# Morel (Morchella esculenta)

**Morchella esculenta* and relatives*

**Known today as.** A honeycombed, hollow spring mushroom.

Kind: Fungus  
Poisoning: Gastrointestinal irritants (https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/poisons/gastrointestinal)

> **Caution.** Never eat raw.

## What was it used for?

One of the most prized edible fungi.

## What does modern science say?

Must be cooked: raw or undercooked morels cause illness, and they are easily confused with the false morel (see [False morel](https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/false-morel)). The sickness from raw morels is from hydrazine compounds destroyed by cooking, and from a sensitivity in some people even to the cooked fungus. In 2023 undercooked morels in a Montana sushi restaurant made fifty-one people ill and killed two.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **a heat-labile haemolysin**: destroyed by cooking
- **small amounts of hydrazines**: disputed
- **unidentified neurotoxin**: in the morel neurological syndrome

**Mechanism.** Raw or undercooked, morels give gastroenteritis; eaten in quantity even cooked they have caused, in a French series of 129 cases (Saviuc, 2010), a syndrome of tremor, dizziness, and unsteadiness twelve hours after the meal, resolving in a day, from an unknown agent. The false morel with its gyromitrin is the deadly lookalike.

**Dose.** A food when cooked and eaten in moderation; the neurological cases followed large meals.

**Standing.** A prized edible with a documented syndrome.

## What lore surrounds it?

Often found after forest fires, and in old orchards.

Morels come up in the ash of a burned forest in the spring after the fire, and the hunters of the American West follow the previous summer’s burns; Boyne City, Michigan, has held a morel festival for over sixty years. Cultivation defeated growers from the first French attempts of the 1880s until Chinese field methods and a Danish indoor method of 2021 at last made it pay.

## What did the older authorities say?

**Its name.** From the German *Morchel*, perhaps for its likeness to a carrot; in the Appalachian country it is “dryland fish,” “hickory chicken,” and “molly moocher.”

## Sources

- Phillips, R. (2006). *Mushrooms*.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2024), on the Montana morel outbreak.
- Saviuc, P., et al. (2010). “Can morels (*Morchella* sp.) induce a toxic neurological syndrome?” *Clinical Toxicology* 48.

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*Morel.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-01. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/morel

Historical description, not medical advice.