You've gotten me all excited for our fall rains! I see this little fungus all over the place, in so many environments. David Aurora, in "Mushrooms Demystified", reviews its edibility as:
Too small and tough to be of value. However, some natives of Madagascar are said to chew them, for reasons unknown.
Well, your post got me to looking around and there's a world of eating this mushroom out there! I've enjoyed other fungi that he's not given high marks for edibility (like the Insidious Gomphidius). How are you cooking your Split Gills? If you have a recipe, I'd like to try that out!
I've never tried eating S. commune but if you search "Kanglayen Paaknam recipe" on google you'll find a lot of recipes.
When I was doing some research to write this post I came across a lot of comments pf people mentioning its medicinal properties, and I did a quick search in Google Scholar and there are some papers about the antitumoral properties of some polysacharydes from this fungus.
I'm usually a bit hesitant to eat perennials polypores collected from the wild though. They tend to host all kinds of life on them (lots of bacteria and mold) but if you go ahead and try eating it I'd love to hear about it.
Btw, I really like the photos you submitted to the b&w contest!
That's an interesting perspective about perennial polypores. I'll have to consider that, for sure. It's amazing how many plants and fungi have medicinal properties of one kind or another.