No one is quite sure how to spell the name of this mushroom. Merriam-Webster has it under portobello, but then gives portabella and portabello as variant spellings. If we Google the word to get a snapshot of how real people are spelling it, the picture is just as murky: on the Internet, the phrase portobello mushroom turns up 25,400 times, portabella mushroom 19,400 times, and portabello mushroom 10,400 times; this means that the variant spellings, when combined, outnumber the supposed standard spelling. A few poor souls on the Internet—872 to date—have even spelled the name portobella mushroom. The confusion might be the result of the fact that both porta and porto exist in Italian, the former being a feminine noun meaning door and the latter being a masculine noun meaning harbour, thus, portabella meaning beautiful door, and portobello meaning beautiful harbour, are both possible forms in Italian. (The gender of nouns and their adjectives must agree in Italian, so the forms portabello and portobella are not technically possible in that language.) The story, however, gets more complicated: although portabella and portobello are Italian compounds, you won’t find anyone in Italy using either of those terms to refer to the mushroom; there, the fungus in question is known as capellone, meaning big hat. In fact, the name portobello (or portabella) actually appears to have arisen in North America in the 1980s, and there are two theories about how this occurred. The first is that the name was chosen by some anonymous marketing director to make this overgrown brown mushroom seem more enticing to the American consumer. The same thing occurred in 1961 when a New York ice-cream maker named Reuben Mattus invented the name Haagen-Dazs in order to give his product a “European” cachet, a technique known as foreign branding; in actual fact, Haagen-Dazs does not mean anything in Dutch, nor in any other language. If that is also how the mushroom acquired its name, then the choice of portobello may have been inspired by the fact that Portobello happens to be a common place-name: there is a Portobello in Panama, in Scotland, in Nova Scotia, and in Sardinia, to name only a few. The second theory regarding the mushroom’s moniker is that it emerged as a corruption of prataiolo, the name of an Italian meadow mushroom.