Note that you can certainly burn them. That’s not ‘cooking’, however. The key here is that mushroom cell walls are composed of chitin which is far more heat-stable by virtue of the structures it forms, compared to pectin which is what you’d find in veggies¹.

In this video, Dan Souza explains all this and does something quite surprising when cooking mushrooms: He sautés the mushrooms in water to ‘collapse’ them prior to cooking them in just a teeny bit of oil (and the usual salt, pepper, butter, and herbs.) Amazing.

Every person I’ve sent this to has seen it. Not sure why my own internet excursions didn’t yield this manifestly horrifying video.

The last few seconds reminded me of scenes from Annihilation. Like this one:

Edit: It’s been used in Eastern Medicine for a while. Like the top YouTube comment notes, “Cordyceps is evolving to trick us into believing it is medicine.”