Ugly milk capLactarius turpis

Modern European and North American field guides agree: not recommended. Necatorin — a substance with proven mutagenic activity — has been found in the fruiting bodies. Although it does not cause acute poisoning, eating it regularly is a chronic risk. In Finland and Sweden it has been officially removed from the list of culinary mushrooms.

Yes, the tradition of salting the Ugly milk cap goes back centuries in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Nordic countries. There were no mass acute poisonings, which is why the tradition stuck. But “not acute” does not mean “safe”: necatorin acts at the cellular level, the effect is cumulative, and modern research data appeared only in the 1990s. The old field guides simply didn’t know about it.

Don’t make it a regular part of your diet. Eating a small portion once won’t do anything critical, and there will be no acute symptoms. But making the Ugly milk cap your main mushroom of the season and eating it every week is a bad idea. Better alternatives: Saffron milk cap, Lactarius resimus, Woolly milk cap.

Only under birch — it is an obligate mycorrhizal partner of birch. It grows in damp birch and birch-pine woods, along forest edges, in mossy patches and on peaty soils. You won’t find it in pure conifer or broadleaf forests without birch.

Throughout the forest zone wherever there are birches — especially common in Polissia (Chernihiv, Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Volyn and Rivne regions), the Carpathians, the Carpathian foothills and the northern forest-steppe. In the steppe it appears only in planted birch stands. One of the most abundant autumn milk caps in Ukraine.

August–November. One of the latest milk caps — fruiting peaks in October, and it holds on until the first hard frosts. In a warm autumn it can keep coming until mid-November, when few other mushrooms are left.

Very recognizable: large size, a dark olive to almost black cap that is very sticky in wet weather, a fuzzy inrolled margin in young specimens, burning white milk, and growth under birch. The reaction with potassium hydroxide (KOH) on the cap is violet-black. It is hard to confuse with anything else.

With Lactarius picinus — that one is dark chestnut with no olive tinge and grows under spruce. With L. fuliginosus — that one is not sticky and has white milk that turns yellow. With the Woolly milk cap — that one is pink, not dark. A dark slimy cap under birch + a fuzzy margin = Ugly milk cap.