I have always pictured the mushrooms being sauteed in butter.

Cluin's quote from another site is incomplete in its listed anachronisms: Sam really wanted 'taters in his coney stew, but they, too, are a new-world import that would have come much later.

I've always rationalized (or maybe ignored) these food availability quibbles by remembering that since the Third Age all the lands have been changed, and that maybe some food species once native to northwest Europe (which is, in very general terms, the locale of Middle Earth, according to Tolkien) might have died out there, (a la potato famine), but survived in the Western Hemisphere, only to be reintroduced in the modern age. A pretty frail reed to lean on? Sure it is. Oh, well.

Dave Oesterreich