There are recipes that are meant to amaze and recipes that are meant to solve a taste problem. Mushroom sangria belongs to the second category, even if at first glance it seems to belong to the first. Anyone who has made sangria at home at least once knows the feeling well: a sangria that starts off well, fruity and easy to drink, and after three sips becomes flat, sweetish, monotonous. Something’s missing: that depth which in wine we call structure, in cooking we call umami, and in gastronomic mycology we simply call Porcini...
Imagine walking on a coastal plain in the late Silurian, about 420 million years ago. There are no trees. There are no forests, no birdsong, not a single air-breathing vertebrate. The vegetation surrounding you barely reaches your ankles: tiny primitive vascular plants, carpets of bryophytes, crusts of algae and cyanobacteria colonizing the wet mud along the waterways. And then, every now and then, on the horizon, something absurd looms: a smooth, tapered, dark column, as wide at the base as the trunk of a centuries-old oak and up to eight meters tall. It has no branches and no leaves. It has no visible roots. It's simply there, a biological monolith towering thirty or forty times higher than any other terrestrial life form on the planet. That monolith is called Prototaxites, and it is probably the most baffling, most debated, and most fascinating Prototaxites fossil in the history of paleobotany.
