Homemade Sleep Gummies and Christmas Tortellini 🎅🏻
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start a newsletter cursing in Italian and dreaming about French oysters you'll never have
Hi there!
Have you heard the news? UNESCO has officially recognized Italian cuisine as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Well, as we say in Rome among the uneducated: "intangible" stocazzo.
Pardon my French, what I mean is: intangible? Something about the food? It doesn't work like that, we real people with greasy fingers know that.
You all have a Happy Christmas, my tangible friends!!!
Piero
✹Nigel Slater, The Christmas Chronicles.
What Video Games Teach Us About Food
Imagine: you're on a snowy mountain, the cold draining your energy. You open your inventory, select five spicy peppers, toss them into a steaming pot. A cheerful melody plays as the dish takes shape. Now you have an hour of cold resistance. You can climb to the summit.
This is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but it could be any of the most-played games of the last decade. Food in popular video games has become much more than a bar to fill. It's become complex mechanics, narrative moment, even survival philosophy.
In Minecraft, food is brutal necessity. The hunger bar drops as you play. Without food you can't sprint, then you start losing health, finally you die. The game teaches you that food requires work: planting seeds, waiting for them to grow, harvesting, processing. The Golden Carrot requires gold beyond the base carrot, becoming a strategic investment for those who want maximum saturation.
In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, food becomes creativity. Link combines ingredients to create dishes with specific effects: Spicy Peppers grant cold resistance, Mighty Bananas boost attack power, Endura Carrots add temporary stamina wheels. There are over 100 recipes. The system rewards experimentation: mixing incompatible ingredients cancels effects, but finding winning combos makes you feel like an expert chef.
In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, food is conviviality. The 2.0 update introduced 141 cooking recipes: Aji Fry, Apple Pie, Tomato Curry. They don't primarily serve to recover energy but to decorate homes, gift to villagers, create atmosphere. Cooking becomes social ritual, not game mechanic.
Games force us to slow down. In Zelda you spend minutes gathering mushrooms, meat, spices. You bring them to a pot. You choose what to combine. You wait for it to cook. It's a process we skip in modern life: we order takeout, heat up frozen meals, devour everything in five minutes in front of a screen.
Scholars note that when we prepare virtual food we increase familiarity and curiosity toward real culinary traditions. Cooking in a game makes you think about ingredients, combinations, necessary time. Qualities we've lost but that video games, paradoxically, give back to us.
The paradox is this: we spend hours optimizing pixel recipes to survive in fake worlds, while in real life we open the fridge and complain that "there's nothing to eat". Maybe video games don't teach us recipes to replicate in the kitchen. They teach us that food requires attention, planning, care. And that taking time to prepare it isn't waste but necessity, just like in Minecraft you can't ignore hunger hoping it disappears.
PS: this essay came into my mind after I read this article about the videogames that accidentally shaped the far right. It's pretty good.
These days I had people over. This is what I cooked
British Style Brunch
🦐Potted Shrimps (★recipe) 🥗Watercress and Green Apple Salad (★recipe) 🫖Mary Berry's Scones (★recipe) 🥔Mashed Potatoes (★recipe) 🫐Chelsea Buns (★recipe) 🥧Steak and Ale Pie, the thing that everybody loved (★recipe) 🍎Apple and Blackberry Crumble (★recipe) 🍳I also scrambled some eggs with soy sauce and served them on a baked mushroom and crispy bacon
Vegetarian guests
🌰Chestnut Gnocchi (★recipe) with black cabbage sauce (★recipe by Jamie Oliver) and Amaretti biscuits squash cream (you can wing those on a pan, then blitz it all) 🫑Sheet-Pan Baked Feta With Broccolini, Tomatoes and Lemon (★recipe) 🥕Carrot and Oranges Salad (★recipe)
As always, the three recipes I dream about every Christmas
🦪Any Panaché de fruits de mer, like this one or this one
🐽Modena's Style Tortellini (★recipe)
🐟Bouillabaisse Marseillaise (★recipe)
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In Shakespeare, Food References Are a Window to the Soul
Leigh Chavez-Bush / Atlas Obscura
In Shakespeare's time, food revealed character and emotion through the theory of humors—roast mutton fueled anger, vinegar deepened melancholy. Gluttony was the worst sin, embodied by Falstaff, whose excessive eating showed his moral failings. Yet refusing food was equally suspect, since hospitality demonstrated virtue and social connection.
