An 185-word Chinese text from 1209 taught the world to farm shiitake
The oldest written guide to growing shiitake is a short passage in a Chinese county record compiled in 1209, under the Song dynasty. Copied and cited for centuries, it was adapted in 1796 into Japan's first book on the subject. Today this single mushroom accounts for about a quarter of all mushrooms grown worldwide.
Shiitake is Japanese for the mushroom of the shii tree, Castanopsis cuspidata, whose dead logs are its traditional growing medium. Its scientific name, Lentinula edodes, ends in the Latin word for edible. Miles Joseph Berkeley first described it in 1877 as an Agaricus, and over the next century it was shuffled through Cortinellus, Tricholoma, Lentinus and other genera before David Pegler settled it in Lentinula in 1976. In the wild it grows in clusters on rotting hardwood such as chestnut, oak, beech and mulberry in warm, damp parts of Southeast Asia.
He Zhan put the 1209 description, just 185 words long, into his local history of Longquan County. The Japanese horticulturist Satō Chūryō drew on it for his 1796 book. Japanese growers felled shii trees with axes and laid the logs beside trunks already sprouting shiitake so the spores would spread. Until 1982 the Japanese variety could be raised only in its traditional places by these old methods; a report that year on its budding and growth opened the way to commercial farming in the United States.
Cold weather produces the most prized grades. Dōnggū, winter mushroom, is sold as donko in Japan, and huāgū, flower mushroom, earns its name from the cracked, blossom-like pattern on its cap. Chinese cooks braise and stir-fry shiitake in dishes such as Buddha's delight, while Japanese kitchens make a vegetarian dashi from it.
Raw shiitake is 90 percent water, and like every mushroom it makes vitamin D2 when ultraviolet B light hits the ergosterol inside. Eaten raw or undercooked it occasionally triggers shiitake dermatitis, a streaky itching rash that shows up about a day later and fades within three weeks, probably caused by the polysaccharide lentinan. New Zealand has a separate native relative, Lentinula novae-zelandiae.
Source: Shiitake
