Memory Transcription Subject: David, Human Restaurateur
Date [standardized human time]: November 1, 2136
Chiri and I walked back inside, made up some obvious lie about having forgotten something on the boat, and the impromptu tea party continued without further incident. Helena peppered her new alien friend with all the silly little questions that meant the world to four year olds, requesting Chiri’s opinion on the subject of crayons and building blocks and cakes. That last topic, I made a few mental notes on, since sourcing a woman’s favorite desserts fell squarely under the responsibilities of a dutiful boyfriend. It had sounded like she was describing a spiced plum fritter? I could probably make something like that.
Eventually, we said our goodbyes. Sam and Helena wandered off to the playroom, Erin went back upstairs to process Chiri’s visa application, and Chiri and I shuffled into “the big car”, the one the family had purchased for ferrying around today’s groceries and tomorrow’s peewee field hockey teams.
“Where’s the steering wheel?” Chiri asked, staring at the dashboard in confusion.
“Next to the trebuchet,” I replied by reflex.
Chiri blinked. “Huh?”
I chuckled. “Sorry, couldn’t resist. Most cars are fully autonomous these days. You just put in the destination, and the computer handles the rest. Driving is more of a hobbyist thing, like the boat.”
Chiri seemed happy enough for the moment watching some examples of intact human mass-market architecture fly by through the window, so I started researching what to make. “Computer, show me authentic Yotul recipes.”
The AI companion chirped a complaint. “I’m sorry, I can’t provide that information. The U.N. Department of Alien Affairs would like to remind you that joking about cooking and eating allied species is not appropriate.”
My jaw dropped. “Motherfucker, I meant authentic recipes from Leirn.”
“Understood,” the AI said impassively, but still chirped a complaint. “No results found. The U.N. data exchange with Leirn’s internet is not scheduled to be processed until later this month. Would you like to be notified when this information is uploaded?”
I sighed. “Sure,” I said, shaking my head in frustration.
I turned to Chiri instead. “Heyyy, so--”
“Absolutely not.” Chiri held her paws up. “I have literally never met a Yotul before, and everything I’ve ever heard about them was just someone older than me being extraordinarily racist.”
“Right. They would have been uplifted when you were like, what, seven?” I said, quickly doing the math. “Not a lot of time for much more than gossip to spread to nearby homeworlds. Still, maybe you’ve heard something. What’s the Yotuls’ favorite food?”
“Their own shit.”
“Chiri!”
She leaned her head against the window. “I just said that all I have on them is hearsay and slander!” She sighed, and thought deeper. “Okay. One of the stories my dad tossed around as an example of why the Yotul are ‘just far too primitive to be allowed to have a say in their own culture’ or whatever is a recent historical event called the Grain Wars. So I guess it stands to reason that they like grain?”
I shrugged. Who didn’t? “I guess I could do like a nice pita wrap.” I explored the idea in my head quickly. “Yeah… Fluffy chewy flatbread with different sauces and fillings. I could pre-prep the fillings like stews, and keep a couple different chafing dishes going, and then ladle it out onto fresh bread. That’d let me serve it up quickly, since it’s just me in the kitchen.”
Chiri nodded. “Your bread and stew is pretty great. Loved breakfast this morning.”
“Thanks! Did you like the tea and cookies?” I asked, as we pulled into the parking lot.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sweets are sweets. The tea was way more… I dunno, earthy and tannic than I expected, but I liked it. Dark and deep.” She looked up at the giant warehouse-sized brick of a building. “So they sell food here?”
“They sell everything here,” I said.
“Bioprinters?” said Chiri, smirking and suddenly sitting up.
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, and the answer is still no. We’re mostly here for ingredients, but like… we can probably get you kitted out a bit. Couple changes of clothes, maybe a holopad? What happened to yours, by the way?”
Chiri sank into her seat. “Lost it during the evacuation,” she muttered. “Tried to text and flee at the same time. Stupid fucking move.”
I shrugged. “Shit happens. Can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same, if it came down to it. In any case, I’m sure one of the Terran models will work with your cute little paw pads. Then we’re just a software update away from having it in your language.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Chiri stared at her paws in confusion, muttering the baffled word “Cute?” at the lower edge of hearing.
I grabbed a cart, which would have been more at home in a warehouse than a supermarket. The store was both in many ways. Pallets of bulk goods stretched from the floor to the rafters. Fifty pound bags of rice, five gallon jugs of olive oil, number ten cans of tomatoes… wholesale stores were the pinnacle of good old American Excess. Poor Sifal would have had another existential crisis. Chiri’s eyes just drank it all in with a look of awe. The labels would have been gibberish to her, but pictures of strange Earthling fruits, beans, and stalks of grain were self-explanatory.
She laughed giddily. “Ha! Behold, proof of the relentless hunger of the savage predator!” She patted a nearby sack of lentils. “Gods, this thing is bigger than a Zurulian! And it’s, what, a type of bean?”
“Yup. This is just the dry goods section,” I noted. “I wanna get some seasonings, but we’re mostly here for fresh produce. We’ll probably be back for these, but I’d rather not cart something that large around until I know what I’m making.”
Chiri nodded, and followed me over to produce. Huge open fridges with automatic misters kept leafy greens crisp and bright. Giant displays of fruit and squash and root vegetables practically overflowed out of their containers.
“I want to try all of these,” Chiri said, with stars in her eyes. “Seriously, how do you have this many different types of vegetables? I haven’t seen this kind of variety outside of a spaceport!”
I laughed. “We get bored easily. Have you heard of heirloom varieties? Every once in a while, someone gets bored of, say, tomatoes,” I said, pointing at one of the few she’d already tasted, “so they go back to the old pre-industrial cultivars and see if any of those were good, just to change things up. Then, sometimes farmers start crossbreeding them to make even new and weirder varieties. That’s why I wanted to show you our orchards. I swear, it’s like someone invents a new apple every couple of years.” I pointed at a nearby display. “This one actually used GMO techniques to splice in certain aromatic production genes from cinnamon and nutmeg trees to make it grow pre-spiced. It tastes like an apple pie right off the branch.”
Chiri bit her lip hungrily, and I added a few to the cart. “Alright, we gotta stay focused, though,” I said. “I need to figure out what’s going to go over well for an alien palate, and I know you’re not a Yotul, but you’re the advisor I’ve got. Let me pitch you some ideas, and you can tell me if I’m on the right track.”
Chiri nodded. “Sure. I get to try them, right?”
“Of course! I’m going to be spending the next week or so refining the dishes until they’re perfect. You’ll get to try them all a lot.” I picked up an eggpla--aubergine, and held it out to her. “Dish number one: Baingan Bharta, from India. Fire roast the aubergine, mash it, add spices and tomato and chickpeas. The end result is savory and tangy. Very filling and chunky because of the aubergine mash.”
Chiri nodded. “Hearty, loud flavors. Sounds great. What else?”
I glanced around, trying to decide what else jumped out at me. I picked up another option in purple. “Beets. Sweet and tangy by root vegetable standards. There’s a popular stew from eastern Europe called Borscht. Normally, it has meat in it for savoriness, but most of the flavor from the dish itself comes from the vegetables. I could probably work on a meatless variant.”
“Don’t mention the original dish if the translator’s going to bring up meat,” she said. “But yeah, sweet and tangy root vegetables sound good.” Chiri went quiet for a moment. Her face scrunched up, visibly thinking. “Hey, uhh…” she started, “stop me if this is a weird line of inquiry, but like… you mention savory a lot. You said meat was savory. Are most human dishes, even the vegan ones, chasing that flavor profile?”
I took a long moment to self-reflect. I’d had a certain line of thought before, all the way back when I worked at that Southeast Asian restaurant, of what made a dish a “meal”, as opposed to a side dish or an appetizer. It had come up in conversation that some of the other chefs in that kitchen had different thoughts on the subject than I did. In that whole swath of the continent of Asia, across dozens of national, religious, and linguistic boundaries, the answer was generally “rice”. A dish became a meal when it was served with rice.
And then I’d have a laugh about how ridiculous that sounded, but then, because I’m me, I’d immediately check my own ass to make sure my own cultural supra-cluster wasn’t making the same mistake.
So, uh, bad news.
It turns out I could count off all the common Western dishes that didn’t revolve around meat, dairy, or eggs without running out of fingers and toes, and even most of the exceptions took savoriness as presumed. You practically couldn't serve a basic platter of spaghetti marinara in New York City without half your diners asking where the meatballs were. Conceptually, a meal just wasn’t really a meal unless it had meat in it, or at the very least tasted like meat.
Even mentally heading back to Asia wasn’t much of an escape from the savory onslaught. The most fundamental, basic Chinese stir-fry seasoning--the kind you could throw on everything from pork fried rice to green beans--was, what, ginger, garlic, and green onion, plus Shaoxing cooking wine and… two different types of soy sauce for savoriness. Hell, the first thing I thought of when I got in here was to start stocking up on umami boosters: ingredients and seasonings that could make dishes more savory, since that was the main thing to worry about when cooking vegan dishes, right? A lack of savoriness?
“I think you might be right,” I said aloud. “Bit of a meat-centricity to how I’m thinking about this. I might be getting tunnel vision again. What about in the Federation? Do they do a lot of other types of flavors?”
“Sweet,” Chiri said immediately. “Total sugar addicts. Maybe not a dessert, necessarily, but if you can work some sweeter flavors into the stews, they’ll probably be popular. Some sour and bitter flavors wouldn’t be off the mark, either.”
I started brainstorming some ideas for sweeter dishes, as I loaded a few ingredients onto my cart. Plantains and pumpkins and the like. I even grabbed a few bushels of leafy greens in the hopes of conjuring up something in the tangy and herbaceously bitter realms. Maybe I could make a fresh pesto or chimichurri style of sauce? Oh, and did they sell bitter melon here, or did I need to hit up a specialty store for--
“David,” Chiri said stiffly. “Everyone’s staring at us.”
I looked up, and saw… well, every human in the produce area looking directly at us, and unless produce was unusually popular today, about half the humans who’d previously been elsewhere in the store. Some of them had their phones out, recording us for social media. I smiled and gave a polite wave. “Eh, don’t worry, they just haven’t seen an alien before.”
Chiri waved as well, politely. She seemed nervous at being the center of attention. Me, I was used to it. I liked being the center of attention. I was more nervous about whether or not I’d just been caught on video violating Emergency Order 56 by talking a bit too glibly about meat with a Gojid.