The Lost Art of Cooking

[cmdr_zoom]

(in which a science officer explains her strange hobby.)


"The thing about replicated food is that it's always exactly the same. The original pattern may have been prepared by a master chef, and chosen by a panel of experts... but every copy is identical, right down to the molecule. And even the perfect dish can lose a little of its flavor when you've eaten it a hundred times.

Cooking, even with a recipe to follow, is unpredictable. Maybe another few grains of salt will fall from the shaker, or you'll stir something forty-eight times instead of fifty, or decide to use fresh paprika. Maybe your oven's running a little hot that day. Maybe one of your guests can't eat iron-blooded meat and you have to substitute and improvise. Maybe a lettuce leaf will fall this way instead of that. It's controlled chaos, an equation full of variables... a reminder that for all we try to understand and define and tame the universe around us, there's still that element of uncertainty.

It's also delicious. And if sometimes it's a little less delicious, a little overdone or too spicy, that's what you get for taking chances."


(those of you who personally know me, and how little I am into cooking RL, will appreciate how much of this is roleplaying. ;)

Comments

[kireishojo.livejournal.com]

Well written.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :)

[meagenimage.livejournal.com]

Cooking is awesome. It's making delicious with SCIENCE.

[seawasp]

But of course a real replicator technology would simply add some cook-based random (or not so random) factors, so that in fact the stuff WOULDN'T be exactly the same. That's certainly the way it works in Grand Central Arena; your AIWish is loaded with templates, but it can vary the templates according to a number of parameters. :)

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

I had that in mind as well, but no real good place to put it. ;)

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Trek replicators are based on transporters, and what you get out of a transporter is identical to what (once) went into one. Usually.

"I asked for one chocolate sundae, and got two. I suspect that one of them... is EVIL."

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

"Enterprise... what we got back... didn't taste very good."

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Pineapple Upside-Down Cake is one thing; Inside-Out Cake is something else entirely.

(One gets the Master Chief dropped on his head, the other... "hold, please.")

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

(pan between two glass sundae bowls, one of which contains only a couple of scoops of ice cream - or maybe even ice milk - while the other is piled high with hot fudge, brownies, etc. and creepily underlit)

"But how can we tell?"