How Might Cuisine Be Affected in a Magical World?

deafblindmute

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My current WiP is a novella that features cooking and cuisine as a focal point. I am trying to figure out how the culinary arts might be affected by the magical arts.

I figure that some of the ingredients would be fantastic animals and plants, like mandragora or manticore. I also figure that spells might enhance the meat, or that alchemycan be utilized to properly cook food.

Do you ever have any suggestions for a writer trying to integrate magic and food?
 

blacbird

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Star Trek pretty much did exactly this, with their "replicators".

But if you are invoking magic, you have free rein to do whatever fits your story. Fricassee of Zorakian filbaroggers, in a white wine sauce laced with tincture of albokag ought to work.

caw

caw
 

Brightdreamer

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Not quite what you're probably looking for, but Tom Bruno's Confessions of a Gourmand, or How to Cook a Dragon is a fantasy story with a foodie MC who views the world through a culinary lens. Worth a read if you want to see how to integrate cuisine with worldbuilding, though IIRC the cuisine itself was not magical.

On the concept, you'll want to decide how much your magic can do, and how much it can't. A general convention is that magic can't endlessly replicate food - or, if it can, it's not properly filling food, just an empty copy that provides no nourishment; the Harry Potter universe, which has pretty lax/freewheeling magic in many respects, even had this restriction. (This is generally to keep magic from getting overpowered; a hero who can just snap their fingers and have a banquet is not only going to ease through a lot of situations, but put every chef, farmer, spice trader, and so forth out of work.) So, what can your magic do? Can it help preserve food? Can it provide heat to cook, perhaps in an "exotic" fashion (as a microwave cooks from within, perhaps magic also cooks differently than regular external heat, making new recipes possible... or maybe seen as a cheap substitute for "real" cooking)? Can it transport spices? Can it create or combine flavors not normally combined in nature - merge meats and herbs on a molecular level, perhaps, or create peculiar hybrid fruits and vegetables? Is there a risk from eating magically-infused foods? Can people be allergic to magic traces in food - wizards, perhaps, or maybe only wizards can eat magically-touched food unaffected, making for the ultimate exotic fare that lay people can only dream of feasting on?

Ultimately, what do you want or need your culinary magic to do in order to create an interesting story? What do you need it to not be able to do?
 

Maggie Maxwell

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I'll go ahead and recommend the manga Dungeon Meshi/Delicious in Dungeon. It's a fantastic story about a team that's extracted from a dungeon after losing a teammate. Broke but determined to save their teammate, they decide to scavenge their meals from the dungeon. It plays with many magical monster tropes with a strong focus on ecosystem balance. Like, the traditional mimic (treasure chest monster common to many fantasy video and tabletop games) is a hermit crab, with the mimic portion being their shell. It's a great example of how to use culinary arts in a fantasy setting.
 

RobertLCollins

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Brightdreamer mentioned allergic reactions to magic. I used something like that in one of my Gwen Conner fantasy/mystery stories. Which leads me to bring up another point: how common is it in your world that magic is used with food? Would there be laws about the practice? After all, if magic is common, it could be used as a way to "doctor" spoiled food to make it seem, or even taste, like it's not spoiled.

Also, what about laws regarding the eating of magical creatures? There are stories in fantasy about hunting creatures for spell ingredients. Would they also be hunted for food? Would there be other magical creatures that would frown on that practice. I can imagine a treaty with such a clause, if hunting magical creatures for food is a thing.

It does depend on the story you want to tell. I could see one direction to take is putting the typical fantasy quest story, but making it a food quest. Making such a quest about something relatively trivial could annoy the main characters, or upset them, or make them not take matters as seriously as they ought to.
 

Tazlima

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In addition to cooking/preparation, you could have some really interesting magical methods for food preservation. Look at some of the standard preservation techniques in the real world. Drying, salting/sugering, smoking, fermentation, pickling, canning, freezing, etc.

One thing all of these have in common is that they each alter the taste and texture of foods in very distinctive ways. A pickled egg tastes hugely different from a fresh egg, and I remember being astonished as a kid to learn that icky, gross raisins were the same food as delicious grapes.

Magical food preservation could impart some fascinating qualities to the finished product. Food conjured out of thin air would probably taste completely different from food that was shrunk down for ease of transport, then re-enlarged to eat. Magically preserved/conjured food could make your breath steam, or change the whites of your eyes to different colors, or enhance the flavor of every other item on the plate, or have a distinctive sparkly grit, or make everything taste like rain smells, or make your pee smell weird (oh wait, that's asparagus, lol), or all kinds of other interesting things, and people would likely either love or hate these effects.

Imagine these words, "I like canned greenbeans, but I don't really like fresh or frozen ones. My parents only ever used canned when I was growing up, and I could never get used to the crunch of the other kinds."

....only with magic. :)
 
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Lissibith

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And hey, if you magically cook the food, could that affect how it manages after? Like, if I cook a steak with magic, maybe it stays perfectly moist and juicy and just the perfect temperature for an unreasonable time - say 12 hours, so you can get the food all set early. But once the magic runs out, the whole thing becomes shriveled shoe leather that's disgusting and tough to eat? Of it you try to cook food by normal means that was prepared by certain magical means, maybe it has a bad reaction?
 

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I no longer have the book to verify details but in Emperor Mage by Tamora Peirce there's a minor character, Lady Varice, who is a mage in a foreign emperor's court and specializes in entertaining. I don't know exactly how much of it actually involved her magic but I think elaborate and possibly physics-defying cakes and pastry art were involved. (Consider the pastry/cake art shows/competitions you see on Food Network and then bump it up a bit.)
 

benbenberi

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There's a delightful series on Amazon Prime, Just Add Magic, that's based on the notion of a magical cookbook where the recipes include magical ingredients to perform spells that affect people who eat the food. Different classes of ingredient are used for different types of effects. Some spells are minor or trivial, some are world-changing, or at least life-altering. The series centers around 3 young (tween) cooks who are "guardians" of the cookbook, and 3 older women who were its guardians many years ago and made mistakes.
 

Will Collins

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Yes I use invented ingredients native to many fictional worlds, but I include them with foods from our Earth that are delicious to make it all seem appealing.
 

Cobalt Jade

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I am thinking of magical cookware and utensils. For example, a spoon that stirs by itself, a self-oiling frying pan, a golden replica of a nose that can sniff cooking food and tell the mage what is needed for improvement.
 

Enlightened

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Hook (Robin Williams) has an adult Peter Pan, called Peter Panning, come back to Neverland. He sees his once friends (kids) eating a bunch of bright-colored creams. To him it looks disgusting. Once he re-learns how to pretend, it becomes a feast with real food.

There are a lot of ways to tackle food with magic/illusion. Poison apple from Snow White?

I have a couple culinary degrees. Food will be a big part of my books. I have a lot planned. There are, basically, three main forms of cookery: pastry (desserts); non-pastry baking (e.g. breads); and everything else (meal course preparation). Think how you can make each fun and unique. Maybe the movie Sausage Party can give you an idea how to animate food, if this is an interest.

Beetlejuice dinner scene (cocktail shrimp turned hands and arms)?
Gremlins II: The New Batch. A genetically-altered Gremlin was turned into a walking, talking salad.
Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (Ghostbusters)?
Pizza the Hut, Space Balls?
 
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Fujuman

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My current WiP is a novella that features cooking and cuisine as a focal point. I am trying to figure out how the culinary arts might be affected by the magical arts.

I figure that some of the ingredients would be fantastic animals and plants, like mandragora or manticore. I also figure that spells might enhance the meat, or that alchemycan be utilized to properly cook food.

Do you ever have any suggestions for a writer trying to integrate magic and food?

I'd also think of what the atmospheric conditions of the world do to the soil. Do vegetables come out similar to ours, but with a tougher/softer consistency? One idea is to have write the magic like GMO tampering. Spells make the food bigger/ tastier. Hope that helps.
 

Conrad Adamson

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With magic you could add another flavor. Generally there is sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami/savory but with magic you could manipulate food to give the eater a sensation that doesn't otherwise exist. This would challenging to figure out how to work it into the story, as a new flavor would be like a color you have never seen before.
 

MisterFrancis

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As another recommendation, there are two short books called The Infernal City and Lord of Souls by Greg Keyes about a chef attempting to escape a daedric city by serving the best magical feast. Overall, the story is a bit hokey, but the magical cookery is maybe the most inventive I've seen food in fantasy.
 

AwP_writer

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One effect of magic could be as simple as more people can afford to eat better because magic has upped crop fertility and production significantly.
 

Masel

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Medieval recipe books and herbals go into the humors of foods: hot, cold, moist dry. The art of planning a meal was to balance the humors with each other and for what the guests might need. Cinnamon was hot and dry, cabbage was cold and moist for example.
 

thereeness

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I love this kinda stuff, since I'm both a food buff and a fantasy writer!

Everyone's had some great ideas and suggestions. I agree with different seasonings, magical cooking utensils, etc etc. and wanted to toss in some stuff in my own words. If they've been repeated before, my apologies!

I look at a lot of things when I think of cooking/food in my fantasy worlds. Of course I take heavily from the real world, but I also think of how magic can make things easier. Things like: earth magic enhancing flavors of spices/veggies/fruits/etc. or fire magic allowing for different heating techniques to be used all at once or knives that are enchanted to remain ever sharp, stuff of that nature. I also consider how magic would affect the person eating it. Again, I think Brightdreamer said something about people being allergic to magic food, but there's also "buff" type food, like in MMOs, where eating a certain food item increases your stamina or magic output, which I find also interesting.

But I think the biggest thing is how your fantasy culture understands/treats food. Food in every culture is different. To many, it represents family and tradition and a way to bring people together. I can also be about ritual or simplicity or whatever. Is food considered to be an important part of life, to where society has developed magics solely to use in the preparation/presentation of food? Is it thought of as an art form, where creativity and ostentatious flare is the main drawing point?

So many interesting things can be done with food and food rituals, cooking techniques and preparation, especially when magic's involved, that it's hard to narrow it down XD But I definitely think that figuring out how your fantasy society views food/cooking will help streamline things and maybe even inspire new ideas.

Good luck! :D (Now I'm hungry, haha.)
 

Princess Of Needles

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Imagine what kind of fad diets you would see in a magical world.
 

llawrence

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I see it affecting the flavor of non-magical foods.

If magic in your world costs money, then only the well-to-do can afford it. They won't be interested in paying for things like imported spices or other rare ingredients, or artisan chefs, or quality kitchen utensils, if they can get the job done with a sorcerer on retainer. Without the patronage of the wealthy to bring about economies of scale these other things kind of go away, which sadly makes them unavailable to the population at large. So if you’re one of the few who can afford a culinary sorcerer, great, swell, congratulations—you’ve got tasty food. If not... well, I guess it’s time for some more plain, unflavored gruel.

Eat it and like it, serf!
 

Cobalt Jade

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Imagine what kind of fad diets you would see in a magical world.

I can see a spell that numbs someone's sense of taste. That would cut down on eating real fast.