Grilled Squid and Peanut Butter

Originally posted in the OSR Pit.


The anime Food Wars is about a highly competitive, iron chef-esque Japanese culinary high school. It’s funny, engaging, clever, mouth-watering, dramatic, sexy, basically all of the things I like.

The main character, Yukihira Soma, is in some ways a very stereotypical shonen anime character, but there is one characteristic about him that I feel is unique, and speaks to the intelligence of this show.

He likes to experiment; combining ingredients that make absolutely no sense together, that are even viscerally disgusting. And, he doesn’t really care whether or not it works. There is value in the exploration and experimentation, even if the end result cannot possibly succeed, because he understands the fundamental components of cooking and can meaningfully apply these speculations.

And so, he makes grilled squid and peanut butter.

This is how I think about genre conventions.

I can respect a well-realized but otherwise basic setting, and I can even see the logic in conforming to these conventions. Game of Thrones, for instance, is about political machinations and grand drama, at a level of depth which would be difficult to do in a very Weird setting; in this case, it makes sense to keep it mostly low fantasy, and mostly traditional fantasy where it’s supernatural at all.

Likewise, I can understand the logic of less is more; of using a mostly mundane setting to accentuate one very Weird idea, and explore that well. As much as I love the Lovecraft Mythos, creators often struggle to make it work to the same effect when integrated into an already overloaded, high-power fantasy setting. Or similarly, taking something that is well understood, and subverting it in some very clever way, like the comic book Rat Queens which juxtaposes modern sensibilities with traditional fantasy to positive effect.

But for me, I like Weird, Gonzo, Pulp. I want a million ideas jam-packed together, that don’t really make sense and don’t pretend that they do. That is fundamentally different in some critical way, intentionally or not, as the sum of its parts or at the level of its parts, than anything that has come before. There is an art to all of those cases I describe above, but there is also an art to doing something truly Weird, genre-defying, and unapologetically unrestrained, and those are the works that most inspire me and that I strive to create.

Sometimes those ideas work and sometimes they don’t, and it’s important to understand why. I’m willing to acknowledge when an idea doesn’t work, or when I think it failed to work because of something I did or didn’t do that is ancillary to the core idea itself.

These ideas require more buy-in from the audience. I can’t leverage your preconceived notions of orcs and elves, or colonial marines, or whatever else the case may be. That means I have to do more to earn that buy-in, to pique the interest of the reader, to express the core concepts coherently, or have such compelling ideas that even without context they are engaging. It also means the ideas themselves have to be better. All of this, when the audience for something of that sort may not even be that large. Some people just want orcs and elves, and there’s not anything I’m going to be able to do about that.

So, sometimes, I create something that I know can’t possibly work, something like Grilled Squid and Peanut Butter, just to see what happens. 9 times out of 10 I am more interested in an ambitious idea that fails, than a safe idea that succeeds.

But also, there is a difference between throwing random shit together or making over-ambitious hypotheses out of ignorance, and doing so because you understand the things you’re doing and want to understand them better.

That’s where the brilliance of Yukihira Soma comes into play. He understands flavor profiles and cooking methods, he understands Grilled Squid and also Peanut Butter, and where they work and where they don’t and why, but he chooses to experiment anyway, just to see if there’s anything he missed, some emergent, inconceivable phenomena, that would make it delicious. Or that still fails, but that he might take with him to another recipe.

So I will end with a food idea. The next time you make pancakes or waffles, mix some soy sauce into your maple syrup; 2 parts maple syrup to 1 part soy sauce, or to your own taste. You can even very briefly boil or simmer them together to get some more caramel-y notes. Some people completely balk at this concoction, but the mix of sweet and salty, and especially these two with rich, complex notes, is wonderful. Not just the saltiness, but also the umami of the soy sauce, combines so well with the sweetness of the maple syrup. It’s even better than salted caramel, or like the sauce of mitarashi dango.