother's gardens. I related the story about my childhood task and he and I giggled over the ongoing "kid chore". After that, the mushroom eggs were promptly forgotten until today. Back behind the grape arbor, there was a perfect specimen of a mushroom with the "egg" still attached! No, this was not a stinkhorn but a mushroom that a squirrel had obviously upended. The egg being the part that is normally underground...the root, so to speak.
A thought came to me as I sat staring at the upended mushroom. Did other folks call these things "eggs" and were other kids given the chore of sifting through mulch to find and discard the eggs? Was this something that was strictly a family thing? Don't even try "Googling" it as all you will find are 163,000,000 (no lie) recipes for scrambled eggs with mushrooms and, honestly, that does not even sound too tasty to me unless you also throw in some onion, peppers and cheese.
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