Lactifluus volemus, the weeping milk cap, is an ectomycorrhizal milk cap of the Northern Hemisphere with an apricot to tawny, velvety cap and pale golden gills. Cut gills weep abundant milky latex that stains tissue and other surfaces brown, and the fruit body has a distinctive fishy odour that fades with cooking. Molecular studies show that L. volemus in the broad sense comprises several species.
Edible and popular, including in Yunnan (China), Nepal and the eastern United States. Slow cooking (casseroles, thick sauces) suits it better than frying, and the fishy odour fades when cooked. Two people in Turkey developed transient pancreatitis after eating it. Look-alikes L. corrugis (darker, wrinkled cap) and L. hygrophoroides (distant gills) are also edible; a milk cap with acrid latex is a different species.
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Habitat
Ectomycorrhizal with both conifers and broadleaf trees, more often in deciduous woods; also in peat moss beds. Fruits singly or in groups from summer to autumn, more abundantly in warm, humid weather.
Distribution
Northern Hemisphere: warm temperate Eurasia and North America, with subtropical and tropical Asian records. Europe (declining; considered locally extinct in the Netherlands and Flanders); Asia (China, Japan, India, Korea, Nepal, Vietnam); Iran and Turkey; North America (southeastern Canada, the eastern United States, Mexico) and Guatemala.
Characteristics
Cap: 5-11 cm, convex with an inrolled margin, becoming flat with a central depression; apricot to tawny, varying by region; velvety or smooth, dry. Gills: adnate to slightly decurrent, close, narrow, brittle, sometimes forked; pale golden yellow, bruising brown. Stem: 4-12 cm long, 1-1.5 cm thick, slightly paler than the cap, firm, velvety or smooth. Flesh: whitish; ferric sulphate turns it dark bluish green. Latex: abundant, milky white, staining brown. Odour: fishy, stronger as it dries. Spore print: white to whitish. Spores: roughly spherical, hyaline, reticulate, about 7.5-10 x 7.5-9 µm.
