Food Writing — of the Speculative Fiction Variety
Food is its own form of communication and likely the oldest medium of human culture and creativity. As such, food is a key part of fictional worlds, making them feel more real and lived in. Although it is mostly in the background, food plays an important role in Broken Tongues. It signals social status; it conveys courtship, play, and nurturing; it helps repressed ethnic groups maintain emotional ties to their homelands and transmit their cultures to new friends and family; and sometimes it becomes a tool for the authoritarian state to monitor and control people.
Alu-Bel, the capital city, is a garden paradise where every public square is filled with towering trees for shade, but also fruit trees and gardens of greens for public use. As a runaway, Alaki is able to get plenty of fruits and vegetables from the gardens, but the only source of available protein is the tasteless, government-issued staple nutrient packs ey remembers from early childhood with a working class single father. So when ey lucks into finding an illegal speakeasy, Nuhu the cook’s rich, synth-lamb stew helps it feel like a new home.
When Bassat goes home to see her critically injured mother, she turns to a story about her favorite comfort foods of passion fruit and chocolate ice cream in search of the illusion of normalcy.
Given the importance of food in both our writing and our lives, once we had the draft of Broken Tongues ready to send out to agents, we decided to thank our spouses for dealing with us through all this by cooking them a meal drawn out of the book, featuring the aforementioned lamb stew and passion fruit ice cream. The food came out better than we could have hoped for, so we wanted to share the recipes.
Bassat’s Passion Fruit Ice Cream
Bassat’s father looks up in surprise from his chair near a hospital bed as Bassat enters the room. Bassat has a hard time naming all the emotions that cycle across his face: shock and excitement and sadness and something else that’s strong and stony and stunned. He looks pale, like he hasn’t washed his hair or slept well in days. His clothes are wrinkled and somehow they look like they don’t fit right. To Bassat’s alarm, tears well up in his eyes, and then start to spill down his cheeks, unchecked. Bassat has never seen her papa like this, and she simultaneously feels like running away and tumbling into his arms. She tumbles into her father’s arms. She rests there for several heartbeats or a lifetime.
After a while standing like this, her papa straightens up. He pulls away a bit, while still holding Bassat’s head as if he wants to keep it close to his chest. “You're early. How was your trip?” Bassat has never talked with her papa via implant before, at least not in the same room. His cool and collected thought voice calms her down and makes her feel safer.
“It was good.” Bassat searches her memory for the fun parts of her trip. “The train had an ice cream vendor. I bought passion fruit and fig and then there was a little kid who bought chocolate and she traded me part of her chocolate for part of my passion fruit. And in my train car there was a man with this HUGE hat, it was extending way out past his body, like an old-fashioned farmer or something, and the woman beside him was obviously really annoyed with him and she kept making faces at him that he didn’t see, or at least he pretended he didn’t. Then someone opened the door and there was a big wind and it blew his hat off his head into her face and she made a little scream and stomped out of the car. And another kid and I laughed a lot and then the man winked…”
Bassat’s thought trails off as she finally looks over at the hospital bed. She had been avoiding it. Talking calmed her down, though, and her eyes found the courage to meander over on their own.
In this passage, food provides an escape. Talking about eating ice cream on the train gives ten-year-old Bassat a way to reassure both herself and her father by pretending to a happy, childlike normalcy while visiting her critically injured mother in the hospital.
It turns out that passion fruit ice cream is one of both Erica’s and Lilith’s favorite things ever. This no-churn ice cream uses chunks of passion fruit, packaged in one-centimeter cubes which, at least in Ames, you can find in the freezer section of Target (no, there are no Targets in Belite culture, but sometimes great art requires compromise). We like tart flavors, so if you favor sweetness, consider adding a third of a cup of sugar to both the ice cream and the sauce.
No-Churn Passion Fruit Ice Cream:
Ingredients:
16 oz by weight or about 3 cups of frozen passion fruit chunks
One can of sweetened condensed milk
Two cups of heavy whipping cream, very cold (you can put it in the freezer to get it cold)
Directions:
In a blender, puree together the passion fruit chunks and sweetened condensed milk.
In a large bowl, whip the heavy cream until it forms stiff peaks, approximately three minutes.
Add the blended passion fruit mixture to the bowl and mix again until combined.
Pour into freezer containers and freeze for at least six hours.
Drizzle passion fruit sauce on top and enjoy!
Passion Fruit Sauce:
Ingredients:
8 oz by weight defrosted passion fruit chunks
1 cup of sugar
2 tsp cornstarch, dissolved in 1 cup of water
A pinch of salt
Directions:
In blender, puree the passion fruit chunks.
Heat passion fruit blend, sugar, and salt in a saucepan.
After it’s boiling, add the cornstarch/water mixture and boil for a few minutes until slightly thickened.
Chill and serve!
Nuhu’s Lamb Stew
Alaki hangs out watching the first speakeasy patrons filter in: beautifully dressed, laughing, arms about each other, leaning on each other. Maybe they’ve already been drinking. The wall panel between the library and the bar’s main room is open, and Alaki stands just inside the library entry, separated from the patrons, repeating eir poem silently, trying to work up the nerve to perform.
It’s hard to believe how eir world has changed in two weeks: from the suffocating hallways of the Royal Academy, trapped in the perpetual indoors of the Tower’s manicured parks, to the soot and free-flowing air of plazas and the gorgeous people and glamorous art and exotic literature of Sabu’s bar.
Maybe ey should go out and sit at a table, but eir stomach knots at the thought. Looking for something to do, Alaki asks if the bartender needs help. Muttu shakes his head and waves distractedly towards the kitchen. Nuhu grunts at em to stir an oversized pot – a huge vat of stew fragrant with aniseed and raisins and dried apricots, chunks of potato and lamb bobbing out of the broth. It’s delicious, Alaki knows from first-hand experience.
Ey stays in the kitchen for half an hour or so, stirring, making salads, and cutting bread for Nuhu, then wanders back to the library. Yalatu’s sitting there, looking at some books, her and another kid Alaki’s seen in the afternoons at the bar. They smile, but Alaki isn’t sure what to say. A patron comes in and Yalatu and the other kid say something to them about a new book and a Lisankubim raid. But Alaki isn’t listening, because Tia just entered.
What will she think of eir poem? Alaki doesn’t understand why she is so nice to em, but is increasingly convinced she will lose all interest in hanging out with em at the speakeasy when she hears it. What possessed Alaki to think ey could write?
A few minutes later, the lights dim and Sabu stands up in the center to greet people. Laughter rolls through the audience. Alaki even chuckles a bit. Sabu is good at making people feel at home. On the other side of the spotlight, Alaki sees dimly that Tia is at a table with four other people and feels a twinge of regret that ey won’t get to sit with her.
Sabu closes his speech with some good news. “You’ll all be glad to know that I finally got permits to operate as a legal establishment. It’s amazing what can be accomplished with a little perseverance and an obscene amount of money in the right palms. That’s why we let you keep your implants on tonight, but be careful! I promise those blighted Lisankubim are monitoring everything we cast here tonight.” As Sabu steps offstage, Alaki narrowcasts him asking to perform, not pausing to think. Sabu’s message comes back jocular and warm: “Oh ho ho! I’m looking forward to it.”
Nothing like the comfort of food to calm the nerves and put one at ease, at least for a while. Maybe if Alaki had stopped to eat a bowl of Nuhu’s wonderful stew rather than just stir it meditatively, ey would have been able to hold on to that calm long enough to read eir poem… No, that doesn’t seem likely, but at least it helped keep em calm enough to put eirself out there.
Erica wrote the stew description in this scene, and Lilith’s first response when reading it was to message Erica - “now I want lamb stew.” This is a recipe slightly adapted from one that Lilith’s wife, Liz, came across at some point and both of them thought it was good enough that she wrote it down in their kitchen recipe book. The original recipe didn’t have the apricots, anise, or raisins, so some adjustment to match the scene was needed, and they turned out to be excellent adjustments, though we skipped the raisins.
Ingredients: (it’s a long list, but it’s really pretty easy)
2 lbs lamb, cut into cubes, salt well at least 2 hours before cooking. (boneless stew meat is easier, but bone in is tastier if you don’t mind removing chunks of bone once cooked)
1 lb parsnips, peeled and cut to 1” chunks
1 large Sweet Potato, cut into 1½” chunks
2 sticks celery cut into 1” slices
2 onions, thick cut
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tablespoon cumin, toasted and ground
1 Tablespoon coriander
½ teaspoon allspice (fresh ground is best, but powder is fine)
1 ½ cup beef broth
15 oz diced tomato
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 3” cinnamon stick
8 oz dried apricots
4 pods star anise
2 dried arbol chilies
¼ cup almonds, toasted and ground
Juice and zest of ½ lemon
2 ½ cups water
2 cups couscous
¼ cup fresh parsley
Directions:
Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a cast iron skillet, Brown the lamb and then transfer to slow cooker.
Saute parsnips, sweet potato, celery, and onion until light brown and tender, 5-6 min.
Stir in garlic, cumin, coriander, and allspice, let cook for 1 more minute and then transfer to slow cooker.
Add broth to skillet and scrape, add to slow cooker.
Add tomato, black pepper, cinnamon, apricots, anise and chili to slow cooker.
Cook 6-8 hours on low.
When stew is done, mix almond, lemon zest and lemon juice in a bowl, Remove the cinnamon stick and star anise from the stew and stir in almond mix. Cook for 15 more minutes.
Add 1Tb olive oil to 2 ½ cups water and bring to a boil. Stir in couscous, remove from heat and let sit for 5 min.
Serve stew over couscous and garnish with parsley.
After all that food talk, it’s a good thing we’re doing a double family dinner tonight! We hope you enjoy these recipes, next week we’ll be sharing a background myth from the world of Broken Tongues. Until then, have a great week!
Lilith and Erica