Learn the true meaning of Science Fiction Cuisine

A season of feasting is again upon us, and Tor.com has decided to, in the interest of promoting geeky frivolity and whatnot, collect my Science Fiction Cuisine posts. Not only will I revisit the glory of homemade Popplers and Spoo, I’ll also include, at the end, a few “leftovers,” miscellany of the edible variety.

Before we get into all that, I wanted to give a few general pointers for making food more science fictional, at least in a cosmetic sense. While my posts deal with the trills and tribble-ations of re-creating food from SF sources, I want to share what I’ve learned about how to make any dish a little weirder. With a little extra effort, you can make well-known dishes into visually arresting, delicious oddities fit for a Klingon.

1. Play with shapes. When I visited Thailand years ago, I marveled at the Thai art of garnishing. Thai cooks carve and shape food into wondrous sculpture, giving a carrot the elegance of a temple entrance. Their garnishes give the dishes a distinct Thai character. The same is possible with SF food. A familiar ingredient can be altered to appear futuristic. The two easiest shapes for this effect are cubes and tendrils. My recipe for Babylon 5’s flarn, for example, is mostly a log of goat cheese made into cubes instead of the usual cylinder. Holiday cheese balls and logs could be transformed without any great effort into cheese borg-ships. A simple green salad can become exotic when you cut the ingredients into unfamiliar configurations. Regular old green beans can be split at one end several times over (before cooking) to change the ubiquitous Thanksgiving casserole into a vat of mini-Cthulhus. Also, candies such as tootsie rolls and starbursts (which, I’m told, were originally called “Opal Fruits,” a vastly more interesting name) can be kneaded, rolled, cut and shaped like modeling clay.
2. Play with spices. In Lebanon, rice is sometimes flavored with cinnamon. Though rice and cinnamon, separately, are very familiar, the combination often pleasantly startles my guests when I serve this. A similar result came when a friend of mine, on a whim, added cardamom to cranberry sauce. The pairing, though unfamiliar, worked brilliantly. When concocting a banquet of future-food, branch out from your usual herb and spice combinations. If you have a Middle Eastern, Asian or Indian grocer nearby, chat with the owners and get cooking tips. Try spices you’ve never heard of before. The less familiar the flavor, the more potential it has to transform well-known dishes.
3. Play with technique. A recipe for lentil soup in Cook’s Illustrated (not to be confused with Cooks Source!) paired Indian cooking techniques with French ingredients, with great success. Every region of the world has culinary specialties. Thanks to the internet and ever-increasing communication between cultures, the cooking styles of the planet are available to us. Using the ingredients familiar to one culture, cooked in the style of another, can give rise to some really cool new combinations. Japan, since the Meiji Restoration, has made great use of this, and we have tempura and Japanese curry and other dishes, as a result. And as for SF cuisine, what could be more futuristic than serving a fusion of flavors never achieved before?
4. Play with color. Just ask Sam-I-Am; changing the expected color of a dish can profoundly augment the presentation. As a general rule, I dislike using food coloring. It feels like cheating, and an empty experience. Sometimes it can’t be avoided, and I think that in small amounts, it is okay, but I like to use ingredients for coloring. The reddish tint in my recipe for Qagh, f’rinstance, comes from pomegranate juice rather than red food coloring. Root vegetables and berries can yield good red, orange, yellow and purple colors. Green is easiest of all, of course. Blue is a hard one, though. Blue fruit usually gives purple juice.
5. Experiment in advance. If there is one thing I have learned in making these recipes, it’s that a whole lot can go wrong. Do not, therefore, save your experimentation for the day of Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever the special occasion may be. Do it in advance, give yourself room for failure and modification, and take notes as you go, so you’ll get it right on the day you are entertaining your favorite host of nerds.

I know that cooking intimidates a lot of people. This is why I emphasize fun, learning and experimenting in all the posts. I am a firm believer that “perfect is the enemy of good.” Not everyone will be Julia Child or Jacques Pepin. That’s fine. Not everyone will be Rodin or Van Gogh, either, but that shouldn’t stop you from having fun with Play-doh or finger painting.

	4/19/09 – Science Fiction Cuisine – The Spoo Elevating Moment On the Menu: Spoo
	4/26/09 – Science Fiction Cuisine – Like Granny Used To Make On the Menu: Roasted Spider Soup
	5/03/09 – Science Fiction Cuisine – Eat Up, Meatbags! On the Menu: Popplers
	5/10/09 – Science Fiction Cuisine – Today is a Good Day to Diet On the Menu: Qagh
	5/19/09 – Science Fiction Cuisine – I Find My Lack of Success Disturbing On the Menu: Blue Milk & Food Rations
	7/13/09 – Science Fiction Cuisine – Share and Enjoy On the Menu: Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster

Jason Henninger cooks stuff for people who eat it. Won’t you?