Poor Dungeon Meshi getting called out here… However it’s one of the best series’ I’ve read for years and I would highly, highly recommend it - I love all the insane food it somehow invents. And in fact it somehow remains the focal part of the story, despite the ridiculous twists it takes.

I think cooking could be a good way to help describe the culture and socioeconomic conditions of an Isekai world. (I.e. if a famine occurred in a kingdom, the various dishes in that kingdom could highlight the differences of it as compared to a neighboring country). But yeah, as an Isekai solely about cooking may not be terribly interesting

No matter how much you describe the taste to me, I don’t know and will never know how a dragon or orc taste.

You think that’s bad? I’ve been a vegetarian most of my life and I’ve no idea what any meat tastes like. But that doesn’t stop me from enjoying cooking in Anime And Manga.

Campfire Cooking for the most part seems to provide pretty solid “this tastes like this other thing” examples, like orc meat tasting like high quality pork for example. You don’t have to really stretch your imagination much for those dishes most of the time, since the flavor is usually “the best version of X meat you’ve ever had”.

Also you can pry my Isekai Izakaya “Nobu” from my cold, dead hands.

I feel like the reason why plenty isekai series add cooking is simply because it’s relatable to a lot of people, so it’s a decent filler. There are some cases where the manga revolves around food, but even if they’ll never taste dragon meat or similar, well, the author won’t either! So you’re free to interpret it as you like. And readers can still try the recipes out, using RL ingredients, just to get a feel. (That’s what I did with banbanji, from Campfire Cooking. I definitively didn’t use rock bird, just some plain chicken.)

Then there are cases like Cooking with Wild Game, where the food itself doesn’t matter that much; what matters is how the characters use it to relate to each other. Like Asuta and Ai doing swapping the gender roles of the forest people, as she hunts and he cooks. Or how his cooking is lifting up the forest people, things like this.

I always thought of cooking in cooking manga more as a plot device, rather than something specific to eat. Although Tis Time for Torture, Princess certainly made me prepare a few dishes.

Still, what about Gensou Gourmet? It goes in an entirely opposite direction - each dish tries to be as far away from a normal/realistic/earth dish as possible. There’s no pretense of orc meat being a pork substitute at all. I feel like it really helps to develop the fantasy world atmosphere. Also Sylphin is a treasure.

I have two objections to this, although I’m not the biggest fan of cooking manga (I don’t really seek it out), first about unknown taste and second about mixed taste. Both are kind of interconnected.

This unexpectedly ended being kind of a large answer.

So for unknown taste, I might not know how a dragon tastes, BUT, I also don’t know how a turtle tastes. But I can enjoy reading a cooking manga where they cook a turtle into a soup and I even kind lf imagine how it tastes like. There are also many descriptors yhat are vaguely useful, like sour, tender, etc that coupled with the image hives a rough idea regardless of how wrong it may be in actuality.

Second is when they make their fantasy ingredients contradtable to IRL ones or a mixture of other two ingredients. It is the same as when people tell me frogs taste kind of like Chicken, if you told me a dragon had stiff meat due yo all the muscle and that it tasted kind of like a hard bird meat, I would completely believe it and wouldn’t detract , now if it says it tasted like a gorilla we come back to completely unknown flavours and imagination has to do some heavy lifting.

At the end if the day I think we can appreciate some of the beauty in fantasy food, taking heavy inspiration on IRL dishes but with twists that sound delishious.

While making this point I was constantly thinking about dungeon meshi and toriko, the first utilizes fantasy tropes appropriately to subvert your expectations and make unexpected but reasonable flavours out of fantasy beasts (also dome of the cooking methos are hilarious, like for the trap chest at the beginning). Then you have Toriko which used a lot of fantasy fruits that are mixed of what we have, like it’s not that difficult to imagine what a caramel melon would taste like.

At the end of the day, I don’t think fantasy cooking is that much worse, but the authors do need a lot more creativity to pull it off.

To finish, here is an analogy, It’s kind of like fixtional sports manga (although not 1 to 1) most people wouldn’t seek out reqding sport manga based on rules that were though by the author but that no one had ever played, those sports tend to have inconsistencies on rules, sometimes they aren’t fun to watch, they can be unintuitive, etc. Those are inherent problems that these works face that normal sports manga don’t because of the simple fact that sports have been developed across many years by a lot of people into something people enjoy, also the familiarity is an aspect that boosts enjoyment. But those being inherent problems doesn’t mean fictional sports in media are bad. They do require a lot of creativity and thought, especially if the author is gonna focus on them or else you get a shitty sports like quidditch.

PD: love that more manga discussions are creeping into the community, I lowkey hate [DISC] posts being so frequent, although I fo understand the necessity to keep things alive, but most people aren’t keeping up with more than a few manga and that makes it so there isn’t much discussion to be had unless the community grows to a large enough point that you have people reading everything.

I agree, to some degree. I do enjoy reading about people bonding over dinner, but the specifics of the recipes does not interest me at all. Collection of ingredients can be fun though, as well as unlocking new ‘technologies’ for better cooking, or getting buffs from the cool meals.

Yeah, people describing tastes that don’t exist isn’t great, but what bugs me more is that somehow the most dangerous monsters generally taste the best. Are you telling me that these tough-as-shit orc and dragon muscles are gonna taste better than those cows bred specifically for the purpose of optimizing tastiness? I’m not buying it.