Interstellar MegaChef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

Author:Lavanya Lakshminarayan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sci-fi
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd
Published: 2024-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

These off-world blues

Are melting away

I’m at the very heart of it,

I’ll be a part of it,

It’s just the start of it,

I’m here on Primus to stay…

—Boundless Fran & the Ur-Siders, from ‘Primus, Primus’

2043 Anno Earth | 1968 Interstellar Era

Twenty

Two things became immediately apparent from my first five days at Nonpareil: I had no idea what I was doing in a Primian kitchen, and Good Cheer Chaangte delighted in my ignorance.

Each morning, I found myself scrubbing down countertops, a glorified intern. Every afternoon, I was assigned family, which I didn’t mind since I got to mess around in the kitchen and actually cook. It helped that the pantry wasn’t as depressingly empty as it had been my first day on the job. I turned out beest fry and shellfish curry, pepper rasam, bagara baingan, and an entire menu of Daxina foods presented as humbly—to Primians, entirely savagely—as possible. I dropped my fancy, pretty plating from the Elé Oota days and served things home-style, often in sharing portions.

Boundless Baz found his way to the family kitchen each day, dropping in for at least ten minutes to watch me work. ‘I’m a second-generation Primian, but a quarter Earthling on my dad’s side,’ he’d confided the first time. ‘I don’t say it out loud, but I love this food. Reminds me of my grandparents.’

I always made it a point to give him an extra helping for his kindness.

Good Cheer Chaangte was not a fan, and managed to take more than ten minutes each day to stop by and tell me so. ‘You know, I’m from the Wight School,’ she began this afternoon. ‘We’re known for our infusions and marbling techniques. It takes precision, finesse, artistry and a steady hand. It’s true skill.’ She sniffed at the gayam I was chopping—with great precision into perfectly even long slices, for the record. ‘We don’t use brute force. We use seduction.’

I rolled my eyes and ignored her, but she carried on. ‘Have you ever made a Saens flavour motif? Or a regression reduction glaze?’

She paused and looked at me pointedly for a response. I let the silence stretch out, yawning and void-like, watching her watching me out of the corner of my eye. She grimaced in frustration, and Kili sniggered on my shoulder.

‘Of course you haven’t,’ she answered herself. ‘Stuff teenagers do on this planet when they want a snack. Probably different where you’re from—running around with knives and stealing food off each other, I’ll bet. Explains the violent cooking technique.’

My knife snick-snick-snicked through the gayam, and I had to resist the urge to let it thwack into the chopping board as I finished the last slice. My palms were sweaty, and anger bubbled up within me, but I decided to ignore her bullying and focus on the consistency of the batter I was making.

She wasn’t entirely wrong—as a scion of the Godavari clan, I’d been far removed from the realities on the Earth-streets, but it was a bit obnoxious of her to assume the same kind of savagery of all Earthlings.

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