Bitter Helmling

I still don't understand how someone found out about how bitter helmlings help you fight infections. Someone must've eaten it several times while having an infection. I mean, have you tasted the thing? It's vile.

If there's one mushroom that has saved lives, it is the bitter helmling. This small fungus seems like nothing much, but eating it might help you fight off infections.

A Kind Of Edible Medicinal Mushroom - at least for a while

The bitter helmling is eaten raw as a remedy for various infections. It even works against infected wounds. It doesn't always work, but it will increase the chance to fight off rather nasty infections.

It isn't an easy medicine to eat, though. The bitter helmling is, as its name implies, incredibly bitter. It's so bitter, in fact, that some people can't even eat it. This is unfortunate, as the mushroom needs to be eaten to help against infections. Various things have been tried to make it less bitter, but no way has been found to reduce the bitterness that won't remove the medicinal effect as well.

Another problem with the bitter helmling is that it's only edible for a while. After about a week the mushroom starts producing a deadly toxin. During the first few days the toxin won't kill you, but it will make you ill. However, after the helmling has built up enough toxin, even a small bite can be lethal. It's still considered an important part of Northern Asharian medicine, despite the risk.

Hard To Grow Or Store

There has been attempts to grow the bitter helmling as a part of a medicinal garden, but the mushroom is notoriously hard to grow anywhere it doesn't grow naturally. Only some attempts have been successful, but as it demands a ridiculously amount of work to keep it alive outside its natural habitat, the helmlings produced in these attempts are quite expensive, and thus only available to the most wealthy part of the population.

The most successful bitter helmling farm belongs to the medicinal garden of the Asharian royal healers. This farm has been kept mostly alive for over a century, with a few occasional failures where the whole mushroom farm died out and had to be regrown.

The bitter helmling is impossible to store while also keeping the medicinal effect. There have been attempts to dry it or preserve it with heat by either boiling or frying it, but the medicinal effect seems to disappear when the mushroom is dried or heated. All that is left is a highly disappointing and very bitter snack.

by adege

Geographic distribution

Darker areas in forests in the southern part of Northern Asharia