A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
975 entries
bolete
A mushroom with a sponge underneath instead of gills — a layer of vertical tubes opening as pores, which peels away from the cap in a sheet. Boletes are mycorrhizal, partnered with specific trees, so they come up in the same places year after year. The group includes the porcini and a long list of others of every quality, and the pore surface is where most of the identification happens.
Etymology
Latin boletus, which in Roman usage meant a fine edible mushroom and probably a specific one — likely Caesar’s mushroom, which is an Amanita and not a bolete at all, so the modern word points at the wrong fungus by inheritance. The Latin came from Greek bōlitēs, thought to rest on bōlos, a lump or clod of earth. Which is what a bolete looks like coming up: a clod that has decided to stand.
Notes
The Roman association is a dark one — Claudius is supposed to have been poisoned by a dish of boleti, which made the word notorious in Latin literature and gave Nero a joke about mushrooms being the food of the gods. Modern practice separates edible from otherwise by pore color, bruising reaction, and taste rather than by anything the Romans knew.