Mushrooms in the Roman Kitchen
Cecilia Hosinsky Faringer
Petits Propos Culinaires September 30, 2026 DOI: 10.1558/ppc.29093 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
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| Key points | Argues that mushrooms were used as tinder, medicine, aphrodisiacs, and ritual-magical substances long before they were used as food, citing archaeological finds such as puffball remnants at a roughly 100,000-year-old German site and Fomes fomentarius tinder at late-Paleolithic and Mesolithic sites. It also documents ritual use of Psilocybe in ancient Central America, Borneo, and New Guinea, and of Amanita muscaria in Siberia. |
Abstract
ushrooms have been used in different ways, e.g. as tinder, medicine, aphrodisiacs or as a medium to get in contact with supernatural powers, since the very beginning of human history.The use of mushrooms as a source of food is probably more recent.Remnants of puffballs (Lycoperdon), still used in folk medicine, have been found in the 100,000 yearold archaeological site of Salzgitter-Levenstedt (Old Mousterien period, paleolithic) in Germany.Fomes fometarius for tinder has been found in sites of the Alleröd culture (Denmark and South Sweden) in late-paleolithic (9,000 years bc) and from mesolithic cultures, (7,000 bc) at Salzgitter-Levenstedt, Endingen, Hohen Viecheln, all in north Germany.The ritual-magical use of Psilocybe sp. is well known from ancient Central America, especially among the Maya, but was also practised in Borneo and New Guinea.The use of fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) for the same purpose is documented from Siberia.The first pictures of mushrooms were, as far as is known, made in Tassili N'Ajjer in Algeria between 7,000 and 3,500 years ago, in 1450 bc in Egypt (a wall painting in the grave of pharaoh Amenemhet of the twelfth dynasty), and on the Chukcha peninsula in ca.1,000 bc.From Greek and Roman times fungi appear in literature.Thus Theophrastes (480-406) relates the tragic death of a whole family in one day, mother, young daughter and two sons, by mushroom poisoning.It is believed that it was his own family, but it has not been proved.The Roman people were (and still are) great mushroom lovers, to the extent that they even grew themthe Greek sophist Athenaeus wrote a paper about the cultivation of mushrooms around 228 ad.