THE COOKBOOK TEST #0018: DELICIOUS IN DUNGEON

INSTALLMENT #0018 (FREE) / MONSTROUS COOKING / COUGHING AND TEA

Dear Readers,

This edition is a bit of an oddball. Normally I tackle a cookbook, new or vintage, and deconstruct and review it while cooking some its recipes. This week: a visit with a popular manga, the DELICIOUS IN DUNGEON series. I've had the first four volumes laying around the house for a couple of years, but the series attained a new bump of popularity as the anime version hit Netflix last Thursday night.

Delicious in Dungeon wins points immediately by having a name that quickly spells out the intent of the series. The books follow the travels of a group of adventurers delving into a hazardous, monster-choked underworld in search of treasure (and a missing member of their team), sustaining themselves (and balancing their outfitting budget) by eating the monsters that they kill. A fortuitous encounter with a dwarven adventurer named Senshi in volume one puts the whole conceit into motion - he quickly puts party leader Laios's ideas about eating dungeon denizens into practice.

The thing that makes Delicious in Dungeon really work is that it commits to the details. Anyone could come up with the idea of cooking a hot pot dish using a giant scorpion and a walking mushroom. (Well, maybe not anyone, but it's at least a fairly accessible concept.) Kui breaks down the process to get at the really gritty bits: score the scorpion body so that the meat cooks more readily and evenly, take out the innards (which are edible but bitter, and serve more readily as a fermented beer snack), and omit the tail (which tends to give people the runs.) Seaweed, dried slime monster, walking mushroom toes, water and seasoning finish out the dish, which provides a mix of vitamins, minerals, and lean energy to dungeon divers. 

Very little of what's cooked within Delicious in Dungeon is attainable in real-world supermarkets, but the logic and detail of its nose-to-tail cooking is clear as day and elegantly written.

The books are a fantastic compilation of cooking technique, fantasy setting notwithstanding - you'll go from mashing to mincing to frying to butterflying to fermenting to roasting to skewering to poaching within a matter of pages as Laios and his team eat their way through the underworld. The books are written with a light touch - there's life and death combat with the supernatural, sure, but also a fair bit of physical comedy, and resourcefulness that ranges from using a burning oil trap to cook a tempura-style meal to blocking dragon's breath with a cooking pot.

I write a lot in THE COOKBOOK TEST about the difference between cooks and bakers, or between cooking by the book versus cooking from the soul. I'm a baker, and I cook by the book, and I don't apologize for that, but I also appreciate my counterparts and their more intuition-guided efforts in the kitchen. Delicious in Dungeon is really a tribute to the soul-guided cooks out there, as its recipes are fantasies, made up on the fly by adventurers working within tremendous constraints and guided by wildly spirited intuition. It's unlikely that you'll ever have to cook a basilisk or vegetables grown in an earth golem, but that isn't a reason to avoid Delicious in Dungeon - they're as inspiring as anything I've come across in terms of igniting love for making it up as you go along, guided only by ingredients, experience, and instinct.

COUGHING AND TEA

I have had a cough for the past two months. Or has it been three months? The history of my malady is getting more abstract - the next time I really care to dwell on my cough's lifespan is when we celebrate its first birthday, this coming autumn.

The experience has given me all of my least-favorite coughs:

The Turbo-Charged Cough where you cough and then somehow start a second cough without inhaling, and essentially empty your lungs of all their contents;

The Laugh-Cough where any real, joy-bringing laugh you might experience is cut short by unavoidable respiratory distress;

The Boa Constrictor Cough where you keep coughing, deeper and deeper into your lungs until you cannot breathe, and then continue coughing.

Nothing I do really seems to move the needle on this thing, so I've mostly given up on "recovery" and moved on to "coping." I bought the 250-drop sized container of Honey Lemon Halls drops. I take Nyquil "Nuke 'em All" strength before going to bed. And I have been leaning extra hard on one of my regular favorite things to do during the winter months: drinking tea.

I've gone through a long tour of different tea styles over the years, starting with my childhood favorite (a teabag of Lipton with sugar and milk, sugar and milk added first) to Japanese green and jasmine teas, gunpowder teas, quality Earl Grays, white tea, local herbal teas, pu-erh and just about everything in between. I have landed on this: commodity grade black tea with sugar and milk, sugar and milk added first. I find that if I go to any given Russian, Turkish, or Indian market, I can get about a pound of black loose leaf tea for around $10. That yields about 100-150 cups, at a price so low I'd be crazy not to drink it.

My son gave me a Christmas present this year, an open-topped teapot for one. It's a much more beautiful preparation method than my go-to (a teaball) but it does let the water cool down a bit in the four minutes that I let it steep. That means my first taste of tea is Very Very Hot instead of my traditional go-to, which is Actually Boiling. I am adjusting to the new normal, however, as I like the way the teapot looks and using it is kind of pleasant unto itself.

at your service,

James