Imaginary Worlds - Fantastical Feasts

Episode Date: September 5, 2018

What is the role of food in worldbuilding? Characters usually have to eat to stay alive -- but food is also culture, and if you're creating a fantasy culture, food will be an expression of those values. Chef Chelsea Monroe-Cassell talks about the origin of her fantasy cookbooks while chef Jenn de la Vega makes us a dish based on the novel "The Lies of Locke Lamora." Authors Elizabeth Bear and Fran Wilde break down the tropes and cliches around SF foods. Chef and author Jason Sheehan talks about his favorite dystopian food. And writer Scott Lynch reveals the fantasy beverage he's always wanted to try.Here's the episode show page with Jenn's Pears and Sausages recipe: https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/fantastical-feasts.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Chelsea Monroe Castle is a chef in Vermont, and she's a big fan of Game of Thrones. And the books they're based on are A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. And back in 2011, she started a blog called The Inn of the Crossroads, which had recipes she created based on the foods from Game of Thrones. Some of the foods were broken down by different regions, the land of Westeros. Some of the foods had symbolic meaning for characters, like lemon cakes, which were important to Sansa Stark. Should we have some lemon cakes?

Lemon cakes are my favorite. So we've been told. You know, Sansa's love of lemon cakes early in the series sort of represents her sort of sweet, childish view of the world. And then, you know, later on, there are no more lemoncakes and there are no more sort of fairy tales. And she's been sort of become jaded about the world and sees it for what it really is. And I had written George Martin to, you know, say, we're doing this blog. Thank you so much for your books. We really love them. And sort of tongue in cheek said, if you ever want to do a cookbook, think of us. And was shocked when he not only

wrote back, but said he would mention it to the publishers. Now beyond her Game of Thrones cookbook, she's also written a cookbook for Lord of the Rings and the video game World of Warcraft. And so that was a neat challenge because in many cases there are no ingredients listed, but I had an image of what the finished dish is supposed to look like. There's a goat noodles one where I meticulously went through and tried to drape the noodles the same way for the picture

as they were in the in-game image. Her next goal is to make a Star Wars cookbook, which, yes, would include a recipe for blue milk from a bantha. in the in-game image. Her next goal is to make a Star Wars cookbook, which, yes, would include a recipe for blue milk from a bantha. I think I have some goat milk added in, a little bit of almond milk, and then a little bit of protein powder, just because you'd need every little bit of that

that you could possibly get, you know, on Tatooine where it's so difficult to grow things. But making foods based on fantasy worlds isn't just a creative challenge for her. It's a way of turning the make-believe into something real. I think that food and recipes are sort of this really neat way to take a step closer to all of these fictional worlds and, you know, eat what the character ate and sort of experience that in a very sensory way. That had never occurred to me before, that food could be like a virtual reality, using taste and smell to get us into a fictional world

in a way that sight and sound never can. And until recently, I really hadn't thought much about food in fictional worlds at all. I mean, if it's there, okay, cool. But if it's not, I don't notice if it's missing. But a lot of people do. Because it turns out food can actually be a crucial ingredient that makes a fantasy world gel together. And Chelsea is definitely not the only chef who's doing stuff like this. On a rainy summer day in Brooklyn, my assistant producer Stephanie Billman and I went to the kitchen of Jen DeLaVega.

She also creates recipes based on foods from fantasy worlds. Like there's a scene in The Force Awakens where Rey goes to a cantina with Han Solo and Finn. But the thing that Jen kept noticing in that scene was the snack that Rey was eating. Force Awakens, where Rey goes to a cantina with Han Solo and Finn. But the thing that Jen kept noticing in that scene was the snack that Rey was eating. She's holding this hollowed out apple with a Romanesco sticking out of it. And Romanesco is fractal broccoli. It's something that you see at farmer's markets. It's a real food and it looks very alien.

food and it looks very alien. And it inspired me to go home, hollow out a Fuji apple and poach some Romanesco and put it in. But I call it the snack awakens. Now, we did not come to Jen's kitchen to make the snack awakens. We are making pears and sausages in oil based on one of her favorite fantasy novels, The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. Jen likes to describe the novel as Ocean's Eleven set in a medieval fantasy world. But what really intrigued her about this dish was the way that pears and sausages are used symbolically throughout the book. They're associated with characters that are central to Locke's life,

and they also describe money. He's not worth a sausage. They describe shapes of people. Like his best friend Gene Tannen, when he first meets him, he describes him as shaped like a dirty pear. And then it turns out that this dish, pears and sausages and oil, is the first dish that Locke eats when he becomes a gentleman bastard. He joins a thieving gang.

It's very significant. He gets a double portion on his first day. Now, had you ever heard of this dish before you saw it or read it in the book? No, actually. This combination works. Like fatty things like sausages can go really well with not necessarily very fruity like it's a sweet and savory kind of situation i don't know i kind of i love the idea and i actually hadn't seen anyone combine these two ingredients i'm i'm pretty pleased with the way that turned

out considering that i basically uh made it up on the spot below those many years ago. Just dumb luck that turned out pretty edible. And that is Scott Lynch, the author of The Lies of Locke Lamora, which is part of the series Gentlemen Bastards. One of the earliest notes I ever wrote to myself concerning The Lies of Locke Lamora in one of its very, very early formulations, you know, I literally wrote this on the lies of Locke Lamora in one of its very, very early formulations. I literally wrote this on the back of a napkin, just an admonition to myself. Why does it need to be set in another medieval dirt town? I'd seen it a thousand times at that point, which is why it was comfortable and familiar and what I started to go to. But then I began to set a mission to myself, you know, make

it weirder, make it more Baroque, make it richer, make the experiences a little deeper, you know, don't just have the characters eat food, unquote, have them eat something that is a little more culturally distinct, a little more memorable. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky, and today we're looking at what food can reveal about fantasy worlds, beyond whether the characters have a sweet tooth or not. And spoiler alert, by the end of this episode, you're probably going to feel very hungry, because there is a feast of ideas just after the break. Mission to Zix is a sci-fi comedy podcast, an outer space sitcom for your ears.

The cast is made up of veteran comedians from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, and features guests from shows like Saturday Night Live, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and other great comedies. Episodes are completely improvised and obsessively edited and sound designed to become an immersive sci-fi adventure. Everything that's improvised in an episode becomes canon forever, impacting all future episodes. So hop aboard the sentient but grizzled spaceship, the Bargerian Jade,

get ready to meet Dar, the moody 12-foot-tall omnisexual security officer, and prepare for a mission briefing by Nermit Bundeloy, a 19-inch tall lizard bird with his little heart always set on getting a promotion. That's Mission to Zyx, spelled Z-Y-X-X. Listen or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Fran Wild co-hosts the podcast Cooking the Books, which is about food and fiction. She's also a sci-fi author and a teacher. And when she runs writing workshops, she's a particular way of teaching students the importance of food in fantasy worlds. I have people do, quite often when I teach classes,

is I have them do an exercise where I ask them to boil water. Not literally. She asked them to write out the steps in which their character would boil water. Now, since I'm not a fiction writer, in which their character would boil water. Now, since I'm not a fiction writer, she asked me what was the last book that I read. It was Alchemy of Stone by Yakutsrina Sidiya. It takes place in a steampunk world where the main character is basically a robot named Matty, who is literally wound up like a clock.

So she asked me, well, how would that character of Matty boil water? What are all the steps? I wasn't entirely sure. So you've already set a whole series of world building things in motion. And if this was your own story, you would have to say, okay, there needs to be a well. If there's a well, is it a manual, you know, crank well, or do they have a pump? Because if they have a pump, then they have engineering. Yeah, no, in this, this is a steampunk world. So they would probably have some kind of, yeah,

way in which they've automated the water coming up from the well. So, and then you have to determine a heat source and you have to determine, is this a stove or is this a fire? And every single choice that you make as you tell your character how to boil water is a world-building detail. Now, one of the books that really influenced Fran's thinking on this subject was The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land by the late writer Diana Wynne-Jones. That book went after all the clichés of genre fiction, including the tropes about food.

This is the book that, you know, sort of says, OK, let's talk about stew, because stew was sort of ever-present, and it was always being served to you in inns when you read books. And stew is very boring and very brown and it has been boiling for a while and you can't exactly cook it on the road and run. It takes forever to cook a stew. This is the worst possible choice for someone in a fantasy universe to be cooking while they're on the road. Sam and Frodo, I'm looking at you. The novelist Elizabeth Bear was also really inspired by that book, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. People who are hiking long distances don't eat stew. They don't eat bread.

Those are things that require you to be stationary. But we need a few good taters. What's taters? Brussels. Potatoes. Boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew. And there's another cliche that really bothers Elizabeth Bear. Potatoes.

Potatoes are all over medieval fantasy worlds, from Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones. I mean, even George R.R. Martin had an opinion about them. He famously proclaims that nobody cares where the potatoes come from, and I care where the potatoes come from. Like, I want to know why this England analog has potatoes in a world with no America. Wait, but there are potatoes in real Ireland, so wouldn't fake England have a fake Ireland close by? There weren't potatoes in fake Ireland before there was fake America. Okay, that was news to me from 500 years ago.

I didn't know that potatoes originally came from South America. They were brought to Europe by Spanish conquistadors. And it took a while to convince European farmers to plant them. Now, I should say that both Fran and Elizabeth Bayer really like the way that Tolkien and Martin use food symbolically. They just think that food should get the same kind of attention when it comes to world building as fantasy maps or constructed languages. People who live in a scarcity economy care where their food is coming from. You know, I was a child of a single mother in the 70s. I cared about where my food came from.

And I feel like sometimes when you're writing characters who are living a subsistence life, who are hungry, who don't know where their food is coming from, then that's a thing that they should be caring about more than they often seem to. now the use of food in fantasy worlds has gone through phases as our society has thought about food in different ways now in the early 20th century tolkien was very nostalgic for this pre-industrial past and a lot of writers were influenced by him and then came the atomic age which inspired sci-fi writers to imagine food very differently. You know, 11 guys in white lab coats all staring into an oscilloscope, and then there has to be this perfectly clean, stainless kitchen, and they have to push a button and food pills come out. That is Jason Sheehan. He's a chef, a food critic, and a sci-fi author.

The rebellion against that took so long. It went from that to, you know, stories of scarcity. And then from that to the sort of like the cyberpunk thing where nobody ingests anything except, you know, cocaine and Japanese beer. Jason thinks the portrayal of food in fantasy worlds has gotten better in the last 10 to 15 years because the food movement has opened up our palates and made us think differently about where our food comes from and the hidden costs of convenience. For example, he really likes the 2015 novel Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vey Watkins, which takes place in a near future when California is going through a slow-motion ecological collapse. There's a really evocative scene where the characters stop by a farmer's

market. There are all these beautiful farmer's market foods that have all been ruined somehow by the future that they're living in now. And the one that I always remember is they tried to get raspberries, but the hearts of the raspberries were all full of gassed aphids. Like no reader gets past that line. I mean, that's that's fishhooks in the eyes, man. Like, you don't get past that. You know exactly the world you're in. He says that's another thing that food can do in genre fiction, especially dystopian fiction.

It can take something ordinary and make it extraordinary. Like The Road by Cormac McCarthy. There's a really touching scene where a father and son find what is probably the last can of Coke in the world. It's a treat for you. But Jason's favorite example is a scene from The Road Warrior featuring his childhood hero, Mad Max.

And he pulls a can of dog food out of his bag and he's got like some old-fashioned can opener that he opens it with a giant wooden spoon. And he sits there and he eats the dog food while he's looking through like his binoculars down into the valley below him. He's not grudgingly eating the dog food. He's relishing every bite of it. That one moment to me defines, you know, Max Rakitanskyky as this sort of perfect machine built for surviving in this world. And he says the great thing about that scene is that food is being used for world building and character building. Because Max isn't humiliated eating dog food.

He is chowing down like it's the best meal he's had in weeks. In fact, for young, impressionable Jason, that scene made dog food seem kind of cool. That so seriously hooked me that I'm not going to say that I didn't actually try eating dog food after seeing that. Because I did, and not just once. I was, and seriously, even today, I love a corned beef hash from a can because it reminds me of that. Now, I've mentioned before, I'm not a big fan of dystopias

because I know that I would never survive in those worlds. So I tend to like the other extreme, where an abundance of food can be used as a social critique, like in the Pixar film WALL-E or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But what's it do? Can't you see? It makes everlasting gobstoppers. Did you say everlasting gobstoppers? I remember I wanted so badly to eat those candies in real life.

And then when I finally bought one of Nestle's everlasting gobstoppers, I was so disappointed. Yeah, like I got my hands on an Everlasting Gobstopper and then I was like, well, this is not, this is, I was sold a bag of goods here. Elizabeth Baer says the great thing about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the way that it plays with both ends of the spectrum, scarcity and abundance. Like in the beginning of the novel, Roald Dahl describes the thin cabbage soup with potatoes that poor Charlie Bucket has to eat. And Elizabeth

says that's what makes the candy seem so tantalizing later on. And I wonder how much of that grows out of the rationing culture in England during World War II, which also has a huge effect on C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which revolves heavily around food. We don't talk about food at all when we're in England, but once we get to Narnia, everything is food, food, food, food, food. Oh, that's so interesting. I never thought about that. And it's lavishly described. There's the feast that Lucy has when she first meets Mr. Tumnus. And of course, the infamous Turkish delight. See those two hills? My house is right between them.

You'd love it there, Edmund. It has whole rums simply stuffed with Turkish delight. Couldn't I have some more now? No! I don't want to ruin your upper life. Another thing I was disappointed by when I encountered it in real life. I mean, it's okay, but I wouldn't sell my soul for it. Now these are spicy in a buzz your lips kind of a way.

Meanwhile, back in Brooklyn, Jan de la Vega was crushing up Sichuan peppercorns for the oil to cook our sausages and pears, based on the books by Scott Lynch. There's a reason why I try to add so many interesting encounters with food and drink. You know, it's punching up the sensory experience. It's creating a sensory landscape. a sensory landscape. It's engaging senses of the reader that may not be commonly engaged in a tale that's otherwise about, you know, intrigues and running around scaling walls, wearing cloaks, shooting people with arrows, etc. As we were cooking, Jen was telling us that for all the good things food can do in sci-fi fantasy worlds, there's one trope that really bothers her.

sci-fi fantasy worlds, there's one trope that really bothers her. Sometimes fantastical foods can be used as a way to express xenophobia, especially in science fiction, where the food is literally alien. There are a lot of these moments throughout sci-fi and fantasy where people are in a new world and they see something unfamiliar and they're like, you eat that? And they get disgusted. And as a Filipino American, I grew up bringing my lunch to school and my mom would send me fragrant chicken adobo, which is actually, once you think about it, it's, you know, it's not crazy. It's chicken simmered in soy sauce and vinegar and garlic. And sometimes there would be bones. But, you know, when I get into the lunchroom, I got stares and crinkled noses and, you know, what's that? And it's really frustrating to sort of see that in the books that I read. Fran Wild, who writes and teaches

speculative fiction, thinks that those kinds of scenes can actually be used for good. When you have characters eating different things, you can turn the tables in a way that is still, okay, this character is being put in an uncomfortable position and then has to eat a food that they're unfamiliar with and they do it badly. It is an opportunity to show people coming into contact with the unfamiliar rather than the alien and how they react as a character building moment. And Jason Sheehan thinks that food and fantasy worlds can remind us of how often we underestimate the diversity of cuisines in our world. The stuff we eat right here is so bizarre to anybody who didn't grow up within 20 miles of where we were sometimes, within five miles sometimes. Even the past can feel alien to us.

Like Jason loves to read the lists of food on 18th century sailing ships, like the dried meat and hard biscuits the men had to eat to survive. You know, man, an 18th century sailing ship and a 30th century generation ship, they're exactly the same stories. I mean, as people today are trying to figure out how we could live on the moon or Mars or in space cylinders, writing about food and fantasy worlds is a great way to imagine how we could eat differently. Elizabeth Bayer has thought about that in her trilogy Jacob's Ladder, which features a spaceship that's adrift for centuries.

If you have animal protein at all, it's probably going to be things like insects or tilapia that are very resource efficient. And sections of her fictional spaceship are packed with wild kudzu. Because it turns out that kudzu would be a pretty good thing to take into space. It's edible and it grows under almost any condition. Wow, yeah, I never would have thought of that. Yeah, apparently it tastes like spinach. I haven't actually tried it myself.

One of the things that makes food such a powerful thing in science fiction, beyond its humanity, beyond its relatability, beyond all the obvious things, is also sort of the reason that I became a food writer in the first place. It's because food is – it's like magic. Because if you're writing about food, you can literally write about anything. Food is politics. Food is talking about supply chain and logistics. It's class warring. It's anything that you want it to be. You know, it's the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. Also, we're facing an environmental crisis here on Earth. So in the near future, reimagining food might be more than just a creative challenge.

It might be a survival mechanism. So we don't have to resort to chowing down on cans of Purina, no matter how cool it may have seemed in The Road Warrior. Would you like some? Of course, I'm dying to. Anyway, back in the present day, Jen's kitchen, we were finally ready to eat pears and sausages cooked in hot oil on a bed of arugula.

I hope it's not too spicy. Oh my God. This is so good, my Boston accent's coming out. This is wicked good. This is delicious. Yeah. It's really good. Yeah, no, it's definitely not too spicy.

Good. That is it for this week. Special thanks to Chelsea Monroe-Castle, Jen DeLaVega, whose blog is called Rain Witches, Jason Sheehan, his novel is called Private Little War, Fran Wild, the author of The Bone Trilogy, and finally Elizabeth Baer and Scott Lynch, who, full disclosure, are married. By the way, Scott still hasn't tried cooking pears and sausages, although he says there is something in a fantasy world that he's always wanted to try.

You know, the cordial of Imladris, the elven wine from Lord of the Rings, sounds like it would be absolutely wonderful to abuse. I would have less than cordial uses for that. Now, I could have filled up three more episodes with every example of food in fiction that I didn't get around to talking about. So tell me your favorite examples on the Imaginary Worlds Facebook page,

my tweet at emolinski or Imagine Worlds pod. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. I'm posting Jen's recipe for pears and sausages on my website, imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Panoply.