Cooking with Ursula K. Le Guin
February 19, 2018 1:19 PM   Subscribe

 
Hey, Eat Your Words is pretty great! I also like exceptinsects' 36 Eggs, found via their research AskMe.
posted by zamboni at 1:33 PM on February 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Yeah, was going to pop in and holler for exceptinsects; right up their alley.

Wonderful project. However, I take exception to the author's notion that a dried fish cake cannot be delicious. Source: extended married-into Italian and Japanese family. I'll trust that LeGuin knew what she was talking about. Source #2: personal experience. When you've been very cold and very hungry for an extended time, your frame of reference for "delicious" shifts. So now this feels like a challenge.
posted by Nancy_LockIsLit_Palmer at 1:42 PM on February 19, 2018


There are several actual recipes in Always Coming Home. They should do those!
posted by emjaybee at 1:57 PM on February 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


I'll read this as soon as I finish squeeing.
posted by Celsius1414 at 2:57 PM on February 19, 2018


I've had some salt dried cod based appetizers that were crazily delicious, though I admit the cod was rehydrated first.
posted by tavella at 3:56 PM on February 19, 2018


Wasn't there also some sort of tiny cube they ate in the tent? It became a bun when water was added, I think. It's been a while.
posted by Melismata at 4:07 PM on February 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've actually made at least one of the meals from Always Coming Home and it's awesome -- zucchini and eggplant with yogurt sauce and boiled potatoes and yum.
posted by allthinky at 4:17 PM on February 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


Oh, those fruit bars are way too edible and fresh to be gichy-michy. I mean, they look delicious and I know she's trying to cook food that people can actually make and eat.

I always pictured gichy-michy to be somewhere between a Datrex ration (think compressed cookie crumbs and fat) and maybe something like a magic, expanding weatabix or shredded wheat biscuit and also something like pemmican or suet withor some other extremely high fat food.

Gichy-michy would probably be something like 50% or more of fat, then some roughage, carbs, salt and sugar. If it expanded in volume with hot water like oats or noodles, it would warm, hydrate and take up more space in an empty belly. And if I'm recalling correctly, one of the key parts of it was that it could be eaten uncooked as is or cooked.

Actually, the Datrex ration is a pretty close existing real world thing to gichy-michy, because you actually add water to it and make a porridge or softer biscuit out of it, but you'd basically be eating soggy cookies. Datrex blue rations are about half or 1/4th the calorie density of what I'd imagine gichy-michy to be at about 2kcal/lb, and gichy-michy is described as being plenty for someone on the ice at 1 lb a day.

Which is a lot of calories. In extreme cold arctic or antarctic explorers and trekkers are looking at 15,000-20,000 kcals a day, so cramming 15,000 kcals into one pound is... possibly not possible to make and still be edible or digestible to humans? I mean, we could reason that a citizen of Karhide could make do with less calories than an Earth human, and that Ai is remarkable as a Ekumen contact agent, but, still.

Consider even a very meager and conservative 8,000-10,000 kcal per lb. A pound of pure lard is about 4,000 kcals. A pound of pure sugar is about 1700 kcals. Even a pound of pure ethanol is about 3200 kcal.

Speaking chemically, I'm not sure exactly what else could be remotely edible to human-like beings that actually manages to cram a strict 10,000-20,000 kcal diet for one day into one pound of matter that isn't... say, explosive or extremely flammable.

However, I take exception to the author's notion that a dried fish cake cannot be delicious.

Yeah, Japan would strongly disagree, where for starters there's katsuobushi which looks like and essentially is a block of wooden, moldy petrified fish before you shave it into delicious paper thin flakes and put it in everything from soup broth to noodles or right in your mouth. And I I could afford a slab of the real thing, I'd probably saw off a chunk to try to gnaw on like jerky.

Actually, I want some kind of katsuobushi lollipop or something on a stick like a dog chew for humans.

And if someone were to make some kind of dried smoke salmon fishcake I'd probably be all over it, especially if it resembled "yukon candy" or candied smoked salmon. I would eat that sweet-salty-umami flavor in basically any form from a dust-like powder to sprinkle into soups to compressed cakes made out of flakes to strips or slabs bigger than my head.
posted by loquacious at 6:08 PM on February 19, 2018 [7 favorites]


The article shies away from the most-mentioned food item in LHoD: the breadapple. I always assumed they were something like potatoes, or maybe a starchier form of Bramley apple.

As for gichy-michy: in my head it's a lot like Rey's bread from the beginning of The Force Awakens, and tastes a bit like miso. (I know that's weirdly specific.)
posted by Pallas Athena at 6:43 PM on February 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


Control-F gichy-michy. Ok.

Only I imagined it would be much more like pemmican, with a very high fat content. Don't they get melted in a pan at some point?
posted by glasseyes at 4:26 AM on February 20, 2018


"In extreme cold arctic or antarctic explorers and trekkers are looking at 15,000-20,000 kcals a day"

That's a little overstated -- it's more like half of that, but yes, still more calories than you can possibly pack into a single pound given even the most calorie-dense food, fat, is only 3,500 calories a pound.
posted by tavella at 8:54 AM on February 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


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