Ardor Sauce: a Pastiche

My fiction response to "Writing Challenge: Texture, Tone, and Style" from page 61 of "Wonderbook The Illustrated Guide To Creating Imaginative Fiction" by Jeff Vandermeer.
A painting (Scott Eagle's cover for Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen) is given as an example of a collage. The challenge is then to create something similar using words.

(Part 1) ARDOR SAUCE: a Pastiche

This was created from public domain sources I found by searching for a term I chose arbitrarily "mushroom."
I sampled phrases containing this term, as well as any nearby phrases that caught my eye

-the pastiche was created by shuffling phrases from these four sources
-then references to "mycelium" or "mushroom" were replaced with one of:
-- "compulsion", "fixation", "whim", "ardor", "craving", or "longing"
-- a very few other minor alterations to text or changes in punctuation were included

Public domain works used:

-MUSHROOMS: How to Grow Them. A PRACTICAL TREATISE ON Mushroom Culture for Profit and Pleasure. BY WILLIAM FALCONER
-STUDENT'S HAND-BOOK OF MUSHROOMS OF AMERICA by Thomas Taylor
-Mushroom Town by Oliver Onions
-The Whitehouse Cookbook by Mrs. F.L. Gillette

(Part 2) Alchemical Remix

After completing Ardor Sauce, I wanted to tie its various samples together a bit more tightly without changing them too drastically, so I added an "alchemist training manual" through-line, then reshuffled and pruned them to more closely approximate a time sequence.

The cover image is used via Creative Commons share-alike license.
It was posted by Dan Molter https://mushroomobserver.org/observer/show_user/439
It was taken from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hygrocybe_psittacina_54130.jpg
The image is cropped to fit size requirements, but otherwise unaltered.
I make no other claim regarding the image.