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eBook Category: Humor/Fantasy
eBook Description: Have you ever had one of those days when everything just seems to go … right? Even when it's wrong? "Primordial Chili" is a laugh-out-loud thrill-ride of culinary perfection, taken to cosmic proportions. The planets align, the gods speak, and supper turns out pretty good, too.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Science Fiction Age, ed. Scott Edelman, 1999
Fictionwise Release Date: April 2002

133 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [22 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [30 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [8 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [46 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [8 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [61 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [80 KB] , hiebook (KML) [49 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [33 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [7 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [9 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [37 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [15 KB]
Words: 2513
Reading time: 7-10 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

"Brilliant. 'Primordial Chili' is as delightful a debut story as I can recall."--Mike Resnick

It was the best pot of chili ever. Really. In the history of this or any other universe.

In the first place, there was magic garlic. Fadrinski didn't know it was magic; he just picked it up one afternoon while snooping through the produce section of Butson's Family Market. But it was magic just the same--magic, self-peeling, all big-cloved garlic from the fields of the fourteenth Bard of Quangarla, a secret society in the midst of the streets of Yalta, so secret, in fact, that the other members didn't even know they were members. But the Bard, who traveled daily to his fields by cab, was well schooled in the ancient art of garlic growing. He was a genius, a master, and in possession of the hallowed Runes of Dunderhans, which, when chanted over with the thirteen sacred philosophies of Rudolf the Curious, imparted to the plants and their pungent roots a flavor so refined and elegant and perfect as to be the very essence of garlic. Anyone eating of this plant would not only experience the taste sensation of a lifetime, but would be (afterwards) unpopular in elevators for weeks.

Then, too, there were the tomatoes. Fadrinski got them in the same produce section as the garlic, but, brought into the supermarket that morning on an eighteen wheeler, they had not come from California, as the writing on their box proclaimed, but had fallen through a freak wormhole in space from the dimension of Zanng, where the tomato (or at least, a fruit that grows on many of the worlds there, and which looks, smells, tastes like, and therefore IS a tomato) is revered among the seventy-five cultures of the Pakancy, is worshipped, is given lifetimes from the various races and species there, in the form of cultivation and works of art. (In Zanng, for example, the most famous piece of sculpture is not a David or a Perseus on Horseback or an Atlas shouldering the world, but a great big vine-ripened plum tomato on a plate.)

We could go on about the beans, hand picked, not by Juan Valdez, but a monk named Alarcon in a town some sixty miles south of Guadalajara, who had discovered, recently, the meaning of life but decided, somewhat mischievously, not to tell anyone; or the beef--cubed, not ground--the meat of philosopher cows which had realized, at the moment of slaughter, that all life, somehow, was this feeling they could not articulate as love, and so they gave freely and lovingly of themselves, releasing endorphins and antibodies and various subtle healing chemicals into their bloodstreams and therefore into their muscles and meat at the last moment. We could expostulate on the singular nature of the herbs, many of which had been raised by a man in Crete, wildly insane but possessed of the belief that he was here, solely, as a servant of cumin and oregano and basil and pepper, and who raised his plants as one would raise children, and sung to them, day and night, and played lyrical melodies for them on his balalaika until the local police obtained an injunction against him, but by that time the spices had already been harvested and sent on their way.

Or we could think more about the onions, the green peppers, the chives, all of which had come from similarly unprecedented places and pasts, all of which had shown up, at one time or another, in a sauce here, a dish of Chicken Olympia there, making that sauce--that dish--taste exceptionally good, but never, in the history of history itself, had such a panoply--a pantheon--of ingredients come together in one pot.