rm | culinary exile and fictional food

The next piece in the Jack/Ianto thing Kali and I are wroking on will be posted before I leave for Terminus, I think (if not, the first day while I'm there -- we're close to done).

In writing it I've solidified a lurking feeling I've had about my writing recently, which is give me an alternate or non-earth-based world and I'll give you a cuisine. Seriously, this is my weird compulsion as a writer. I always want to know exactly what foods and flavours appeal to people. It's not like "Oh, I bet there's a thing that tastes like this." it's that I have to figure out an entire food logic of a place, and then a character's preference within such a place. I've done it for my novel project, and I've clearly just done it for Jack's past in our fics. If I cared to, and I don't, because I'm fucking lazy and it's weird, I could cook you weeks of menus around these ideas.

It's such a funny compulsion. I wonder if I would have done it pre-celiac disease or if it's a habit that comes out of my own culinary exile.

Perhaps funniest to me is how rarely it syncs with my own food habits and preferences. I suppose it's like that thing when I'm writing Narcissa Malfoy and I have to stop myself from buying peach-colored lingerie.

Regardless. Now I go make dinner.