mushroom mixture. Pull the saucepan over a
bright fire; boil, stirring carefully, for about five minutes. Serve on
squares of carefully toasted bread.

=Tomatoes Stuffed with Mushrooms.=--Wash perfectly smooth, solid
tomatoes; cut a slice from the stem end, and remove carefully the seeds
and core. To each tomato allow three good sized mushrooms; wash, dry,
chop them fine, and stuff them into the tomatoes; put a half saltspoon
of salt on the top of each and a dusting of pepper. Into a bowl put one
cup of soft bread crumbs; season it with a half teaspoonful of salt and
a dash of pepper; pour over a tablespoonful of melted butter; heap this
over the top of the tomato, forming a sort of pyramid, packing in the
mushrooms; stand the tomatoes in a baking pan and bake in a moderate
oven one hour. Serve at once, lifting them carefully to prevent
breaking.

Or, the mushrooms may be chopped fine, put with a tablespoonful of
butter into a saucepan and cooked for five minutes before they are
stuffed into the tomatoes; then the bread crumbs packed over the top,
and the whole baked for twenty minutes. Each recipe will give you a
different flavor.

FOOTNOTES:

[E] The recipes for Agaricus are intended for the several species of
this genus (Psalliota).

CHAPTER XXII.

CHEMISTRY AND TOXICOLOGY OF MUSHROOMS.

By J. F. CLARK.

Regarding the chemical composition of mushrooms, we have in the past
been limited largely to the work of European chemists. Recently,
however, some very careful analyses of American mushrooms have been
made. The results of these investigations, while in general accord with
the work already done in Europe, have emphasized the fact that mushrooms
are of very variable composition. That different species should vary
greatly was of course to be expected, but we now know that different
specimens of the same species grown under different conditions may be
markedly different in chemical composition. The chief factors causing
this variation are the composition, the moisture content, and the
temperature of the soil in which they grow, together with the maturity
of the plant. The temperature, humidity, and movement of the atmosphere
and other local conditions have a further influence on the amount of
water present.

The following table, showing the amounts of the more important
constituents in a number of edible American species, has been compiled
chiefly from a paper by L. B. Mendel (Amer. Jour. Phy. =1=: