Was brainstorming dishes for a formal banquet in a space opera set 7000 centuries hence, with a bunch of genengineered animals/crops and a buggy LLM translating the story into today's English (so there are no smeerps, only "rabbits").
So far I have:
Azhdarchid biryani
Microquetzal sashimi
(NB: yes they've been resurrecting extinct dinosaur analogues and eating them.)
Any suggestions for posh nobles showing off their kitchen?
Creatures bioengineered with spice glands so they get the deepest possible marinade
The medieval thing where you roast a bird and serve it with its feathers back on?
There’s an amazing luxurious macaroni dish in in Lampedusa’s _The Leopard _, but it’s hard to make moderns hear that as fancy..,
If you can forcefeed a goose to get foie gras, you can probably do that to a dinosaur.
There will be some equivalent of ortolans, eaten whole. Something like a small octopus, flashing chromatophores madly as it is eaten while alive. And if these folks have cloning or autowomb technology, why not go full Swiftian?
@cstross @GinevraCat Charles Phoenix invented the turducken of desserts, the Cherpumple, which is a cherry pie, pumpkin pie, and apple pie, each embedded in cakes, with the cake layers stacked atop each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherpumple
I am reminded of an SF short story I read many years ago which was all about the very rich and very cruel dining on very rare animals.
@adamrice @GinevraCat It's been done—for real: in 1870 during the Siege of Paris, they slaughtered the zoo animals and dined on them.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/paris-siege-eating-zoo-animals
@adamrice @cstross @GinevraCat The middle layer has inspired me on the dodgy alien AI translation front...
Some kind of terrible cock up between a Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte and the Swartschild radius of a black hole resulting in a culinary technique that creates spiralised super-dense dessert spaghettis using a tiny black hole in a branded appliance every noble simply must have or their chef quits.
Serving suggestion: spinning psychic cutlery in the style of Red Dwarf VI, Ep 2, Legion
@cstross ah. the classic off by two orders of magnitude problem...
Have they tried raising humans for food ?
@cstross Veblen’s laws remain valid in the far future, so it would have to be a species that is both threatened with extinction but also impossible to reconstruct (otherwise there is no scarcity value). Substances that are expensive to collect in our time due to labor costs like saffron or vanilla won’t be when robots are commonplace.
I predict some entrepreneurs will find a solution to the problem of supplying Veblen foodstuffs by using intellectual property law to create the artificial scarcity. Cloned human meat of celebrities who granted an exclusive license to their DNA would be a suitably ghoulish option.
Liger tartine (fresh not vat-grown, for the truly fancy)
@Gorfram @cstross @vincenzovin7
Correct answer. 3:O)>
My father told me about the time his uncle[1,2] returned from a stint in the French Foreign Legion with some tins of cheese similar to that... _Nobody_ would try it, and apparently he eventually ate it all himself.
[1] Polish army, possibly reserves - apparently serving with foreign (friendly) armies was common at the time (early 1930s).
[2] Reached the rank of Major, and ended up somewhere in a forest (Katyn).
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