It's Orion Spice Crumble Season!

Star Trek Cookbook author Chelsea Monroe-Cassel dishes on her new book (see what I did there)

Sep 20, 2022

Welcome to Star Trekking, my attempt to share points of interest and random intersections in the final frontier.

Time to shut down the replicator, channel your inner Neelix, and take a look at the Star Trek Cookbook!

As you can see, this is NOT the 1999 Star Trek Cookbook. This one is all new, featuring over 70 recipes (with fantastic photos!) by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel.

Chelsea is no stranger to creating fanciful dishes. She started a Game of Thrones food blog that ultimately led to an official cookbook - A Feast of Ice & Fire. After creating cookbooks for other sci-fi/fantasy/gaming properties (including a World of Warcraft Cookbook), Chelsea decided to explore a strange new world.

I asked Chelsea to tell us more.

First off, what was your inspiration for tackling this project?

I used to watch Next Gen with my parents when I was a kid, so I've always liked Star Trek. I think it's a hugely hopeful and compelling setting, showing us a future that could be, without shying away from humanity's tumultuous past. So as a fan, it had been on my short list of projects I'd love to tackle for a cookbook. I was delighted when I finally got the email asking about my availability!

What are the similarities/differences to the 1999 edition? Did you make any updates to the original recipes?

So, this is a completely new cookbook. There are a few dishes in common between the two cookbooks, but entirely new recipes. It's also written in-world, from the perspective of a gastrodiplomat giving a lecture at Starfleet Academy. I took a look at the original cookbook, and incorporated some of the behind the scenes information, where available and appropriate, like the inclusion of a blue sports drink for Romulan Ale when they were filming.

How did you approach creating new recipes?

First off, when creating new recipes, I take a look at what we know about it from canon- appearance, ingredients, any background information, the culture it hails from, etc. Then I try to defamiliarize the recipe with either unexpected flavor pairings, unusual appearance, that sort of thing. I have one rule: it has to be as authentic as possible, but still taste good.

Tell me about the contributions of your husband, Brent. You thank him for his Trek knowledge as well as his taste testing and kitchen cleaning abilities...

That last bit was a little tongue-in-cheek, but truly, I couldn't do any of these cookbooks without him. Brainstorming, editing, writing, taste testing, offspring-wrangling, you name it, he's there. He's also been a big Star Trek fan since he was a kid, so he was already familiar with the history and the setting, which was a huge help. He has a remarkable ability to look at any sentence I show him and make it better. So he helped with the editing on my end of things, and also contributed several of the headnote blurbs about the recipes, which anchor the dishes within the setting of Star Trek.

What was a particularly surprising and effective ingredient to make a recipe suitably Star Trek-y? I'm thinking of something like using peas in Greenbread.

Rather than a single ingredient, I've had good luck with unusual combinations of ingredients or flavors to defamiliarize a food. So the Greenbread is a fun example actually, because yes, you've had bread, but I bet you haven't had green bread! If you've had mashed potatoes, maybe you haven't had mashed cheesy parsnips. It's so much fun to play with new ingredients in new ways, even if it does make our cupboards a little chaotic for a few months. ;)

You've done a lot of fun themed cookbooks (Game of Thrones, Firefly, Star Wars). How does this Trek cookbook compare in terms of difficulty writing/creating recipes?

This was an unusual project amongst my others because of the futuristic setting. I had to really stretch myself when it came to the photography, because I'm accustomed to mostly doing sort of moody dark medieval food photography. The world of Star Trek is bright and clean, though, so I needed to learn a lot more about lighting, as well as acquire a good deal more glassware and dishes that better fit the world.

As with all the best cookbooks, this one is fun to read - it's not just a collection of recipes. You obviously worked hard to present it from an "in universe" point of view. What challenges did you have with creating the material surrounding the actual recipes? (I love the pairing and plating tips!)

For the headnotes, I wanted each entry to both describe the food itself, but also how it's related to the world of Star Trek, so where it's from, any cultural significance, that sort of thing. The Memory Alpha and Beta wikis were absolutely essential for this, so shoutout to all the fans who meticulously keep those up to date!

And I'm so glad you like the tips! I really wanted the cookbook to help people make impressive looking meals, and hopefully the suggested pairings enable readers to build a really striking meal, if they want. Even if you don't know what you're looking at, so much of the food that's shown in the series is intriguing and alien-looking (especially in Strange New Worlds, swoon!) so I wanted to help people be able to replicate that effect in their own kitchens.

What recipe would you suggest to someone who has bought the book more as a Trek fan than as someone with experience in the kitchen?

It depends on what you like! All the recipes have a difficulty rating from 1-4 to help readers choose dishes they can tackle. That said, some of the easier recipes include the Plomeek Soup, Bolian Tomato Soup, Krada Leg Skewers, Ktarian Pudding, and Romulan Ale.

What are some of your favorite recipes?

It's always hard to narrow it down, but my top picks from this collection include: Quadrotriticale Salad, Deviled Regova Eggs, SFRs (Starfleet Food Rations), Denobulan Sausage, Chadre’kab, Spatchcocked Tribble, Osol Twists, Uttaberry Cruffins, and the Raktajino.