Basic Trope: A recipe contains things that don't have physical substance, such as sounds, colors, emotions, or abstract concepts.
- Straight: Alice lists "love" as one of the ingredients in her world-famous chili.
- Exaggerated: The chili consists entirely of abstract nouns.
- Downplayed:
- Alice mentions that her food is "made with love", yet it's not formally listed as part of the recipe and it's clear that she's speaking metaphorically.
- When Alice says "love", she doesn't really mean love, but an ingredient merely named love (e.g.: Made by Love Foods; or something custom-made that the original maker dubbed "Love").
- Justified:
- Alice has emotion-based magical powers that allow her to conjure delicious food.
- Alice is from a race of Emotion Eaters, so all her food is made from emotions.
- Inverted: Alice has a recipe for Love. Its ingredients are beef, chili peppers, tomatoes, kidney beans, garlic, onions, water, and salt.
- Subverted:
- Alice tells everyone that her secret ingredient is love... but it turns out that it's actually MSG.
- When the recipe says 'red' it means any dyeing agent be it vegetable juice or synthetic dyes. Without it the creature it was meant for wouldn't eat it.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: the original colloquially called for the petals of a flower associated with love, not love itself.
- 'Love' was kept as-is from the Troperian original.
- Double Subverted:
- ...Which, in this case, actually stands for Mama's Sentimental Geniality.
- ...But the recipe also calls for "purple", which isn't explained.
- 'Love' is Troperian for 'loaf'… loaf of what?
- Parodied: Alice is shown opening a jar labeled "love" and pouring it into the pot. Bob calls her out, telling that you can't bottle up love as he tastes the jar's content... And he instantly turns into overtly affectionate Love Freak.
- Averted: There is no recipe, or it only lists ingredients that physically exist.
- Enforced: A poison recipe is less likely to be tried at home when it includes ingredients that under no circumstances can be acquired by the audience.
- Lampshaded: "'Love?' Funny, I've never seen that at the supermarket..."
- Implied: Bob looks at the ingredient list and blurts out "No seriously how the hell would you get that!"
- Invoked:
- Alice seeks out a magical device that can crystalize emotions into physical form, for no other reason than that she wants to find out what happiness tastes like when ground up and mixed into chili.
- Alice wrote the recipe as a Snipe Hunt.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Alice insists her chili is good solely because of the high quality of the beef and spices.
- Discussed: "Is this really the recipe? From how it tasted, I assumed it was made from sunshine, rainbows, and pure distilled happiness."
- Conversed: "It's such a cliche to have the old grandma insist that love is the secret ingredient to her home cooking."
- Played for Horror: The chilli contains horror.
Back to Insubstantial Ingredients, which is made up of something called Life Ruining.
