Lethal Chef / Literature

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• There's an old anecdote about a maid who's supposed to bake a goose. Which she does by putting it right into the oven, as it is. With feathers still on and innards still in. As the narrator tells us, it was a big stunk.
• Alfons Zitterbacke from the children's book from East Germany with the same name. Once in summer camp, Alfons and his buddy Bruno volunteer for cooking. Which they've never done before. They try Makkaroni with tomatoes. At first they don't use water, and half of the noodles get burnt. In the second try, they use more water, then throw the tomatoes in, but notice that the result looks more like soup and tastes "funny". They decide it lacks salt, and add three pounds of it. No wonder one girl thinks she's poisoned when trying to eat it.
• Animal Inn: Val's really not that good a cook. Known examples include an incident where she forgot to put baking powder in "baking powder biscuits", and when she put a whole chicken in the oven with the plastic bag of giblets still inside. Her siblings also tease her by claiming she could burn lemonade.
• In Anne of Green Gables, Anne unwittingly flavors a cake with anodyne liniment instead of vanilla, due to Marilla placing the remaining contents of a broken liniment bottle in an old vanilla bottle. However, Anne is a good cook the rest of the time, if she's not distracted by her imagining things.
• In the Arabian Nights story "The Prince and the Tortoise", the princes' brides, one of whom is a tortoise, have to prepare meals for the sultan at their wedding. One of the brides is not very good at cooking, but when she hears the youngest prince boast that his tortoise bride is a Supreme Chef, she hides behind a tapestry in the tortoise's room to learn her rival's secrets. The tortoise notices and exclaims loudly that she hopes she has enough rat and pigeon droppings for her wedding dish. At the wedding feast, the eavesdropping bride's dish turns out to be a disgusting mess of droppings.
• In Artemis Fowl for a example, the lead attempts to make a sandwich that is described as an explosion on a plate.
• The main conflict in the children's book Beats Me, Claude revolves around Shirley's inability to cook apple pie. On the third try, she even forgets to add the apples.
• Mizuki Himeji from Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts makes dishes that look appetizing, but they taste absolutely awful. Poor Akihisa has violent hallucinations of being dragged off by grim reapers just by smelling it. It's later revealed that she uses potentially lethal ingredients like Aqua Regia, an acid that's best known to be one of the few acids that can dissolve gold. Mizuki has no idea her cooking is that bad since she doesn't taste-test any of it, as she was Formerly Fat and she's afraid of gaining weight again.
• In Because of Winn-Dixie, Opal's Missing Mom is described as a bad cook and that she'd "burn water," too.
• Belles on Their Toes: While Tom alleges he can cook, he really can't. One leg of lamb he roasts with tomatoes is described as looking like an animal leg needing dressing for a wound. It is so bad that when one of the boys comes down with chicken pox, Anne wonders initially if it was the roast lamb he ate.
• Asebi from Ben-To is an odd variation of this trope. Her friend acts as though she's one, and given her credentials at inadvertently causing bad luck you would expect it. But when the main character tries her food he finds it looks perfectly nice, has expected texture and smell and also tastes fine... If not for the minute detail that nothing she makes tastes like it's supposed to. Her fried pork tastes like fresh banana. Her boiled broccoli tastes like honey. The spiced prawns have no taste at all. Even perfectly ordinary rice ends up tasting strongly of coriander for some bizarre reason.
• Betsy from Betsy-Tacy takes a good long time to learn how to cook, and rarely produces edible results until she's been keeping house for nearly a year. Several disastrous dinners are recounted in "Betsy's Wedding": memorably a meat pie that manages to be soggy, undercooked, overcooked, and burnt all at the same time.
• Blackout: Mrs. Rickett runs a boardinghouse during the Blitz. She gouges her tenants, charging them for board (even demanding that they turn over their ration tickets to her), and repays them with horrible food. The main characters frequently gripe about it and look forward to opportunities to eat anywhere else.
• Bladedance of Elementalers:
  • Claire's cooking usually ends up mostly resembling charcoal. Her cat likes it, though. The cat is a flame spirit.
  • Fianna normally adds sleeping medicine so her unfortunate victim never really notices. However, once in a cooking duel when she made food that could knock someone out she claimed that was actually the point, to defeat her opponent.
• Arianna of Campione! is noted to have two failings as a maid: She cannot drive and she can't cook stews. Any other type of food she can prepare to perfection, but her stews and soups taste so bizarre they're impossible to describe.
• In the Chalet School series, some of the girls' cooking failures are played for laughs in some of the cookery classes. In The Chalet School and the Lintons, for instance, Cornelia Flower uses garlic cloves as flavouring for apple pies rather than normal cloves, and in Carola Storms the Chalet School, Carola Johnston's class fry their jam doughnuts in cod liver oil.
• The Chronicles of Emberstone Farm: Violet's cooking skill level is low, which means she usually burns anything she tries to make. This applies even if there is no heat source. Cutting strawberries? Burnt. Mixing flour and water to make pastry dough? Burnt. She presses prepared dough into a pie pan, and has to soak her scorched fingers in ice water afterward.
• From Codex Alera:the Vord Queen's attempts at cooking tend to fail. Then again, so do all her attempts at acting human.
• In Coraline, the titular character's father is somewhere between this trope and Cordon Bleugh Chef in that most of his meals are lots of different flavors implemented badly — of particular note is the unevenly-cooked homemade pizza which had pineapples on it served at the end.
• Dear Dumb Diary
  • Jamie's mom is an awful cook who can’t even assemble a hot dog correctly, but constantly guilt-trips her daughter and husband to eat her cooking because of the starving kids in foreign countries (or as Jamie puts it, "Wheretheheckistan") who would love her food. Jamie dryly comments, "It seems to me the kids in Wheretheheckistan have enough problems without dumping Mom's casseroles on them, too." However, she can make delicious appetizers, with Jamie saying, "It's like she'd be a great cook if she only had to prepare meals for Barbies."
  • The school meatloaf is even worse than Jamie's mom's cooking. Miss Bruntford, the cafeteria monitor who gets upset when the kids don't eat the meatloaf, once tries some herself and yells, "Call 911!" Weirdly enough, while it tastes horrible, it works wonders as a lip balm, turning Isabella's dried-out, chapped lips into "full, round luscious crescents of papaya" in just a few hours.
• Several examples from Discworld
  • Properly baked dwarf bread is always made by a lethal chef. Used less as a food and more as a weapon, its main ingredient is apparently gravel, and it takes fifteen saw blades to cut off a tiny slice of it. Its most useful purpose when used as rations is to make everything else look edible by comparison. Note that this is intentional on their part, and they can cook other dishes that are perfectly edible to any race (at least, if you don't mind rat).
    The dwarf bread was brought out for inspection. But it was miraculous, the dwarf bread. No one ever went hungry when they had some dwarf bread to avoid. You only had to look at it for a moment, and instantly you could think of dozens of things you'd rather eat. Your boots, for example. Mountains. Raw sheep. Your own foot.
  • Subverted by the Vimes household; Lady Sybil is a bad cook, but Sam has spent so much time eating low-quality food on the streets of Ankh-Morpork that he actually enjoys it. As long as he can pick out the lettuce. Or any of the vegetables. And the fruit, too, for that matter. His favorite foodgroup is Burnt Crunchy Bits...
  • Albert counts too, but it's not so important when you're the cook in Death's household. He firmly believes in grease, fat and black gritty bits, and is the inventor and sole eater of fried porridge. It eats spoons.
  • CMOT Dibbler sells meat pies and sausages that qualify as food on a good day. The fact that he's been able to keep doing this for so long is put down to his salesmanship and some undefinable quality of the pies themselves. Moist von Lipwig speculates that the brain just can't believe what the tastebuds tell it, driving customers back for more.
  • The numerous Dibbler copies also have their own barely edible wares: Disembowel-Meself-Honourably Dibhala's funny-colored antique eggs, Al-Jiblah's highly suspicious cous-cous, the terrible yak-butter tea made by May-I-Never-Achieve-Enlightenment Dibhlang and the unmentionable blubber of May-I-Be-Kicked-Into-My-Own-Ice-Hole Dibooki (main ingredient: exploded whale), the green beer of Swallow-Me-Own-Blowdart Dlang-Dlang and Fair Go Dibbler's meat pie floater in pea soup with tomato sauce (regional specialty of XXXX).
  • Bungling Inventor Bergholt Stutly "Bloody Stupid" Johnson took up cooking at a few points in his life. His attempt to make a pie took out a significant portion of Ankh-Morpork. The actual recipe was fine; it was just that Johnson approached it with his usual indifference to measurements, resulting in something so large that it achieved culinary instability and exploded under its own weight. (He had started making a 30-foot-high pie chimney in the traditional shape of a blackbird, he just hadn't completed it when the pie was ready to bake. It now stands as a monument to those caught in the crust.) He also once created a wedding cake for a friend. The top tier is still in use as a bandstand.
  • "The Sea and Little Fishes" discusses Granny Weatherwax's skills in making sweets. It tends to result in things like jam you cannot even taste (the spoon needs to be hammered in, and you naturally can't get it out), candy that get your teeth stuck together for days, and cakes you can beat a troll to death with. Her pickles turn out fine though. (At the risk of spelling it out, sweetness and Esme don't get on. Sourness, she understands.)
• In Doom Valley Prep School Petra claims her grandmother accidentally poisons everyone whenever she comes over to cook.
• Molly Carpenter from The Dresden Files is a borderline lethal chef. According to Harry she one time burned a boiled egg, and refers to her kitchen attempts as "committing dinner." At least she can make coffee.
• Dungeon Core Chat Room: The dungeons have a cooking competition, just for fun, although they don't really have a sense of taste and thus don't properly understand what they're doing. "Charred and salted" or "boil it in alcohol" is about the extent of their culinary knowledge. Amy, however, takes the cake, by accidentally turning her crab into a deadly virus instead of soup.
• In Durarara!!, the illustrator of the novels drew up a picture of all the girls involved in a cooking contest. While some of them do really well, others...do not. The second worst is Anri, who manages to get a worse score than the girl without a head to taste with. Then there's Emilia, who gets a score of -20... but she seems to be under the impression that she was supposed to be making a bomb.
• Mrs. Bright from Everything, Everything makes Bundt cakes that are inedible in the most literal sense of the word.
• Two examples from Full Metal Panic!:
  • Lieutenant-Commander Andrei Kalinin has his special borscht (an eastern-European beet soup) — a recipe made by his late wife that he has spent years of experimentation to successfully replicate, including on-the-second stirring, pH sampling, and adding such outlandish components as cocoa powder and miso paste. Said borscht is sufficiently gruesome (Tessa states it tastes like "hot Dr. Pepper") to scare away even intractable stoic Sōsuke, which was the whole point — Kalinin's wife was rather vindictive of his prioritizing his career over her. Kalinin himself, however, is completely oblivious to this and finds it delicious.
  • Sōsuke himself is also shown to be a rather Lethal Chef (at least in the novels and manga adaptation). Most of it stems from his lack of common sense, which results in him cooking rice in a rice cooker... over a fire. Indoors. Which causes the others to faint from the fumes. And in the end, he misinterprets Kaname's "a pinch of salt" as being a whole handful of salt.
• In the Sector General book The Galactic Gourmet, a sous chef changes what is though to be an erroneous recipe (reasoning that the chef couldn't possibly have purchased decades worth of nutmeg all at once), resulting in mass nutmeg poisoning.
• There is an entire rhyming children's book about this very subject called The Great School Lunch Rebellion.
• The hot pot in Haganai is black boiling, causes a Vomit Indiscretion Shot, and as Rika puts it (visibly nauseated) "The closest flavor to this in my memory banks is... RUBBING ALCOHOL!"
• The Han Solo Trilogy: Salla admits she's terrible at cooking, and thus has her boyfriends do this instead.
• In Harrow the Ninth, neither Harrow nor Ianthe knows how to cook, since, being highly born in a Feudal Future, neither of them ever had to before. Ianthe's idea of how to cook soup is to burn an onion in the bottom of a pot full of water and then add some salt. Harrow's soup is even worse than Ianthe's—not helped by the fact that at the time she's cooking it, she hasn't slept in almost a week. Also, it's almost literally lethal; she's cooking with the express goal of assassinating someone with it, and so uses her own bone marrow as the base, and turns the marrow into an extremely sharp skeleton after he's ingested it. Only literal divine intervention saves his life.
• Hagrid's poor attempts at cooking are the butt of many jokes in Harry Potter. (However, the birthday cakes he gives Harry are good, and he can fry tasty sausages, though that may have been due to how hungry Harry was at the time.) His rock cakes, however, are basically inedible, and his treacle toffee nearly glues Harry's mouth shut. In the second book, Harry actually uses the treacle toffee to glue Hagrid's dog Fang's mouth shut when he and Ron go looking for answers about the Chamber of Secrets in the Forbidden Forest.
• In Haruhi Suzumiya, the main character says that she became a Supreme Chef to counter her mother's horrible cooking.
• Melissa from I Am J can't cook. Even her boiled eggs taste burnt. In her quest to be healthy and restrict calories, she also ends up making things bland and mixing weird things up.
• Jay Leno's children's book If Roast Beef Could Fly has Jay's father, who attempts to do a BBQ every year but fails miserably in some way — he even says that his father throws the roast when it's done.
• Cecilia Alcott of Infinite Stratos qualifies for this trope as well, despite being the Ojou character of the story. Her cooking is described as "looking exactly as depicted in the cookbook, but tastes just like the cookbook", as evident when she gives Ichika a bite of one of her sandwiches. Later on confirmed in the OVA when she tried cooking a dinner meal. Using one of Blue Tears' Attack Drones. It's later revealed that her lack of common sense is a major cause of her horrendous cooking skills. While teaching her how to cook, Houki, Charlotte and the latter's roommate, Laura, all get sick from her attempts to make the food look better. Later, when Rin to teaches her how to make sweet & sour pork, Cecilia decides to use her IS's laser upon hearing Rin's advice that Chinese cooking is all about "firepower". Much explosion ensues.
• Is This A Zombie?:
  • Seraphim and her vat of bubbling purple... stuff. Anything put in it will melt afterwards, like spoons or chopsticks. When attention focuses back on the cauldron, the cauldron is empty and has a huge hole in it... as well as the table... and the floor...
  • Later on, her cooking prowess has Sarasvati make the kitchen forbidden to her. Aikawa still asks for food made by Seraphim and gets a steak as result. Said steak has sparks that make it look pretty radioactive, but Aikawa still eats it almost melting the fork he used, and the steak manages to explode after being eaten, leaving Aikawa barely conscious. He asks for another, making Seraphim blush and show her "caring" side. The steak in question had nitroglycerin as a secret ingredient; thankfully Aikawa being unable to die can avoid the "Lethal" part of Seraphim's cooking.
• Inverted in a Roger Zelazny book, Isle of the Dead. The main character employs an alien chef who can prepare the finest specialties of human cuisine, but owing to biology and personal taste, considers the dishes to be something between vomit-inducing garbage and toxic chemistry experiments.
• Fisk, in the Knight and Rogue Series. Michael gives up on trying to teach him after only two days.
• Kyouran Kazoku Nikki:
  • Kyouka produces food that only Yuka is able to eat without ill effect.
  • Subverted when pair of former assassin siblings open a restaurant, where their cooking nearly kills all of their customers, until Chika realizes that the cooking is too good to be consumed by normal humans.
• In Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, the main character is actually a Supreme Chef most of the time, but she has the semi-magical ability to channel her emotions into her food. When baking a wedding cake for her sister's marriage to the man she wanted to marry herself, her despair affects the cake and makes people sick to their stomachs. When tossing leftovers to the chickens she raised after having an argument with her sister, her anger makes the chickens attack and kill each other after eating what she feeds them.
• Subverted in the Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions! Light Novels. Rikka somehow is able to make a delicious cake despite not knowing how to cook and using unorthodox ingredients.
• Maburaho: Rin Kamishiro, despite coming from a very traditional family, is an awful cook. At one point, Kazuki has to force down the food she cooks to make her feel better.
• The outdoor humorist Patrick McManus has written extensively about growing up in a household headed by his hard, fearless, super-competent mother, commenting that the only thing she couldn't bend to her will was food. He learned to "scrape off the burnt parts". He also has written on occasion about the dangers of eating camp cooking. Don't ever eat the Green Hash.
• Maximum Ride: Everyone shudders at the thought of tasting Max's cooking. She's pretty aware of this and generally leaves the cooking to Iggy — so when she does offer to make breakfast one morning, it's the first tip-off her friends get that she's been replaced by a clone.
• Gladys from The Night Garden has a tendency to burn every meal she makes. She chalks it up to not having any music to listen to while working.
• In the children's book Olson's Meat Pies, a once-gourmet restaurant runs out of ingredients and in desperation starts putting all sorts of inedible objects in its pies. Popular outcry follows.
• Catherine from On the Spectrum is totally incapable of cooking, so her daughter Clara prepares most of their meals. After Clara is diagnosed with orthorexia, Catherine, feeling guilty, decides to cook her a turkey breast. Clara comes home from school to find that Catherine has charred the turkey breast into a smoking black lump and set off the fire alarm.
• In Our Dumb World, paella is described as containing a long list of things both edible and not, concluding with "...and anything else in arm's reach that's not too heavy."
• In Penny From Heaven, the main character's maternal grandmother, Me-me, can't seem to cook anything properly. Her liver is described as worse than her pot roast, which is worse than her beef stroganoff, "and you don't even want to know about her meat loaf". She's also seen making watery scrambled eggs, mushy peas and onions, and underripe banana pancakes. On the flip side, her Italian extended family on her father's side is a very long line of Supreme Chefs.
• James McDonough, author of Platoon Leader, also wrote a tactics manual. Its framing device was that the protagonist was in purgatory, having to repeatedly fight battles to get into heaven. How did he die? He ate three MREs in rapid succession.
• The searat captain Slipp in The Bellmaker claims to be a cook rather than a pirate when trying to get into the Abbey. Of course he's told to prove it. His patented "skilly an' duff" contains a wide range of vegetation of dubious non-toxicity and the smell is compared to that of a compost heap, thus blowing his cover.
• Pacifica Casull, the titular Scrapped Princess, a.k.a. "The Poison that will Destroy the World"... but not in fact by her dreadful cooking (her foster brother actually teases her about this...).
• Secret Santa (2007): In Be Mine, Jennifer and Violet burn, accidentally salt (when they meant to use sugar), or put too much frosting on multiple batches of cookies.
• At least one of Mercedes Lackey's SERRAted Edge books features a Sidhe warrior attempting to cook breakfast. Mind, the Sidhe ordinarily magic their food out of thin air... The sequence includes such gems as breaking the number of eggs required by the recipe and then "carefully picking out most of the shells" and figuring that hey, tomato paste, Tabasco... Both red sauces, a 1-1 substitution should be perfectly cromulent. He's also incapable (literally) of figuring out how to use a can opener on his own- elves in the setting have no creative ability whatsoever, they can only do things they've seen done before. This disaster actually becomes a major plot point instead of just a random funny. He gives up after recognizing his failure and conjures the breakfast — but doesn't do it sneakily enough: she can instantly tell that there's no way he actually could have cooked the gourmet meal he served her in her apartment's tiny kitchen, leading to her finding out that he's an elf.
• The Shadowhunter Chronicles:
  • One of the few flaws that Isabelle Lightwood has is that she is absolutely terrible at cooking. Her mother is a decent cook, but she never taught her how to do it because she was afraid Isabelle would be told to Stay in the Kitchen.
  • Mark Blackthorn attempts to cook once, and ends up literally destroying a kitchen. Later on, he graduates to a Cordon Bleugh Chef; his specialty is "doughnut-sandwiches", which look as horrible as they sound, but are apparently rather delicious.
• In Shakugan no Shana, Wilhelmina Carmel is known as The Specialist of Everything, but she can't cook to save her life. She was able to feed Shana and herself solely on melon bread, instant noodles, and other things that don't need to be cooked. She gets jealous of Chigusa for her Supreme Chef skills. Wilhelmina's attempts to improve her cooking skills end up burning the kitchen down.
• Snarkout Boys: Walter's mother is so terrible at cooking that Walter finds the inedible Mystery Meat his high school cafeteria serves to be delicious by comparison.
• Xellos of Slayers notoriously lost a Cooking Duel by using his amazing culinary techniques to produce a stew so unpalatable as to cause its component vegetables to writhe and scream in agony. Then again, that was exactly as he intended — he was under the impression that in any sort of "duel", the point is to kill the other person. According to him.
• While we never actually got to read about Shae's cooking in A Song of Ice and Fire , she did mention that "every man who tasted her cooking told [her] what a good whore [she is]."
• Sorcerer Stabber Orphen: Cleao. She even makes a soup called Stone Cold Killer Stew.
• Kitsune Sura in Spirit Hunters. "I can cook anything with legs! When the legs stop moving, it's done."
• Mrs. Samuel Whiskers from Beatrix Potter's Tale of Samuel Whiskers and the Roly Poly Pudding literally tried to cook a KITTEN.
• Teen Power Inc.: In The Missing Millionaire, Kurt, the hotel cook, makes unappetizing-looking breakfasts for the guests that include overcooked eggs and especially shriveled stewed prunes. He actually is a good cook (as shown by the meals he makes for his boss) when he takes the time to make an effort, but he and his boss don't care about making the extra effort to make their guest's meals tasty.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime:
  • Lampshaded openly when Rimuru figures out that this trope is being used the moment everybody else decides they're not hungry when Shion is cooking. To put it into perspective, Rimuru initially has no sense of taste due to being a slime and is still unable to stomach Shion's cooking. When he made Gobta eat it instead, just a spoonful nearly killed Gobta and gave him Poison Resistance for surviving the ordeal. Being fed Shion's cooking even became an official punishment in Tempest (much to her ire).
    Rimuru: Don't tell me that this is going to be that overused trope where the seemingly-skilled hot woman turns out to suck at cooking!
    Shion: *brings out the food, and it is purple, oozing, and emanating an evil miasma*
    Rimuru: Why, trope, why?!
  • Some special emphasis has to be put on just how lethal this stuff is. In the OVAs, one of Shion's dishes starts melting through the metal pot she prepared it in and burns a hole through the ground, and the "rice ball" she tries to offer Rimuru is so toxic it seems to be alive and fully in pain, and when it ends up falling into the lake, even its water-diffused form is able to poison and make the giant monster within the lake go completely berserk as it lashes out in pain. In the Slime Diaries spinoff, a cup of "tea" she makes accidentially drops on his slime body, and then it starts melting his body while forcing him to regenerate and trigger both Pain Nullification and Ailment Nullification to keep it from sending him into agony. It's up to the point that in order to make her food safe, let alone edible, for comsumption she had to die and come back to life with a skill that turns her into a Reality Warper. Even then, that only fixed the foods' taste, and it all still looks like some banquet of the damned.
• There Is No Epic Loot Here, Only Puns: Jebediah the troll is quite good at following orders, but not good at cooking. The first time that Fera has him try making mushroom soup — which is just a matter of boiling mushrooms in stock — the result climbs out of the cauldron and she has to kill it.
• Torture Princess: Fremd Torturchen: Justified with Kaito Sena. To begin with, he's a novice cook whom title character Elisabeth Le Fanu expects to prepare high-class meals for her out of organ meats. This is compounded by his Translator Microbes working too well and translating ingredients specific to her world as similar but distinct ones he was familiar with in Japan. He's actually a passable cook if he has a proper recipe, but the only thing he can make without one is custard pudding.
• TSUKIMICHI -Moonlit Fantasy-: Mio has a number of problems when she first tries cooking, first and foremost among them being that as an Extreme Omnivore, she hasn't got her head around the idea everyone else does not see everything in sight as edible: when she tries making curry and rice, the result (which among other things includes emeralds on the assumption that the "green" she's seen in it must be the most delicious gems) incapacitates everyone else who eats it and melts the pot. She at least understands the basic idea of toast, heating bread over a weak flame, but her idea of a "weak flame" burns it so badly there's nothing left.
• Miss Mush and Mr. Pepperadder from the Wayside School series. Subverted in that they aren't so much poor cooks as poor quantity cooks: when they only have to cook for two or three people, it's gourmet quality. However, Wayside School has 4,000 people in the building. Her most popular dish with the students is nothing. The kids really dread the days she runs out of it, and they have to get something else.
• Moiraine and Siuan are both revealed to be lethal chefs in New Spring, when custom requires them to bake an Aes Sedai a pie shortly after their initiation ceremony. Moiraine's is inedible (and justified, as she's a noblewoman who never needed to learn how to cook). Siuan's is more subtle; the Aes Sedai eats it all, proclaims it very good — and then has to run for the privy as well as get magical healing after.
• The Justicar from Paul Kidd's trilogy White Plume Mountain, Descent Into The Depths Of The Earth, and Queen Of The Demonweb Pits is a pretty good camp cook, but that doesn't stop Escalla from once remarking that "real meals don't look up at you from the plate and offer to negotiate". His tea, however, typically prompts people to take one sip, then carefully pour the rest out when he isn't looking so as to avoid being poisoned by it. Escalla herself has a tendency to over-sweeten food: she's got the metabolism of a hummingbird and thus puts massive amounts of sugar, jam, and/or syrup on everything.
  • From a short story in Dragon
    Justicar: Escalla, do we even have the ingredients for any of the food in your recipe book?
    Escalla: We can substitute with fresh foods from the wild! We'll do beef ragout.
    Justicar: Beef?
    Escalla: Beef, tree-frog, same difference. It'll be a blast!

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