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Mushrooms have been a delicacy for 4600 years, dating back to Egyptian times. Mushrooms were depicted in hieroglyphic drawings and so delighted the pharaohs that the food was reserved for royal taste buds and no commoner could enjoy the edible fungi.
France began formal cultivation of mushrooms in the 1870s although some say that Louis XIV set up the first cultivated mushrooms in darkened caves near Paris. The English soon adopted the French techniques to propagate safely ingested mushrooms. The American mushroom industry sprouted in the 1890s and today the United States ranks as the world's largest producer of mushrooms, of which there are some 38,000 varieties.
This is the sort of information that can be gleaned in the Mushroom Museum, the only museum that fully explains the history, lore, and mystique of mushrooms. Pennsylvania mushroom growers harvest 46 percent of the American mushroom crop, more than any other state. Most of these mushrooms are grown in dark, aromatic mushroom houses in the rolling countryside near the small town of Kennett Square, 'The World's Mushroom Capital.' Kennett Square is also the home of the Mushroom Museum, a large room in a small, one-story building along Route 1.
The mushroom is the fruit of a fungus plant with two parts - the cap and the stem. A diorama inside the Mushroom Museum depicts all the stages of raising mushrooms in windowless houses - mushrooms do not need light to grow - where workers navigate their way past long growing tables with miner's helmets.
The mushrooms grow from microscopic spores, not seed. A mature mushroom will release about 16 billion spore which must be collected in a sterile laboratory. A mushroom contains no chlorophyll and must obtain nutrients from the organic matter in its growing medium. The compost that nurtures young mushrooms is a mixture of corn cobs, straw, seed hulls and manure.
After two to three weeks lacy white filaments emerge which are known as mycelium. A layer of pasteurized peat moss is laid on top of the fledgling mushrooms and the controls are set for constant humidity and temperature. In 17 to 25 days the mushrooms fruit and are pulled from the rich soil with a trained twist. The size of the mushroom does not matter at maturation as a tiny button and voluptuous large cap can both be equally ripe.
In addition to the illustrative dioramas a ten-minute film on the mushroom industry shows the evolvement of the business from tiny farms to the environment of large scientific mushroom operations. In the back of the museum you can see real growing mushrooms in all stages of development.
The adjacent gift shop features all sorts of mushroom related items and, of course, mushrooms. Mushrooms that are dried. Mushrooms that are pickled. Mushrooms that are marinated. Mushrooms that are refrigerated. If you can not make up your mind on which of the different varieties of mushrooms to take home, there are sampler packs.
In early September the town of Kennett Square stages a Mushroom Festival which features farm tours to see all aspects of mushroom growing from the preparation of fertilizer to the harvesting of the tasty white fungi. After a day of sampling different varieties of mushrooms the nation's best mushroom cooks square off in the National Mushroom Cook-off.
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