Something Fresh, Something Wet 🧊

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to wrap your head around the idea that Summer is made for cooling dishes, jelly popsicles, and lonely mouths

Hi there!

All quiet here.

Enjoy the issue!

Piero

✹Massimo Bottura, chef, nailed that.

Hungry for hunger

“Lonely mouth" refers to a Japanese expression. It means you feel like you want to eat something, but you don’t know what it is. A constant hunger that will never be sated. Well, we enter in the Nigella Lawson book-club wit this. A territory where, I'm quoting, "family dysfunction meets fine dining; a "novel about sisterhood, secrets and the things you can’t swallow down". Ok, it sounds good, a bit generic, but it's also our kind of stuff, isn't it?

Lonely Mouth by Jacqueline Maley
→ Shortplot: 🍽️ 🫦 🧑🏻‍🍳 🥧

Dining with the Alien

Science fiction has spent a century imagining what aliens might eat once they land here. Guinea pigs swallowed whole. Cat food devoured like a delicacy. Human blood, taken straight, no glass required.

But almost none of these stories show an alien actually cooking. No fire. No seasoning. No waiting for something to rest.

Maybe that's the real gap, for me. Not the fear of being eaten. The fear of being eaten without ceremony, like fuel instead of food.

What would change if a writer gave an alien species our instinct for ritual? Not hunger. Appetite.

Anyway...

A Random Top 10 about What Aliens Eat, According to Sci-Fi

1. V. A guinea pig, swallowed alive in one gulp. The jaw unhinges like a snake's. Generational trauma guaranteed.
2. The Twilight Zone, "To Serve Man". Kind aliens hand humanity a book. Title: To Serve Man. Twist: it's a cookbook.
3. Star Trek. Klingons eat gagh. Live worms, served while still writhing. The more they move, the fresher they are.
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Ameglian Major Cow walks up to the table and introduces itself, explaining which parts of it taste best. It wants to be eaten. It insists.
5. Coneheads. Beldar and family devour "mass quantities" of whatever's around. The finishing touch: rat poison, used as a table seasoning.
6. ALF. Eighty-five years of obsession with one target: the family cat, Lucky. On Melmac, a cat isn't a pet. It's a menu item.
7. District 9. The Prawns, alien refugees in Johannesburg, go into ecstasy over canned cat food.
8. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. The Martians don't chew anything. They inject human blood straight into their own veins. The 1897 novel that invented alien food horror.
9. Doctor Who. The Adipose are literally made of collected human body fat.
10. Alien Nation. The Newcomers get drunk on sour milk. The spoiled kind we'd throw out. To them, it's a fine whisky.

I think we could easily get to 100 examples, but I'll stop here.

⚪️My yearly suggestion for summer Ajo Blanco, as in Almond White Gazpacho (★recipe) 🍜Cold Korean Soy Noodles (★recipe) 🍋Japanese Shio Ice-Cold Lemon Noodles (★recipe) 🇺🇸The Best New Food and Restaurants in NYC in 2026 so far 🍗DIY Chicken Jalfrezi that packs two of your 5-a-day and a solid vitamin C hit (★recipe) 🥗I agree with this: fast food's newest rival isn't another burger chain, it's the grocery store 😎6 Ideas for a No-Stress Summer Dinner Party 🧳Traveling through grocery stores is fine for me 🍧Fizzy Cherry Coke Jelly Pops (★recipe) 🧊Cold packs on your wrists and f**k off the heatwaves 👽Monkfish steamed liver and the benefits of ordering the weirdest thing on the menu ☕️Vietnamese Coffee Popsicles (★recipe)

The Hidden Rules of Fine Dining

Laura Clawson / JSTOR Daily

Restaurant critics reward technique, creativity, and authenticity unevenly across cuisines, and that unevenness ends up deciding which food traditions get prestige, and higher prices.