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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: This is a cookbook in the form of a science fiction story and/or a science fiction story in the form of a cookbook--a treatise on how to cook like a human being written by an alien for aliens. But it will show humans too how to cook almost any form of human cuisine in a few thousand words and roll your own too. Really. I once did this for Chinese cuisine in a magazine in an article much shorter than this. Try it. If aliens can do it, so can you.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Sinning in Sevens, ed. Silvana Moreira and Antonio de Macedo, 1999
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2007

8 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [42 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [42 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [27 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [186 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [30 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [84 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [97 KB] , hiebook (KML) [92 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [57 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [24 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [31 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [59 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [44 KB]
Words: 8757
Reading time: 25-35 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Introduction

Most beings, sapient or otherwise, must eat. What they eat, in terms of raw materials, is determined by the requirements of their evolved biochemistry. Most species intelligent enough to have developed even the rudiments of a fire and tool using culture prepare, preserve, and combine these ingredients in a self-conscious manner.

It may be as rude and simple as charring animal parts over an open fire, allowing vegetables to ferment under controlled conditions, smoking, pickling, or drying victuals in order to preserve them for future use, or rotting them with bacteria or fungus, but the preparation of food, implying as it does at least the mastery of fire and the use of tools, has long been regarded as a universal criterion of sapience.

The point at which such food preparation attains the status of cuisine, like the point at which a species may be said to have evolved a true civilization, is more elusive of definition, and indeed the argument has often been made that they are one and the same.

While some strictly carnivorous or entirely vegetarian species have evolved both cuisine and civilization, it is generally fair to say that cuisine begins with the combination of ingredients. Meat and vegetable matter(if only for flavoring)or different species of vegetation are combined in the same dish, melded via heat, decomposition, or chemical processes to produce a whole which tastes different than the sum of its parts, and voila, cuisine, civilized dining, and with it civilization, are invented.

The point at which rudimentary cuisine attains the status of a true artform is a matter of critical judgment on the part of the diner, or, as the inhabitants of Earth themselves have it, "one man's meat is another man's poison."

Nevertheless, all civilized beings, given a sufficient degree of biochemical congruence, can recognize artful cuisine when they taste it, and within the fraternity of galactic gourmets, the cuisine of the planet Earth has certainly attained this status.

Indeed a certain mania for La Cuisine Humaine has been sweeping the galaxy ever since the recent discovery of the humans' otherwise not-terribly-noteworthy civilization, resulting in many pleasurable new dining experiences, but also, alas, the prevalence of all too many misconceived and loathsome concoctions that the humans themselves would rightly consider vile desecrations.

This cookbook, prepared after several months on Earth sampling its fare and discussing culinary matters with both master chefs and a sampling of ordinary humans is a modest attempt to remedy this unfortunate situation.

Since the humans have published thousands upon thousands of vast volumes of recipe books down through the centuries, the present work can hardly pretend to be definitive. What is instead presented here is an introductory work designed to initiate the neophyte into the philosophy, principles, and working methods of La Cuisine

Humaine, rather than a definitive compilation of recipes.

It may not produce chefs to match the human masters, but hopefully it will at least allow its readers to more or less cook like human beings.