culinary exile and fictional food

[rm]

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.

Comments

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

I rarely find myself dealing with food - partly because I am often writing about aliens, and if you so much as think about alien food you get distracted into their biology and evolution and ecosystems and ... look, they mostly eat fish, okay? Or I'll never get the novel done. (Which is not to say I couldn't write a cookbook for my favorite species, just that I keep revising their important crops and ecology and things and so shouldn't do so yet.)

But sometimes I end up spending weeks on their aesthetics, fashion, poetry, or other things like that. It's rarely the same theme twice, but there's always at least one for every culture.

I have also had to institute a rule that the voices in my head are not allowed to go shopping by themselves. If more than one of 'em can agree on peach lingerie or striped ties, fine, but even then it has to be something I can and will wear, because long flowy skirts are all very well on some people but not in a wheelchair, and I look hideous in that shade of gold that somebody loves.