Mushrooms | Perfume Posse

We’re within another storm. Amy. Fair bit of rain, very high winds. Feels soupy outside. Large bits of bark from the eucalyptus tree in the next garden all over my garden.

I had a whole other post ready to go today. But, then I saw the mushroom from another planet.

We’ll get to that in a minute, but first a history of my relationship with fungi.

I was late to actually eating mushrooms. I can’t recall my mother using them in her cooking. I don’t remember them showing up in TV dinners or even when we (infrequently) went out to eat growing up.

The one place I might have expected them would have been my mother’s Beef Bourguignon. Hers was wonderful, but it was beef in a sauce. I don’t remember vegetables. We usually had it with egg noodles. Ah, Pennsylvania Dutch egg noodles.

I don’t think I encountered them to eat till I was in my mid-20s.

Now, however, they are a staple. I use a lot of brown capped ones. Portobello, and Shiitake. The latter two I get from the farm shop. They add so much flavour and texture to all kinds of things: soups, omelettes or scrambled eggs, weird stir fries.

I understand that Shiitake in particular are great for gut health (those bacteria get really happy).

Anyway, why mushrooms today?

As I’ve noted too many times it gets wet here and all kinds of weird and not so wonderful things pop up. In the garden I generally dig them up and dispose of them in the garden trug so the dog doesn’t go near them. Weird bluish ones. Cupped black things on the old bay tree stump that make me uncomfortable. Basic beige things.

But the other day on my walk up the lane after a really peculiar day of beautiful blue skies and torrential rain there it was, all by itself on the side of the road. Like something out of science fiction, or Disney, or an end-of-the-world film.

Le mushroom gargantua.

Seriously, this thing was a foot across (really, seriously — and sorry, I wasn’t going to get near it to do an exact measurement). I have never seen anything like it here.

Looking it up (thank you, google) it appears to a Macrolepiota procera – and it’s supposed to be edible. NO THANKS.

Anyway, after stopping and staring for a good 5 minutes, I wondered, as a perfumista does, about mushrooms in fragrance and the only thing I could come up with on the rest of my walk and at home was Frederic Malle’s Une Rose. I bought this unsniffed decades ago on the basis that it was an ‘earthy rose’ which sounded awesome.

There was the vague comment on some reviews that there was a mushroom note and for some people this ruined what was otherwise something gorgeous. I thought: not me, that won’t happen to me.

But of course it did. And after trying very hard for a few days my bottle got rehomed with someone who got no mushroom at all.

I can do some things that do weird turns in perfume, eg, saffron.

I went looking for other fragrances and came up with the following, none of which I had any clue about – and which showed up on a 10 year old Reddit post: Midnight Gypsy Alchemy, November in the Temperate Forest by For Strange Women, someone mentioned BPAL (Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab — which used to be huge on the Makeup Alley fragrance board) having some. Some truly great names there.

So, yes. I wonder how long that giant mushroom will survive before someone (sadly) trashes it.

Do you like mushrooms to eat? Have any perfume in which the note is included?

Pics: pexels, mine

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