New York Carnival

Memory Transcription Subject: Rosi, Yotul Housewife

Date [standardized human time]: November 19, 2136

I drummed my claw-tips on the bartop with the rhythm of new convictions. "So what's coming up next?" I asked with the casual tone of someone newly committed to stealing all of the chef's secrets.

"Grilled Salad," said David, in what was perhaps the most succinct contradiction of terms I'd ever heard.

I chuckled indulgently. "Perhaps there's an unresolved translation issue," I said wryly. "Where I come from, a salad is, conventionally, a raw dish."

David, not even looking up as he worked, bobbed his head in acknowledgement. "Same here. But I don't do conventional."

I snorted. "Heretic," I said.

"The gods must be crazy," David mumbled, focused as he was on the flames.

Cute, but I needed secrets. I tapped my claws more insistently on the bartop. "Do you take requests?" I asked.

"Of course," said David. He still wouldn't look at me, but I was starting to suspect that that was a limitation of his binocular eyes. He was staring directly at the vegetables he was cooking, and nothing I said would divert his attention.

Strange, watching a predator intent on his prey, when he's hunting asparagus, said a silvery voice slithering into my ears.

I blinked. Who said that?

There was no answer but the sound of hot oil, hissing and spitting angrily, as it dripped off the vegetables into the open flames. I tipped my glass, pouring its fizzy, fruity contents further into my open mouth. Drown the inebriation demons…

"Did you, uh," said David, only half-paying attention. "Did you have a request to put in, or was this more of a conceptual line of questioning?"

I shook my head clear. "Porridge," I said, insistently. It only seemed sensible to skip straight to the point. "I want to see a predator's take on how to best cook grain."

There was a long pause out of David, as he finally looked up from his work. He scanned the room, his kitchen, and it was unambiguous what he was doing. His eyes flickered, rapidly saccading between targets. That must have been the true mark of a predator: even when scanning his shelves for flour, his eyes had to move before he did. He couldn't see it all from a single moment of stillness. How weak!

"I'm in the middle of the salad course," said David, at last. "The soup course, traditionally, follows. May I serve your porridge a bit conceptually loosely? Perhaps a corn chowder?"

The words came across, through the translator, well enough. Corn was a grain. Chowder was a thick soup. "I want to know what a predator can coax out of grain," I said, more generally. "To that end, I'll allow it."

David nodded as another vegetable darkened and wilted beautifully on a well-oiled metal grill over an open flame. "As you wish." The corners of his mouth curled up in a smirk. "I'll do the gazpacho some other night, then. I just thought the contrast of a hot salad and a cold soup would be really funny."

I stuck my tongue out in disgust. "Please stop saying 'hot salad'."

"Hrmmmmm…" said David, pensively. "Nah."

I grimaced. "Eugh. This dish is going to be a horror show."

David smirked as he quickly plated the vegetables and drizzled sauce on top. "The thing you gotta keep in mind about horror, as a genre, is how much mileage you can get out of fear of the unknown." He carried a pair of plates over to the bar, and set them in front of Chiri and I. "Rejoice! Be not afraid."

Well, the platter of grilled vegetables looked pretty good, even if calling it a 'salad' was a probable misnomer. Long green shoots, a few thick slices of different gourds and roots, a long piece of some green fruit… all served warm, with a bit of char from the flames, and topped with a thick, greenish-white sauce. "Pesto?" I guessed.

David blinked. "More or less, yeah! It's a vinaigrette, but it does contain pureed leaves and nuts in the style of a pesto sauce."

Chiri looked at me with confusion, and I got to look a bit smug for once. "Oh, sweetie, pesto is a primitive technique. A Gojid wouldn't know it."

David glared a quick warning at me, and the fur on the back of my neck prickled with a fear I'd nearly briefly forgotten. Curious, that needling his paramour was the first thing that seemed to get a rise out of him. Maybe Chiri was right about him being overly-protective of her. Useful to know, if I ever needed to distract him, maybe so another Yotul could make a break for it…

Still, he nodded. "Yup. Pesto. I used modern tools for speed and convenience, hence the puree, but it's classically made with a mortar and pestle, hence the English and Italian name. It's a good technique, and yet it's about as primitive as it gets. Literally just pulverizing some herbs and nuts in oil by smooshing them together with two rocks."

Chiri snorted. "Ah, then I do know it. You taught me how to muddle mint leaves for mojitos, remember?" She started making one to demonstrate, crushing bright-scented leaves against the bottom of a glass using a long metal rod with an odd-shaped tip. "I may have lost my culture to the Federation, but I've been picking up bits of David's for a while now."

I rolled my eyes. "Oh good, this sector's most militarily-talented species, picking up predatory cultural norms."

"You just said they were Yotul norms, too," she said smugly.

I grimaced, and focused on the food. And the utensils, for that matter. This was the first dish that wasn't bite-sized hand food, so now I needed to navigate the morass of whatever passed for human table manners. Probably just gnawing on things in a frenzy, but if we were all still pretending to be civilized… Well, there was a knife, and there was a little four-pronged pokey thing. Seemed straightforward. Chiri tried to helpfully explain how to use them, but I didn't need the tutorial. A knife was a knife, and this "fork", as she called it, had variations on most planets. Uncivilized to get your paws dirty, so most civilizations had invented a tool for that.

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The vegetables themselves were lovely. The spring shoots were cooked perfectly. David would have had a fine career on Leirn, or even Venlil Prime, so long as he hid his face in the back, in the kitchen, and never let anyone find out that a vicious human worked there. The sauce, though, was what really made the dish. Tangy, salty, with lovely aromas and astringency from the freshly-torn herbs. Salad dressings were touch-and-go from planet to planet in the Federation, and humans made an excellent one. Maybe they needed the sauce because plain vegetables were too bland for a hunting species? Ah, but that would have walked me right into David's rhetorical trap about humanity's experiences as omnivores leading to better culinary techniques than a pure herbivore species could ever concoct. I kept that suspicion to myself and made a different observation. "This is the third dish in a row with a component based on getting a thick white paste out of mashed nuts, seeds, or beans," I said idly.

"Mmhmm," said David, already back in the kitchen working on my grain dish. He had a large pawful--handful?--that he was already toasting in a dry pot. "It's an excellent textural element to work with. Thick and fatty, but emulsified. Really works well with spices, acidity, and salty-savory flavors. Do you have a word for that texture in your language?"

I shrugged, and began to take a delicate bite of the melon. The mellow sweetness was baffling in a salad, as were the slight bits of color he'd gotten by cooking a piece of fruit, but the results were undeniable. Sweet and salty, tart and savory, plus that texture he'd just described. "I don't think we have a word that overly-specific. Why, do you?"

"We do indeed," said David, smirking at his cookpot. "Creamy."

"Ha!" Chiri cackled gleefully, as she juggled making her leafy drink with nibbling from her platter. "Back to dairy. Pretty much the human-exclusive ingredient space."

David nodded. "It's true. Even the Arxur think we're weird for that one. But so much of our haute cuisine is built on a foundation of butter and cream. It's such a useful and versatile set of ingredients that we're half-mimicking them even when we're avoiding them, as in vegan dishes like these."

Chiri slid the finished "mojito" over towards me and took another bite of her hot salad in creamy pesto sauce. "You have to try the real thing sometime. Butter, cream, cheese. It's all fantastic."

I made a disgusted face as I shook my head. "Not happening, not ever." I took a sip of the mojito Chiri had made me. Bright and fizzy, sweet and tangy, herbaceous… It had all the same dangerously delicious traits as the pesto sauce. "Not nearly drunk enough," I amended.

David shook his head. "No. I'll let you try anything, but I'm not serving you food that could get you arrested for Predator Disease back on Leirn unless you order it sober."

A reasonable, if unexpected, kindness. Or he just wanted the satisfaction of corrupting me without abusing a handicap. The peculiar honor of terrible fae creatures…

I ate my 'salad' methodically, but I was enjoying every bite. "Why do you think this is a salad?"

"Vegetables and dressing," David said simply as he stirred his porridge. "We do this a lot, actually. Identify the key components of a dish--the pieces that make it the dish in question--and scrap everything else before putting it back together in a new and different way. It's called deconstruction."

I nodded slowly, trying to wrap my head around the idea. Less a culinary technique, by the sound of it, and more a framework for creativity. "Give me an example?"

"Sure," said David, portioning his soup out into little bowls. "What's the first thing I ever served you, back at the baseball game? Mushrooms in cream sauce on flatbread. But see, that's also the first main course I ever served Chiri: mushrooms in cream sauce over noodles. All I did was make it vegan for you and swap the shape the grain took, and it became an entirely new dish." He placed a small pile of wood shavings on the saucers the soup bowls were sitting on, and put a little glass bell jar over the top of the whole thing. It looked like something from a chemistry lab! Then he lit a small fire. The bell jar rapidly filled with smoke, obscuring the soup from sight. "In either case, you could change it a dozen different ways and end up with a different dish each time. A creamy mushroom dumpling or fritter, a mushroom and cream risotto, or even a soup." He brought the bowls over, still swirling with smoke beneath the glass lids. He lifted the lids, and the smoke cleared, leaving its intense scent on the pale yellow and white chunky soup. "Smoked creamy corn chowder with mushrooms," he said.

I blinked. Well, smoking a soup tableside was certainly a culinary technique I'd make a point of committing to memory! Honestly, where did humans get these ideas? Was this species predatory, or just perpetually bored!? Still, once again, at least the utensils were straightforward. Little scoop for a thick liquid. I took the… spoon? Ladle? Whichever. I took a spoonful of the soup and tasted it.

In my heart of hearts, I had hoped it would taste, primarily, of mushrooms. I could have disqualified him over that, since the request was to taste the grains. But no, the mushrooms were a mere accompaniment. Everything centered around this grain in question. Corn, he called it? There were fresh, juicy whole kernels of the stuff, practically the texture of a firm berry, plump and a touch astringent, but it was mixed alongside a dried and ground variation more suitable for a porridge. It was creamy. No, it was bouncy, like a thick gel of vegetable starch, really straddling the line between a soup and a porridge. And the flavor was toasty and loud, like a good bread, fresh from the oven, all warm and crusty and just a touch scorched, here and there, for variety's sake. And the smoke added far more to it than I'd ever expected. Space-age kitchen, and David got it to taste like it had been cooked in an old wood-fired oven like I'd grown up with. He made a soup taste like wood fire baked bread, and he did it using a grain that only predators grew! All at once, in a single bowl, it tasted impossibly foreign, and yet… I took a deep, shuddering breath, and I tried not to choke up. It tasted like home.

Home on Leirn. Not the little prefab domicile on Earth I shared with Nikolo. Not that one, with the bright curtains I'd picked out to make the metal walls feel warmer, and the little potted flower I'd placed by the window to add life to the sterile interior, and two bowls of porridge growing cold in the fridge. Grain and water, seasoned with salt, and my secret ingredient: a single pinch of dried herbs. Watery. Bland. Boiled.

Nikolo deserved better.

I put the spoon back down, took a very deep breath, and indelicately said a curse word.

"Fuck, it's good, or fuck, it's bad?" David asked, to clarify.

"Fuck… you've proven your point," I said, defeated. "On my honor, it's your victory. I would like to work here, if you'll have me." At least I'd learn something worth bringing home, apprenticing under the wing of an artist like David. If I survived the ordeal. And the money wouldn't go amiss. Bless Nikolo's heart, but unless Earth of all places paid construction workers better than the Federation did, we'd need it if we ever wanted to save up enough to start a family.

David dipped his head politely in a show of humility, not wanting to be a sore winner. "Happy to have you. I've got one course left, though, if you want to try it anyway."

"Sure," I said tiredly. It was getting late, but after the others, my curiosity was certainly piqued. "What's the grand finale?"

The human trotted back off into the kitchen and put the finishing touches on a single large centerpiece that he pulled out of the oven. Some giant round gourd that he'd packed the middle of with all sorts of things--fruits and nuts and beans and vegetables, like an overly-complicated pie filling--and roasted. "Stuffed Jack O'Lantern!" he said, grinning happily at his work.

I blanched in horror at what looked, to my eyes, like somebody's severed head on a platter, dripping with dark red Terran blood.

"Jesus Christ, David!" Chiri shouted, protecting me. "Why the fuck did you give it a face?!"