He thought he was picking chanterelles, not boletes. Chanterelles do have gill-like wrinkles on them. But although it isn't quite as big a mistake as mistaking gill fungi for a bolete, it was still a pretty implausible mistake to make for anyone who had any basic knowledge at all: like mistaking a lychee for a strawberry, or a nectarine for an apple - some very superficial visual similarity, but anyone with any sense of the look and feel of the thing would never make such a mistake. As Nick said so well, they were so ignorant they didn't realise how ignorant they were. We are very ignorant of fungi in this country; in other countries there is much more general knowledge about them.

I once found an albino death cap, which is a rare thing. My first instinct on seeing it was "mushroom". From above, it does have a mushroom-looking cap. On picking it, I looked at it and then very quickly went "not mushroom". It has several features which are inconsistent with mushroom on closer examination. So I did not eat it. This is a very important discipline you have to have, and you need to be so sure about just what a mushroom looks like you can look at something and say "not mushroom" when it isn't just right. It was only home with the book that I identified it, and realised how important it was to have got that one right.

My Czech relatives eat lots of Amanita rubescens. They have to be darn sure they aren't picking Amanita pantherina. They know this. I won't pick A rubescens, because I'm not sufficiently confident about making that distinction with 100.0000% reliability. You need to know your limits.