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A Primer to 'Star Trek' Food and Drink

To seek out strange new worlds ... and eat their foods.

The J. J. Abrams–helmed Star Trek movie opens tomorrow. As I was reading up on the new installment, I came across this line in the Wikipedia entry : "Another reference to Abrams' previous works is Slusho, which Uhura orders at the bar she meets Kirk at."

That reminded me that food and drink is depicted routinely in the Star Trek franchise—across ten movies and six TV shows. There's no doubt—or at least, I hope —that there will be food references in the 11th movie, which will feature Romulans, Vulcans, Orions. As a refresher, I thought I'd take a look at what passes for serious eats in these alien cultures. Join me on this mission, won't you?

Romulans: Huge Drunks Fond of Tart Candy

The biological cousins of the Vulcans, Romulans are devious, paranoid, and militant.

The Romulan Star Empire has been at odds with the United Federation of Planets since before the Federation's inception in 2161, and was in fact the catalyst for the Federation's formation. By 2379, however, relations between the Romulans and the Federation had warmed somewhat.

A Romulan named Nero is the villain in the new movie, traveling from the future to destroy the Federation before it gets off the ground.

Romulan Ale

Any Trek fan worth his or her salt (included in Starfleet emergency rations , by the way) knows that Romulan ale is one of the most widely referenced food-and-beverage items in the franchise. It's an ultrapotent blue drink that reportedly results in instant drunkeness. [ After the jump, recipes for Romulan ale, Klingon bloodwine, and why Vulcans hate barbecue. ]

Science fiction often holds a mirror up to contemporary culture, critiquing its practices, politics, and mores. So, too, with Romulan ale. Because of the United Federation of Planets' standoff with the Romulan Empire, the drink is illegal within the Federation—much like Cuban cigars are in the U.S. But like the captains of industry of today, captains of starships indulge in this vice. As Kirk said in The Undiscovered Country, the routine violation of the embargo is "one of the advantages of being a thousand light years from Federation headquarters."

Its proper Romulan name may be kali-fal .

Recipes: There are several recipes out there for Earth-bound Romulan ale .

Romulan Foods

• Jumbo Romulan mollusk : a delicacy that appears to be served over rice, with perhaps scrambled egg
• Osol twist : A very tart candy first mentioned in Deep Space 9 episode "Image in the Sand"
• Viinerine : A military staple, it first appears in TNG episode "Face of the Enemy"

Vulcans: They Don't Like Barbecue

You know what the Vulcans are all about--ultra logical, emotionless, intellectual, cool under pressure. Their food seems equally bland, too, and from what I can remember in all my years of watching Trek shows and movies, there hasn't really been a standout dish that's mentioned again and again in the way Romulan ale is.

Most Vulcans are vegetarians, and while it would be easy for other folks to take a swipe at the veg lifestyle, I've had pretty damn good meatless meals--so there's no excuse for lame food in the Vulcan repertoire.

A little digging shows that Vulcans are absolutely prissy when it comes to food and drink. First of all, alcohol reportedly has no effect on them (even though they do produce spirits on the planet Vulcan). And this doesn't sound very appealing--according to Memory Alpha, "Vulcans have a superior metabolism to Humans. Caffeine and sapotoxins have little effect on them. They are also capable of surviving for long durations without food or sleep."

Oh, and they don't touch food with bare hands , unless using special gloves. This means that Vulcans would hate (if they could hate--emotionless, remember?) Buffalo wings, pizza, hot dogs, hamburgers, and sandwiches of all kinds. And barbecue would make them spaz--again, if they could spaz.

Anyway, let's engage...

Vulcan Foods

• Brandy : Alcohol supposedly does not affect Vulcans, so Vulcan brandy may be used for ceremonial purposes or for export only
• Gespar : Some sort of breakfast food
• Jumbo mollusk : Related to the Romulan jumbo mollusk
• Mocha : You'd never guess that this was a coffeelike beverage, would you?
• Plomeek soup (Plomeek broth) : A bland breakfast soup. In the original series (TOS), Spock threw a bowl of it at Nurse Chapel while he was going through his pon farr (crazy, horny mating period)
• Plomeek tea
• Vulcan port : Again, Vulcans are supposedly immune to the effects of alcohol... You know, I really love Memory Alpha. It's so geeky and thorough. Its entry on Vulcan port goes into AOC/DOC territory, noting that a port wine is techinally from the Douro Valley in Portugal and hence Vulcan port probably "is a colloquialism, which suggests that the production of Vulcan port, and the production of Vulcan alcoholic beverages in general, are an imported practice not native to Vulcan culture"
• Redspice : Helped make a dish so tasty that Chief Miles O'Brien (DS9) asked for the recipe
• Vulcan spice tea : Seems like it was Captain Janeway's (Voyager) version of Earl Grey

Orions: Watch Out, Boy, She'll Chew You Up

You know when casual Star Trek fans refer to Captain Kirk getting with green alien women? Well, he only encountered one such alien. She was an Orion , a race little seen in the franchise.

As Wikipedia notes , "Not much has been revealed of Orion culture. Orion pirates often harassed and attacked early Earth cargo ships. Stock for the Orion slave trade is obtained mostly through kidnapping of other species. If slaves don't command a high enough price at auction, they can be sold as food."

Sadly, Klingons Are Not Part of This Movie

J. J. Abrams reportedly wanted to focus on Romulans as the bad guys instead of Klingons, since Romulans are less well-known.

And, because Klingons eventually ally with the Federation and became heroes later on in the Trek universe, Abrams didn't want to show them in their earlier incarnation as Federation enemies.

Still, while in the rabbit hole of Memory Alpha, I couldn't help look at their cuisine, since it appeared regularly in TNG and DS9. Here are some of my favorites.

Klingon Bloodwine

Along with gagh , this is probably one of the best known Klingon foodstuffs. Served warm, it's an alcoholic beverage that you probably don't have the conjones (or whatever they call them in Klingon) to consume. Jonathan Archer (Enterprise) was the first human to give it a go. According to Memory Alpha , Lieutenant Commander Worf "liked his young and sweet," which sounds kinda dirty. Also according to Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Cookbook seems to suggest it's made with fermented blood and sugar.

Recipes: If you want to go really nuts and make an Earth-bound version, here's a recipe for fermenting your own Klingon bloodwine that uses 10 to 15 packs of unsweetened Cherry Kool-Aid. Wow. Sounds almost as potent as the actual stuff from Qo'noS . If you're too much of a bIHnuch for brewing your own, the Klingon Imperial Diplomatic Corps has a number of cocktail-based Bloodwine recipes.

Update: Eugen Beer of Coldmud points out that buy' ngop , which would translate to "That's good news!" literally means "The plates are full" in Klingon.

Other Klingon Food and Drink

• Bahgol : A warm tealike beverage. Well, not too different from humans ...
• Bregit lung : Spoke too soon. Bregit lung is not actually a respiratory organ but a dish of reptilian animals. Commander Riker (TNG) professes to like it. (Of course, Riker would--didn't he try to impress a Klingon female in one episode with his love of gagh?) Bregit lung is often eaten with grapok sauce
• Gagh : A Klingon delicacy--live serpent worms. "Allegedly, the actual taste of gagh is revolting and it is eaten solely for the unique sensation of the gagh spasming in one's mouth and stomach in their death throes." But the real question is, Would Andrew Zimmern eat it?
• Gladst : Finally, some vegetable matter. I was beginning to get worried about Klingons' regularity
• Klingon martini : Neat. It's a bit of cultural fusion--vermouth, gin, and a dash of bloodwine
• Pipius claw : Looks like chicken feet. I doubt it tastes like chicken, though
• Racht : A big bowl of live worms
• Raktajino : The rare Klingon foodstuff that humans enjoy. Probably because it's a coffeelike beverage
• Rokeg blood pie
• Targ : A type of Klingon herding animal. Eating heart of targ is believed to instill courage in a warrior, and the milk of the creature is apparently consumed as well
• Zilm'kach : Some fruit to round things out

Video: Klingon Food Critic

This really weird fan video of a mock Klingon newscast has the anchors tossing it to a Klingon food critic who reviews popular Earth foods. I think it's supposed to be funny. It's not, really, but it is oddly compelling and--what's the word?--oh, yeah, warped.

Star Trek Cookbooks

Lastly, there are a couple of Star Trek cookbooks, if you really want to replicate the food of the universe here on Earth.

There's the prosaically named Star Trek Cookbook , by William J. Birnes and Ethan Phillips, whose character, Neelix , could often be found cooking in Star Trek: Voyager (his feragoit goulash is known across 12 star systems, after all).

And the Official Star Trek Cooking Manual has a cool spin on things, written as if it's Nurse Christine Chapel's recipe book that was somehow transported to the present time. As Memory Alpha notes, "The introduction includes what is purportedly a food synthesizer algorithm for Dr. McCoy's favorite dish; in fact, it is FORTRAN source code for a program that prints the message, 'CHICKEN 3.14159 SKEPTIC.'" Whatever that means.

Close the Channel

When I started poking around for info for this post, I thought it would be a quick one. But, crap, I've pretty much spent all day tooling around various Star Trek sites, with Memory Alpha being a huge help and awesome resource. I think I now know more about Star Trek food than anyone should. Tomorrow night, though, I think I'll skip the osol twists and get a big bucket of popcorn--it's a Terran snack made from dried corn kernels that are heated until they burst, commonly eaten slathered with butter at movie theaters during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Live long and prosper.

10:41 a.m., 5/8/2009: Jason Kottke linked to this today , saying, "Oddly, my only complaint is that (somehow) his piece isn't long enough. Adam, you didn't even get in to 'Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.'"

I know, Jason. I would have loved to have included Picard's iconic food-replicator order, but I had to limit the scope of this post somewhat or I could have spent weeks in the food quadrant of the Trekiverse. I figured focusing on the aliens encountered in the Trek reboot was a fine way to do that.

As it is, I'm relying heavily on Memory Alpha. Going any deeper into ST food, I'd just basically be aping what they've done on their awesomely extensive database of food and drink across the entire franchise.

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8 Star Trek Recipes You Can Replicate At Home

Eat your way across the galaxy. Blogger Food Replicator has a knack for turning alien delicacies into edible meals for any Earthling.

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1. Plomeek Soup - Star Trek : The Original Series

Plomeek soup is a traditional morning meal on the Vulcan homeworld. Taking a page from the mostly vegetarian Vulcans, the Earth version is vegan-friendly.

You'll Need:

• 2 garlic cloves

• 5 carrots

• 2 small-medium sweet potatoes, peeled

• 3 small-medium beetroots, peeled

• 3 sticks celery

• 1 litre vegetable stock

• Salt and pepper

• Vegetable oil

• Parsley for garnish (optional)

Once you have your ingredients, follow these instructions .

2. Rokeg Blood Pie - Star Trek: The Next Generation

An ancient Klingon recipe, Rokeg blood pie is served during their "Day of Honor" holiday. In direct contrast to the Vulcans, this dish is decidedly not vegan friendly.

• 600ml / 20 fl oz pig’s blood

• 150ml / 5 fl oz heavy cream

• 280g / 10oz pork back fat, finely diced

• 280g / 10oz onions, finely diced

• 2 tablespoons rolled oats

• 1 tablespoon salt

• 1/2 tablespoon smoked paprika

• 1/2 tablespoon sweet paprika

• 1/2 tablespoon nutmeg

• 1/2 tablespoon white pepper

• 1/2 tablespoon chili flakes (optional)

• 3 small beetroots with long roots (if preparing the pie to look like it does on the show)

After you've set up your prep, head over here for preparation directions.

3. Heart of Targ - Star Trek: The Next Generation

Another traditional Klingon meal, a Targ heart (Klingon boars) is believed to bring courage to the warrior who eats it.

• 6 Lamb’s hearts

• 1 head of kale, sliced into thin strips

• 6 stalks of celery, sliced into small pieces

• 1/2 cup water

For the sauce:

• 1 cup red wine

• 2 tablespoons brown sugar

• 2 tablespoons Worcestershire

• 1 tablespoon cornstarch

Follow these steps to have your Day of Honor main course.

4. Jumba Stick - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Made from the sap of the Bajoran jumja tree, these confections are notable for their insane sweetness.

• 1/4 cup golden syrup

• 1/4 cup treacle

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 1/4 cup water

Once you've gathered your supplies, follow these steps to create the sweet treat.

5. Hasperat - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

A well known spicy Bajoran food, it is cooked in a special brine which scorches the tongue if done right.

• 1/4 white cabbage

• 1 litre water

• 250ml vinegar

• 1 teaspoon of sugar

• 125g salt

• 3-4 hot chillies to taste, chopped fine

• Juice of one lemon

Be sure you're ready to start prep a week in advance to properly brine the ingredients.

6. Algae Puffs - Star Trek: Voyager

A local baked Enaran delicacy.

• 4 ounces / 1 stick / 115g butter

• 1 cup water

• 1 cup plain flour

• 35g dried seaweed, in small flakes or powdered

The step-by-step instructions are easy to follow and also show how to convert them into cheese puffs.

7. Luhvian Quail - Star Trek: Voyager

A small bird of similar to the Earth quail and served in truffle sauce, it makes a fine starter to any multi-course dinner.

• 1 litre water - 500ml boiling, 500ml chilled or at room temperature

• 4 carrots

• 8-10 mushrooms

• 1/2 pumpkin, cut into rounds

• 1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme

• 4 springs fresh thyme, for garnish

• 2-3 vol-au-vent cases

• Splash of olive oil

For the truffle sauce:

• 1-2 thin slices of truffle, chopped fine

• 1 tablespoon butter

• 1 tablespoon Madeira

• 100ml chicken stock

While it looks complicated, the directions are simple to follow along with.

8. Seltin Pâté - Star Trek: Voyager

Traditionally made with wood fungus from the Seltin planet, this pâté is a delicious appetizer for lunch or parties.

• 40g / 1.4oz butter

• 1 onion, finely sliced

• 1 garlic clove, finely sliced

• 500g / 17.5oz mushrooms such as button or swiss brown, roughly chopped

• 1 tablespoon plain flour

• 4 sprigs thyme leaves

• 1/4 cup red wine (or you can substitute water)

• 2 tablespoons cream

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

For the filo pastry bowl:

• 4 oven-safe ramekins or small dishes

• 50-70g melted butter

• 1/2 packet of frozen filo pastry

After following the recipe , the resulting tiny pâté bowls are delectable and adorable.

Don't see your favorite alien fare? Food Replicator has plenty more!

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8 Delicious Star Trek Recipes You Can Follow At Home

Ever wanted to eat like the people on TV? Making fictional dishes into reality is quite the fun hobby for geeky chefs, and that isn’t any different for Star Trek fans.

So luckily, if you ever wanted to make Algae Puffs or a Heart of Targ dish, the excellent Food Replicator blog on Tumblr has all the answers.

Algae Puffs –  Star Trek: Voyager

A local baked Enaran delicacy. You’ll need:

• 4 ounces / 1 stick / 115g butter • 1 cup water • 1 cup plain flour • 4 eggs • 35g dried seaweed, in small flakes or powdered

Further instructions

Hasperat –  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

A well known spicy Bajoran food. You’ll Need:

• 1/4 white cabbage • 1 litre water • 250ml vinegar • 1 teaspoon of sugar • 125g salt • 3-4 hot chillies to taste, chopped fine • Juice of one lemon

Heart of Targ –  Star Trek: The Next Generation

A Targ heart (Klingon boars) is believed to bring courage to the warrior who eats it. You’ll Need:

• 6 Lamb’s hearts • 1 head of kale, sliced into thin strips • 6 stalks of celery, sliced into small pieces • 1/2 cup water • Vegetable oil

For the sauce: • 1 cup red wine • 2 tablespoons brown sugar • 2 tablespoons Worcestershire • 1 tablespoon cornstarch

Jumba Stick –  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Made from the sap of the Bajoran jumja tree. You’ll Need:

• 1/4 cup golden syrup • 1/4 cup treacle • 1/2 cup sugar • 1/4 cup water

Luhvian Quail –  Star Trek: Voyager

A small bird of similar to the Earth quail and served in truffle sauce. You’ll need:

• 6 quail • 1 litre water – 500ml boiling, 500ml chilled or at room temperature • 30g salt • 4 carrots • 8-10 mushrooms • 1/2 pumpkin, cut into rounds • 1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme • 4 springs fresh thyme, for garnish • 2-3 vol-au-vent cases • Splash of olive oil

For the truffle sauce: • 1-2 thin slices of truffle, chopped fine • 1 tablespoon butter • 1 tablespoon Madeira • 100ml chicken stock

Plomeek Soup –  Star Trek: The Original Series

A traditional morning meal on the Vulcan homeworld. You’ll need:

• 1 onion • 2 garlic cloves • 5 carrots • 2 small-medium sweet potatoes, peeled • 3 small-medium beetroots, peeled • 3 sticks celery • 1 litre vegetable stock • Salt and pepper • Vegetable oil • Parsley for garnish (optional)

Once you have your ingredients, follow  these instructions .

Rokeg Blood Pie –  Star Trek: The Next Generation

An ancient Klingon recipe, Rokeg blood pie is served during their “Day of Honor” holiday. You’ll Need:

• 600ml / 20 fl oz pig’s blood • 150ml / 5 fl oz heavy cream • 280g / 10oz pork back fat, finely diced • 280g / 10oz onions, finely diced • 2 tablespoons rolled oats • 1 tablespoon salt • 1/2 tablespoon smoked paprika • 1/2 tablespoon sweet paprika • 1/2 tablespoon nutmeg • 1/2 tablespoon white pepper • 1/2 tablespoon chili flakes (optional) • 3 small beetroots with long roots (if preparing the pie to look like it does on the show)

Seltin Pâté –  Star Trek: Voyager

A pâté made with wood fungus from the Seltin planet. You’ll need:

• 40g / 1.4oz butter • 1 onion, finely sliced • 1 garlic clove, finely sliced • 500g / 17.5oz mushrooms such as button or swiss brown, roughly chopped • 1 tablespoon plain flour • 4 sprigs thyme leaves • 1/4 cup red wine (or you can substitute water) • 2 tablespoons cream • 1/2 teaspoon salt

For the filo pastry bowl:

• 4 oven-safe ramekins or small dishes • 50-70g melted butter • 1/2 packet of frozen filo pastry

For more Fictional cooking turned into something quite real, check out these awesome recipes from A Game of Thrones.

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Published May 19, 2022

Edible Star Trek: How Food and Drink Tell Our Starship Stories

Even in a universe with replicators, nothing beats a homemade meal.

StarTrek.com

As a food writer and Star Trek enthusiast, I always take note whenever our favorite starship - and space station - bound characters interact with each other in the midst of “edible Star Trek ” scenes. The writer and director's decision to include a meal or a drink in many episodes is always deliberate. It’s a familiar way to tell an unfamiliar space story that remains accessible to modern viewers. While we don’t all work on starships, all of us eat and drink. Gastronomic scenes also do robust narrative work that add depth to these starship stories and characters. Across various shows in the Star Trek universe, food and drink-focused scenes work on a deeper metaphorical level for building—and rebuilding—interpersonal connections, wielding power, and embracing both internal and external journeys of exploration.

Food as Connection

Like Counselor Troi and chocolate, once you start to consider Star Trek through the lens of food and drink, it’s hard to stop. Of course, we begin with Sisko. In addition to his roles as captain and Emissary on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , Captain Benjamin Sisko also serves as one of the best cooks in the greater Star Trek universe (sorry Neelix). In a future with food replicators, a home-cooked meal demonstrates deep affection, which is key to Sisko’s character especially as he faces down the challenges of the Dominion War. Sans kitchen, he creates delicious meals in his quarters, constructing dishes like a jazz musician improvises a tune. Not surprisingly, Sisko’s father still runs a replicator-free Creole restaurant in New Orleans, Earth. For the Siskos, real food means love:  it helps us to connect and stay connected.

The newest Star Trek shows continue to link food and affection. In season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery , President of Ni’Var T’Rina has salt tea from Kaminar delivered to Saru during a meeting about expanding the Federation. Saru is both delighted and intrigued.

He responds later with a gift of his own:  a specimen of Fredalia from his planet, who’s flower provides the unique flavor to a floral tea of Kaminar. These food-focused opening moves on the chessboard of feelings leads to a satisfying relationship arc for these characters. T’Rina and Saru’s relationship develops slowly but surely for the remainder of the season, including the careful, deliberate decision over whether or not to accept a dinner invitation - awkwardly adorable.

When time is of the essence, however, as in the first season of Star Trek: Picard , edible Star Trek scenes function both as powerful “narrative propellant” for the story as well as connective tissue between characters. When “JL” walks out of the past and up toward Raffi Musiker’s desert trailer, she only lowers her weapon when she confirms he brought her favorite vintage. Clearly, they have shared Château Picard wines in the past; a flashback is unnecessary. Only through his wine peace offering was she even willing to listen to him. Picard hoped that this apology gift would soften her righteous anger and begin to repair their relationship because he needed her brilliant help. His effort to reconnect with her through a special bottle makes it emotionally visible how this wine links these two characters in the past and the present. Picard’s wine bottle gamble works: he has begun to repair his relationship with Raffi, and in turn she agrees to help him on his mission. And, we’re off!

Edible Star Trek scenes even connect terrestrial fans to famous foods that starship travelers will encounter in the future. Beginning with Ensign Ro in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Colonel Kira in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and then jumping 930+ years into the future with Adira Tal in Star Trek: Discovery , consistent references to spicy Bajoran hasperat across space and time in the Star Trek universe satisfy fans’ taste for canonical consistency and continuity.

Food as Power

In addition to establishing and re-establishing interpersonal connections between characters, scenes featuring food and drink also serve as metaphors for aggressive power plays, especially with Klingons and Terrans. In Star Trek: The Next Generation ’s “A Matter of Honor,” Commander Riker prepares for his officer exchange with a Klingon vessel by consuming a wide range of Klingon fare, but replicator-generated gagh is not the same as the writhing dish of serpent worms on offer in the I.K.S. Pagh dining hall. When First Officer Riker sighs and notes that his food is still moving, Second Officer Klag declares, “Gagh is always best when served live.”

Riker’s hesitation inspires hearty Klingon laughter, but it is soon followed by some surprisingly vulnerable conversation about feelings and family where Klag says that Klingons do not express feeling the way humans do and, frankly, “We would not know how.” Riker impresses his Klingon fellow officers by saying, “Yesterday, I did not know how to eat gagh,” while dramatically chewing and swallowing a large bite. This food fearlessness helps his Klingon crew mates to see him in a new way. Riker survives the Klingon cuisine hazing and earns some respect from his skeptical Klingon crew.

Star Trek: Discovery also presents food as a way to wield power, especially in the violent Terran Mirror Universe. Fans likely know about Earth-based luxury foods such as black truffles, oysters, and caviar. Therefore, we recognize how Mirror Universe Emperor Georgiou’s luxury cannibalistic diet of Kelpian flesh channels the Terran values of cultivating fear, exerting power, and performing violence constantly, from the throne room to the plate.

Making polite dinner conversation with the deadly Terran Emperor, undercover Prime Universe Michael Burnham says, “The food is delicious, as always.” “No one prepares Kelpian like the imperial chef,” remarks Emperor Georgiou as Burnham freezes. “Here…have my ganglia,” says the Emperor, “You deserve a treat.” As she swallows the Kelpian threat ganglia from the chopsticks of Emperor Georgiou, horrified Burnham plays this table very carefully. It’s a testament to Emperor Georgiou’s growth arc across her time in our Prime Universe that, upon her return to the Terran universe during her “weighing” via the Guardian of Forever, she takes Kelpian off the menu.

Food as Exploration

Many of us explore new cuisines while traveling to unfamiliar places. What if you’ve been trapped in a space prison for as long as you remember and have only eaten the same prison rations since forever? How do you order something new from the replicator if you only know one dish? On Star Trek: Prodigy , Rok-Tahk doesn’t yet know how to request new foods from the replicator on the Protostar because the only type of food she knows are the rations she grew up eating - a brown, indistinct goo served in a bowl. The younger target audience instinctively understands that knowing only one kind of food indicates limited life experience.

New Tastes and Experiences Help Us Grow

One of the most beloved Star Trek scenes that uses an openness to new food and drink as a signal of personal growth and internal exploration occurs in Star Trek: The Next Generation when Guinan introduces Lieutenant Worf to a warrior’s drink one fateful day in 10 Forward. After dismissing her suggestions about getting to know other members of the crew on a personal level, Worf skeptically tries Guinan’s offer of a human beverage called “prune juice.” The look of surprise and pleasure on his face suggests that he realizes he might have more to learn from human culture than he may have initially thought. Perhaps today is a good day to open one’s Klingon mind.

Ten Forward, Quark’s, and Edible Star Trek Watering Holes: An Appreciation

Without the space of 10 Forward, Guinan would have encountered more barriers to teaching Worf about open mindedness through a glass of prune juice. Indeed, the casual eating and drinking spaces of 10 Forward, Quark’s, the lounge on Discovery , and all the Star Trek social spaces allow for interpersonal connection that happens more easily than in work areas like Engineering or the bridge. Guinan joined Star Trek: The Next Generation in the show’s second season, and the rest is edible Star Trek history. Can you imagine seven TNG seasons without the connecting space of the ship’s bar? Where would Scotty have secured the green Aldebaran whiskey in “Relics?” 10 Forward is key to edible Star Trek storytelling.

Quark’s in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has more of a profit motive than the starship-based bars that offer free synthehol and replicated food, which makes Quark's the perfect non-Federation bar in this, the grittiest of all the Star Trek shows. With a dart board, gaming tables, and a Ferengi behind the bar, it’s the perfect hub for socializing on a reclaimed Cardassian mining outpost. In the premiere episode of DS9, Sisko clearly understands how important social spaces will be for making the Cardassian outpost Terok Nor into a welcoming space station run by Starfleet. With a bit of manipulation, Sisko “helps" a reluctant, fearful Quark understand how vital Quark’s will be to the success of their DS9 project. Sisko knows how important connecting with others will be to building community on this space station. Ergo, Quark’s.

Edible Star Trek scenes across the Starfleet universe help tell our favorite starship stories and serve as a flavorful shorthand for moving the characters and stories forward, particularly by signaling the importance of strengthening interpersonal connections, wielding power, and embracing journeys of exploration. Current Star Trek creatives understand how much narrative mileage they can get from food and drink-focused vignettes so they keep inventing ways to incorporate fresh edible Star Trek scenes, including the addition of a bar on the U.S.S. Cerritos in Star Trek: Lower Decks . With a couple of olives on a toothpick jauntily tucked into a Starfleet delta shield, the logo for this newest social space promises that the Star Trek universe will continue to prioritize gastronomic scenes and locations that help tell great stories.

Writer R. A. Duchak (she/her) was in utero when Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon, and she’s been a space nerd ever since. She has worked as a radio host and producer, university writing instructor, webmaster, editor, and Outward Bound instructor. You can find her on Twitter @ccfoodie.

Star Trek: Picard streams exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S. and is distributed concurrently by Paramount Global Distribution Group on Amazon Prime Video in more than 200 countries and territories. In Canada, it airs on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave.

Star Trek: Discovery currently streams exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S. Internationally, the series is available on Paramount+ in Australia, Latin America and the Nordics, and on Pluto TV in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom on the Pluto TV Sci-Fi channel. In Canada, it airs on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave. Star Trek: Discovery is distributed by Paramount Global Distribution Group.

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Review: Make The Final Frontier Come Alive In Your Kitchen With ‘The Star Trek Cookbook’

| September 19, 2022 | By: Laurie Ulster 29 comments so far

The Star Trek Cookbook Written by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel Hardcover | $35.00 E-book | $16.99 Published by Gallery Books | 192 Pages

Cookbook author and food stylist Chelsea Monroe-Cassel has done cookbooks for other big franchises (most notably Game of Thrones ), but when she got the call to do a Star Trek cookbook, she was overjoyed—as a longtime fan who grew up watching The Next Generation (and eventually every show in the franchise), it had been on her bucket list for years. (And yes, she’s also a fan of the 1999 cookbook of the same name written by Ethan Phillips and William J. Birnes, and makes it clear that despite some crossover, her recipes are all-new.)

She does her fandom proud with this gorgeous, in-canon, beautifully written collection of Starfleet-sponsored recipes featuring everything from the familiar (Hasperat, Plomeek Soup, Raktajino, Yamok Sauce) to the not-so-familiar (Andorian Spice Bread,  Tarvokian Powder Cake). The book not only groups them into appropriate sections—starters, breads, mains, desserts, drinks, etc.—it also ends with a Menu Suggestions section so you’ll know just what to serve with those Denobulan Sausages.

Excerpted from The Star Trek Cookbook  by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel. Copyright © ​2022 by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

From The Original Series to Lower Decks

Monroe-Cassel was able to include everything up to and including Picard and Lower Decks , which means there was no time to mine Prodigy and Strange New Worlds for dishes. The book still encompasses a huge variety of food seen, heard about, or read about, with recipes meticulously photographed, taste-tasted, and chronicled in stunning glossy pages, where you’ll find everything from Rigelian Chocolate Truffles and First Contact Day Salmon to Pizza with Bunnicorn Sausage.

“One of the challenges is always sort of the battle between making it weird enough, but also making it approachable,” the author told TrekMovie. “I want to have ingredients that are not that hard to source, so that people really can make it without having to drive three hours to a grocery store.” In keeping with the book’s in-canon write-ups, she adds, “And if your replicator is down, you want to be able to make it with whatever you’ve got.” She made a point of using the occasional unconventional ingredient more than once, to keep things practical both for herself and for her readers.

Excerpted from The Star Trek Cookbook by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel. Copyright © ​2022 by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

One pip or four?

The book begins with a welcome to food-curious cadets, and each recipe has a 1-4 pips difficulty rating, with 4 being the most challenging. For nervous beginners, Monroe-Cassel recommends starting with the drinks—either the Romulan Ale or the Red Leaf Tea. The Ale is “a very straightforward, very easy, tasty drink” and the Tea is “really nice with breakfast” and “playful with flavors.”

Playful is the right word: The veteran cookbook writer strove to use real food to create delicious dishes, but keep things true to Star Trek, which meant spreading her culinary and photography wings a bit. “My usual comfort zone is sort of dim lighting medieval on a slab of wood kind of thing,” she told us, so incorporating Star Trek’s bright colors was a new experience. She mentions that it took a long time to get the Starfleet Food Rations—those colored blobs seen in The Original Series —to her satisfaction. “One of my rules is you can’t just—if you’re doing Star Wars, blue milk, you can’t just put food dye in milk and call it blue milk like that is literally blue milk, but it’s not a recipe. And so likewise, you can’t just sort of paint some food coloring on melon and call it you know, whatever the up-for-debate name is, which I hope I’ve maybe settled a little bit with my head notes.”

Excerpted from  The Star Trek Cookbook by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel. Copyright © ​2022 by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The ones that got away: Jumja sticks and Captain Pike

Her big regret? Jumja sticks, seen on Deep Space Nine ’s Promenade. “It’s such a disappointing thing because I made one batch of these, and they were perfect. And I apparently did not write down what I did. And I could never replicate them again, pun intended. It devastated me, I was right down to the submission deadline wire, I was still trying to remake these. And so that’s the one that got away from me.”

Not much else did, except for all the delicacies that have been coming out of Captain Pike’s quarters in season 1 of Strange New Worlds . Monroe-Cassel could probably do a whole book of Pike’s recipes—especially the episode where “there’s a plate of canapés going around, and they looked incredible”—and loves the idea of, say, doing a side-by-side cooking demo with Anson Mount on the Star Trek Cruise one day.

Captain Pike cooking up a storm on the Enterprise

The trouble with… spatchcocking

But while we wait for that, we still have her cookbook, which sometimes takes risks by combining old Trek with new, like the Quadrotriticale Salad, inspired by The Original Series “The Trouble With Tribbles” but enhanced with a tentacle look as seen on season 1 of Discovery . There’s another tribble-related dish that Monroe-Cassel considers one of her prouder accomplishments: Spatchcocked Tribble.

“One of my favorite Star Trek things is the Short Trek about the tribbles [“The Trouble With Edward”] and the origin story of the Tribbles, basically,” she says. “And it makes me laugh every time I think about it, that there’s this poor well-meaning but absolutely bonkers scientist trying to solve hunger problems on a planet just takes over the entire ship and it’s just tribbles are a problem forever then, right? But I actually built a replicator for that photo, Original Series -era because I just really wanted it to look the part.” She said it took forever to get the lighting just right. “It’s like crazy person stuff, but oh my god, it’s really fun and worth it in the end.”

From “The Trouble With Edward”

Over 70 recipes from across the franchise

With over 70 brand-new recipes from across all of Star Trek—and yes, Monroe-Cassel includes food from novels and video games—this book is both a fun read and a great addition to your kitchen shelf as well as a collection of Star Trek art books. Star Trek is “just a nice world, it’s a nice place to dwell,” she says. “I think one of the interesting things is it shows us the promise of the best that humanity could achieve. It’s a hopeful future.” This upbeat, life-affirming sentiment is present on every page of her book, whether you’re there as a chef or just a bystander. Happy cooking!

Visit Chelsea Monroe-Cassel’s website or her page about  The Star Trek Cookbook .

On sale Tuesday

The Star Trek Cookbook will be released on Tuesday, September 20. You can pick it up at Amazon in hardcover for $35.00 and Kindle eBook for $31.50 .

Find more news and reviews of  Star Trek books at TrekMovie.com .

DISCLAIMER: We may link to products to buy on Amazon in our articles; these are customized affiliate links that support TrekMovie by earning a small commission when you purchase through them.

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I don’t usually buy into these themed cookbooks. But this was a really good interview and write up, enough to have me seriously consider it. Thank you!

Remember, it ain’t real gagh if it’s not moving.

ST:TNG: “Lonely Among Us”: Riker: “We no longer enslave animals for food purposes. [Humans eat] something as fresh and tasty as meat, but inorganically materialized out of patterns used by our transporters.”

ST:PIC: “Nepenthe”: Riker [preparing dinner, and speaking to his daughter whom he sent out to hunt for bunnicorns (a rabbit-like animal)]: “You cut out the venom sacs? … Pizza, with tomato, basil, and nonvenomous bunnicorn sausage.”

I don’t think he was saying hunting was illegal or went away in itself, it sounds like he was saying that entities like farming methods that is meant to breed animals for food is gone by the 24th century. Hunting is obviously still done today worldwide, but it’s not done to feed the masses either.

I remember having this conversation on this site before and I think hunting would still be around in the 24th century, but probably a lot less so compared to today. I’m guessing the overwhelming amount of people who eat meat in the 24th century are eating a processed version of it via replicators, but some people could still hunt.

So nothing was contradicted. It sounds like farms no longer exist in the Star Trek universe because they no longer have to. They now have technology that can process the taste of meat through other means. But I don’t think it means people don’t eat real meat from time to time either.

That’s exactly how I took it. We know for a fact that other aliens hunt. We heard about it on DS9 and other shows so it’s more of an earth thing – getting rid of mass farming for the sake of meat when replicators exist. It’s also fair to state that Star Trek characters before this new modern era of Trek always talked about how replicators are never quite as good as the real thing. Picard in TNG even said he kept a jar of caviar for special occasions so humans still eat actual animals. Riker even had a picture of fishing with his dad when he was a boy on one of the TNG episodes.

They better have the multicoloured cubes they ate on TOS.

They’re in there.

Blue ones too?

Blue ones too.

Now I’m tempted to buy!

I’m sorry. Hot dogs instead of real lemur meat? This book is not canon and I will not stand for it. How dare the producers of Star Trek foist this trash on us? They have totally lost my support and I will not be watching upcoming seasons of SNW and PICARD.

I’ve always wanted to try Hasperat!

I have always thought hasperat is probably similar to Ethiopian injera, based on its description as “briny” in “Preemptive Strike.”

I’d forgotten about jumja sticks and probably wouldn’t noticed have they were missing…and now I am disappoint ;)

IT’S A COOKBOOK!!! IT’S A COOKBOOK!!! (someone had to make this reference :)))

Deep cut…”To serve mankind”

“how to cook for forty humans”

But does it have Tranya?

That looks intriguing but the Romulan Ale recipe seems to lack anything that would knock you on your a$$ the way the original is supposed to. Energy drink? Lemon lime soda? That’s for a weak knockoff…

I was thinking the same plus it comes across more like a cocktail than an ale. If they were to mix some random 8% IPA with a generous amount of spirits and blue food dye it would probably come across as more authentic but they might have to brace themselves for a few law suits…

Thank you Laurie, I always wanted to know what Romulan ale was made of, though I doubt that was the actual concoction that was used in the series and movies (because of the alcohol). I do wonder what they were using…

contrary to the premise of a cookbook (and like her blue milk example) – probably just blue colored water was all they bothered to make for filming

Romulan ale is just coloured water? Next you’ll tell me there’s no Santa Claus!

But does it have gumbo and Jambalaya?

I wondered that as well.

Are any of the Sisko family recipes like Aubergine stew in there?

No one’s mentioning the OG Star Trek Cooking manual? Or did I miss it? Grits McCoy? It had a great lasagna recipe sourced from James Doohan.

I had it! You mean the one “written by” Christine Chapel? I used to read it over & over as a kid! I wish I still had it.

I’ve been wanting one of these since I saw a Star Wars cookbook. A lot of great Trek books in time for the winter holiday season!

The Bizarre Food On Star Trek Explained

Star Trek has existed in one form or another for more than 50 years. In pop culture terms, that's infinity — many people have literally never known a world without Star Trek . So far, there have been ten television series, 13 theatrical films, and countless novels, comic books, games, and other media. That's a lot of material and world-building. At this point, Star Trek may be the most finely detailed fictional universe ever created.

Many of those details are in the service of creating convincing alien cultures. Star Trek  contains alien civilizations at just about every level of technological and cultural advancement, and it's unusual in that humanity isn't presented as the center of everything. Earth culture is very much just one of many and is often presented as being a bit backward in some ways, a bit advanced in others — for example, food.

Food plays a surprisingly important role in the Star Trek universe. Several stories pivot on shared meals, characters bond over their favorite dishes and reveal themselves in how they react to unfamiliar dishes, and alien cultures are illuminated by what they eat and how they treat the rituals of food preparation and consumption. Since a lot of this is alien food, it can get a little crazy, of course. Here are some of the more extreme examples of the bizarre food on Star Trek explained.

Klingon g agh is one of the most famous dishes in the Star Trek cookbook, in part because Klingon culture is such a big and fascinating part of the universe and in part because gagh is, frankly, disgusting. There's no easy way to say this: It's worms. Specifically, fictional serpent worms — preferably eaten alive and wriggling — which makes sense since the Klingons are a warlike, aggressive race of people who value individual courage and honor. You can see where making every meal a predatory victory would appeal to them.

According to the Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha , the Klingon dish comes in about 51 varieties (in large part because the many, many writers on the many, many series and films weren't particularly consistent with how gagh was described or presented). Luckily for the human characters, some of these involve stewing or chilling the worms, meaning it's a slightly less horrifying eating experience. This might explain why so many Star Trek fans are obsessed with actually preparing  gagh and eating it, despite the fact that serpent worms don't actually exist.

As reported by  Vice , there's significant interest and energy put into trying to create something vaguely resembling gagh in real life. Unsurprisingly, most of these efforts don't actually involve living worms but use worm-like stuff like pasta, noodles, or overcooked veggies to approximate the experience. Of eating worms. Because that's an experience you want to approximate, apparently.

Romulan ale

One of the most famous consumables ever mentioned in the Star Trek universe is Romulan ale, an incredibly powerful intoxicant with an iconic blue color. (It sometimes appears to be phosphorescent as well.) As the Romulans are usually Federation enemies, Romulan ale is usually illegal. Serious Eats  notes that this is often presented as a parallel to real-world Cuban cigars: something highly prized and considered extremely high-quality that is illegal for purely political reasons. Though, to be fair, it is sometimes implied that Romulan ale is also illegal because of its potency — for many, it apparently results in instantaneous inebriation, followed quickly by incapacitation. As  Memory Alpha  notes, even Worf, who enjoys a Klingon's robust constitution, is affected powerfully by the stuff.

Naturally, the combination of extreme intoxication and bright blue color makes it a common example of Star Trek fare that people try to create in real life. The good news is that Romulan ale has never been described in great detail, so all you need to do is make a really, really strong drink that has a really, really blue color to it. There are several recipes on the Internet for cocktails you can reasonably call Romulan ale, most of which involve everyone's go-to blue liqueur, blue curaçao, and everybody's go-to alcoholic dynamite, Everclear. This one packs a punch, for example.

Plomeek soup

The Vulcans are just as important to Star Trek as the Klingons in terms of alien races. Spock , portrayed by the late Leonard Nimoy and later by Zachary Quinto, remains one of the most popular characters in the show's universe. And the Vulcans are at the center of many of Star Trek 's most important storylines.

But Vulcan cooking isn't given as much attention on the show as the Klingons' or even some other, less important alien races. That's largely because the Vulcans, being ultra-rational beings, don't treat their meals like violent deathmatches as the Klingons do, and they also embrace a vegetarian lifestyle that simply isn't particularly exciting. But one Vulcan dish does get a lot of attention: plomeek  soup.

As  Westword  explains, plomeek soup is a traditional breakfast meal for Vulcans and is basically a very bland vegetable broth. Its most famous moment of screen time comes in the classic Original Series episode "Amok Time," when Spock goes through the Vulcan mating cycle known as pon farr . Nurse Chapel prepares some plomeek soup in an attempt to comfort and calm Spock. It does not go well and represents one of the rare times Spock (or any Vulcan) displays an emotional reaction.

If you're hankering for some tasteless veggie broth (and who isn't), Buzzfeed offers a simple recipe for something approximating the fictional version.

Heart of targ

A lot of the food mentioned during Star Trek 's five-plus decades of existence is recognizably traditional human fare jazzed up with some funny names and food dyes. Sometimes you can imagine the writers just taking any earthbound meal and tacking the name of an alien race at the beginning, like Talaxian omelettes or Ktarian beer (which looks a lot like regular beer).

Klingon food, however, is reliably weird. The Klingons are a sneering, violent race, after all — but a sneering, violent race with a rich culture. Even when their culinary achievements can be traced back to relatively normal human equivalents in the real world, there's usually a violent and terrifying twist to them. Such is the case with heart of targ .

As  Memory Alpha  explains, a targ is essentially a boar, except with spikes on its back and a tendency to destroy everything in its path. Naturally, the Klingons keep targs as pets and enjoy eating them in a dish called heart of targ which, you guessed it, involves the heart torn from a targ . The Klingons believe eating it confers courage, so they naturally eat it a lot . Horrifyingly, Buzzfeed reports that Food Replicator, a food blogger, has actually created this dish in the real world using lamb's hearts.

Rokeg blood pie

The Klingons in Star Trek have a rich legacy of poetry, art, and aggressively violent interactions with everyone, including themselves. They're also all about their food. But the Klingons can't just make a delicious, nutritious meal. They generally have to work some kind of off-puttingly violent imagery into it ... or simply make it kind of gross, food that requires courage just to eat.

As a result, an unsurprising number of Klingon foods include the word "blood." In fact, when the Klingons aren't eating stuff like live worms , their food seems to have a disturbingly high blood content. Case in point: Rokeg blood pie. Because who doesn't want their daily recommended serving of blood served in pie form?

To be fair, human beings have a fair number of blood puddings and the like, so it's not like the Klingons invented eating the coagulated blood of other beings. Star Trek does a great job of making the food in its stories meaningful, however, and as  Memory Alpha  notes, Rokeg  blood pie is notable as being a comfort food for the Klingon character Worf. It's also traditionally consumed on the Klingon Day of Honor, when warriors looks back on their deeds and judge their honor.

Recipes exist, but be warned: Most use more palatable stuff like raspberry puree. If you want to make the real stuff,  Food Replicator has a recipe that uses real blood. You have a blood guy, right?

Pipius claw

When the subject of weird alien food on Star Trek comes up, it usually centers on Klingon dishes. This makes sense because the Klingons are both a fantastic creation, equal parts violence and poetry, and a collection of bizarre, off-putting cultural details. Their food reflects this. Most of the Klingon dishes mentioned in the show sound revolting or like the sort of prank dish kids are forced to eat when rushing a particularly cruel fraternity.

Take pipius  claw, which the ever-adventurous Commander Riker ate in the TNG episode "A Matter of Honor." Riker was being temporarily assigned to a Klingon ship and wanted to acquaint himself with the culture via a traditional meal.

If you're wondering how awful something called pipius claw would be in real life, Memory Alpha notes that Alan Sims, the guy who created the food prop for the episode, used chicken feet with one of the toes cut off. The legs were then placed in a liquid broth of some sort and garnished with some colorful vegetable matter. While it's true that people do actually eat chicken feet in real life, we maintain that when the best thing you can say about dinner is that it resembles chicken legs, you've already lost.

If you're planning some sort of Star Trek -themed dinner party, you might look into meals that can be approximated by real-life recipes, if only to avoid serving a bowl of wriggling worms to your impressed but horrified guests. That makes hasperat an ideal choice, because, as  Memory Alpha  notes, all we really know about this Bajoran food is that it resembles a burrito and is so hot and spicy it makes the eyes water and literally burns the tongue. That means that all you need to do is make something vaguely burrito-like and make it spicy AF. In fact, the prop food used in the series was as basic as it comes: flour tortillas, cream cheese, and red and green peppers.

That simplicity makes it ideal for themed party food because it's easy, and attaining a level of verisimilitude is easy enough — they're just space wraps, after all. The challenge lies in the heat level. If you want an authentic Star Trek   hasperat experience, those babies have to be hot, hot, hot. Recipes found at places like Food.com or The Geeky Chef both call for hot sauce but leave it up to you for the level of fire (and the choice of sauce). Whether you make them mildly spicy or thermonuclear, hasperat remains one of the few Star Trek meals you can replicate in your kitchen with a reasonable resemblance to the real (fictional) food.

Stewed Bok-Rat Liver

Ah, those kooky Klingons and their aggressively terrible food. The persistently unappetizing nature of Klingon dishes is one reason their food is the most memorable on the show — and why it's always the Klingon meals  that fans try to make in real life.

A prime example is stewed bok-rat liver. You might think no one in their right mind would want to eat any part of a rat, but as  Practical Self Reliance  points out, rats and mice have been considered delicacies in many cultures throughout history. According to  Food Replicator , this dish is a staple of Klingon warships and is best enjoyed fresh.

Unfortunately, as with most Klingon meals, it's not meant to be appetizing to us regular humans. As  Memory Alpha  notes, in the script of the Deep Space Nine  episode "Soldiers of the Empire," the dish is described as "vile and slimy," which might be exactly what a bunch of Klingon warriors serving in a crowded, stuffy warship for years on end look for in a comfort food but doesn't work so well with human beings. Or at least not normal human beings.

Luckily, the recipe that Food Replicator offers (using lamb's liver) actually sounds delicious — assuming you like liver to begin with.

Alfarian hair pasta

At first glance, Alfarian hair pasta sounds like the classic sci-fi technique of taking something perfectly normal and mundane and adding a sci-fi word in front of it, like "space madness." In this case, take some (angel) hair pasta, attribute it to the Alfarians, and call it a day.

But Alfarian hair pasta is actually a lot more interesting and a lot weirder than you might think at first glance, mainly because the word "hair" isn't so much a descriptive adjective as it is literally what you're eating. Have you ever considered eating the wool from a sheep? If not, it's possibly (probably) because of your provincial human outlook on life. As  Memory Alpha  explains, the hair of the Alfarians is edible, and every year when they begin to shed, their hair is gathered up, cooked, and eaten.

Luckily, Alfarian hair pasta looks more or less like traditional human pasta (thank goodness for the traditionally low budgets of Star Trek TV shows), so recipes like the one offered at Food Replicator are pretty easy to make — although whether or not your obsession extends to actually making your pasta from scratch is entirely up to you.

Because the Star Trek writers traditionally understand the cultural power and importance of food, the Klingon culinary arts get a surprising amount of attention in the various TV shows and films. While sometimes, these mentions of food and drink are just set dressing or provided for shock value, they can also provide a great deal of depth to the fictional cultures of the universe. Klingon bloodwine is a great example of this.

As  Memory Alpha  explains, bloodwine is a staple alcoholic beverage for the Klingons. It's powerful stuff, considered much stronger than whiskey — in fact, most non-Klingons can't tolerate it. At the same time, it has vintages like our wines, so it's a varied experience. Klingons often have favorite vintages and will stock up on a particular year to drink on special occasions. Served warm and very strong, like most Klingon food and drink it's almost certainly disgusting unless you're drinking one of humanity's many versions of it.

Interestingly, there's no official proof that bloodwine actually contains blood, though there are non-canonical sources that suggest it's made from blood and sugar (yum). Most of the recipes created to approximate bloodwine don't actually call for blood –  Cook Fiction's  recipe, for example, uses grenadine and cranberry juice to give the cocktail that bloody look.

Jumja sticks

One of the more subtle and effective bits of world-building employed by the writers of Star Trek is the varied reactions to the alien foodstuffs mentioned in the stories. Having some characters love a dish while others react in horror is a small detail, but it really helps to sell a universe with real depth. In real life, there are plenty of food items that divide people.

That's what makes jumja sticks so interesting. These typically huge treats are made by Bajorans from the sap of the jumja tree. According to  Memory Alpha , jumja sticks are really, really sweet. And like many sweet treats, jumja sticks can be flavored in various ways. As a result, creatures with a sweet tooth tend to love them, while many others find them to be cloying and kind of gross. They're kind of the  Peeps of the Star Trek world, in other words. In fact, behind the scenes, jumja sticks were referred to as "glop-on-a-stick," which gives you some idea of just how appetizing they were intended to be.

If you're wondering what a jumja stick might taste like, some have suggested that maple syrup sugar candy could be used to approximate them. Food Replicator  suggests treacle, which seems like a better match in terms of sweetness and how quickly you'll get very, very tired of eating them.

Klingon skull stew

The Klingon diet is not for the faint of heart. Just about every dish has words like "blood" or "heart" in the name, and these should be taken very, very literally. They also tend to be pretty accurately described — no foodie poetry for the Klingons. So if you glance at your menu and see that you're being served Klingon skull stew, you know a skull is going to be involved. The only question is whether it'll be a Klingon skull or ... something else.

According to  Memory Alpha , Klingon skull stew appeared in one and perhaps two episodes of different Star Trek series. In Deep Space 9 , Klingon skull stew is offered by the Replimat, along with a blurry photo depicting it. In Enterprise , an unnamed stew-like dish is shown being prepared on a Klingon ship with an obvious skull floating in it.

The Star Trek Cookbook –  which isn't considered canon but is still fun to read – includes a recipe for Klingon skull stew using a calf's skull (naturally) and honeycomb tripe (also naturally). Which means that skull stew may be the only Star Trek meal that is actually more horrifying in its real-world approximation than its fictional version.

Hasperat: A Bajoran Delicacy (and an AWR Original Recipe!)

Posted June 2, 2016 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 9 Comments

Of all the foods featured in Star Trek: TNG , hasperat is the one that stands out most in my mind (except for Earl Grey tea, of course). This is partially because it plays a key role in one of the final episodes, but also because hasperat is associated with one my favorite characters: Ensign Ro Laren. Ro is insubordinate and has a tough exterior, but it is later revealed that this may be due to the suffering she endured as a child in a Bajoran refugee camp. One of her only fond memories from her youth is her father teaching her to make her favorite food: hasperat, a burrito-like wrap made with spicy brined filling.

I was intrigued by the description of hasperat—the spicy brined filling sounded a lot like kimchi to me. I’d never cooked with kimchi before, so I was excited to use it in my own recipe. The hasperat made as a prop for the show clearly has a lot of green in it —not just the red from the kimchi—so I threw in a layer of spinach. The prop also included sliced peppers, so I did too. For a little extra fun and flavor, I added rice, avocado, and a little sriracha to kick up the spice. The result is a hasperat recipe I think Ro Laren would love!

Ready to boldly eat what no one has eaten before, Wonderlanders? 😉

Hasperat: A Bajoran Delicacy

“ Kalita: We can’t let her do something like this. We don’t know anything about her. Macias: I know… that she can make very strong hasperat.”

— Star Trek: The Next Generation

INGREDIENTS:

• 2 flour tortillas
• 1/3 cup baby spinach
• 1/2 cup white rice
• 1/4 cup kimchi (I got my kimchi at H-Mart. You can find kimchi at most Asian supermarkets, but you can also order it online .)
• 1/2 small avocado
• 4-6 mini sweet peppers
• 2 green onions
• sriracha to taste

Makes 2 hasperat wraps

INSTRUCTIONS:

• NOTE: I put 3 dots of sriracha on each avocado slice, which is enough to result in mild spice (the spice level will lower as the wraps chill). For truly spicy hasperat, you can add extra sriracha and/or swap the sweet peppers for a spicier variety, like habañeros.

• Repeat Steps 2 -4 with your remaining ingredients to make a second burrito.
• Place both burritos in the fridge for 10-20 minutes to let the flavors set.

Want more wraps? Check out our Greek tortilla spirals!

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9 responses to “ Hasperat: A Bajoran Delicacy (and an AWR Original Recipe!) ”

This looks so colourful and tasty! I guessed right, from the last post.

Thanks! I think the flavors came out really balanced. There’s a little sweet, a little spicy, and the rice/avocado helps mellow it out. 🙂

According to the “Star Trek Cookbook” written by the same guy that plays Neelix and William Birnes it seemed like hasperat was a customize-able cream cheese and veggies wrap. So for a more mild one you could probably spread cream cheese on it and then for greens could use the spinach or even watercress, and for red, yellow, and orange could cut some red, yellow, and orange bell peppers into strips and add those to the sandwich along with some shredded carrots. Could also spread some mild salsa on the tortilla wrap along with the cream cheese.

Star Trek: TNG! Yay! 😀 I’m really excited about these recipes. And I adore kimchi! I need to try this. ^ ^

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Great recipe! soooo glad no cream cheese in this version 🤢🤮 lol

I love Star Trek and I love Kimchi. I look forward to trying a version of this in the future. Thank you!

Glad to meet another trekkie! Thanks for stopping by!

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The Trouble With Trek Food

The best cookbooks help us learn and think about their subjects. The new Star Trek cookbook, sadly, only reaches for the food coloring.

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When I was a kid I used a Fisher Price recorder to tape the opening scenes of Star Trek: The Motion Picture as the VHS played on our big TV, so that alone in my room I could listen back to Kirk and Scotty’s terse exchange and ambient but excessively long shuttle trip to the retrofitted USS Enterprise. Aside from Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic swelling score, I’m not sure that as a child, I really liked this movie, or even that scene. More so it was a distraction, or like hanging out with friends who didn’t demand anything. Looking back now, the gesture of making and listening to a low-quality audio recording of the oft-cited most boring Star Trek film is just completely over-the-top, yet emblematic of the emotional intensity I felt toward Star Trek at the time, and occasionally still muster. This extreme intensity, however, couldn’t get me to want to cook from a Star Trek cookbook.

The food on Star Trek fundamentally looks terrible, from the vaunted live worms that comprise Klingon gagh to the gelatinous cubes wobbling around the original Enterprise mess hall. Slime on a stick on the Deep Space Nine station promenade? Those omelets Will Riker made that everyone thought were awful? No level of fandom could possibly make me want to eat these things, let alone make them.

My aversion, however, may put me in the minority. Because everyone eats, and because eating is a social activity, food is a key component of worldbuilding. This is especially true of stories and franchises set elsewhere: in the past, in the future, in places that don’t actually exist. And as rights holders have expanded their methods for getting fans to spend money, pop culture cookbooks became their own cottage industry . Into this trend comes Chelsea Monroe-Cassel’s Star Trek Cookbook: Culinary Adventures in the Final Frontier , which hit shelves on September 21. Monroe-Cassel, a progenitor of the franchise recipe golden age, began the Inn at the Crossroads blog in 2011 to share recipes for the foods referenced in George R. R. Martin’s book series A Song of Ice and Fire, which was adapted into the TV show Game of Thrones that year. The blog expanded to cover foods from other fictional properties, spurring numerous cookbook projects from Monroe-Cassel, including those inspired by the video game Overwatch , doomed 2000s Joss Whedon sci-fi show Firefly , and Star Wars .

The Star Trek Cookbook is lightly bound by the conceit that Monroe-Cassel is a “gastrodiplomat” lecturing Starfleet cadets about how to further the Federation’s exploratory and expansionist goals through sharing a meal with representatives of other planets. The dishes themselves are all references I could ID from a lifetime of consuming Star Trek, but each dish’s franchise origin is noted. The book is organized by dish type, and not Star Trek series, era, or culture. In theory this makes it more usable for its intended purpose, that is, making and eating the food. This is (ugh) logical for a cookbook, and some of the recipes in here are good. Cardassian Regova eggs , for example: I boiled them, cracked the shells, and submerged them in dye diluted in water until they emerged a pretty, webby green. Spiked with some frilly bits of lettuce they looked striking; maybe I’d serve them at a Halloween party. They were also okay devilled eggs, and I learned a new trick: that you can slice off the tops and prepare them vertically.

But they’re also just devilled hen eggs, and nothing in the filling (yogurt, red pepper, garlic) makes them anything other than superficially a little weird. Everything about how the food looks — the plating, the reliance on dyes, the lightly modernist approach — broadcasts alienness, in a sci-fi aesthetic way. But making a traditionally structured cookbook with solid recipes for kinda odd-seeming food falls short of this project’s full potential, since nobody is going to a Star Trek cookbook first and foremost because it’s a cookbook.

What the best cookbooks do is help us learn and think about their subjects. For example, what could the shifting presentation of food on Star Trek through 12 series and 13 films, along with comic books, novels, action figures, games, and a Vegas attraction that closed in 2008, tell us about the growth and evolution of the franchise? Or, what can we understand about Klingons, Vulcans, Cardassians, Bajorans, Romulans, or Ferengi by putting their foods into dialogue? Aside from being the nerdiest sentence I personally have ever written, and that’s saying a lot, cookbooks are perfect venues for exploring these kinds of questions. But the Star Trek cookbook is just trying to give fans the opportunity to pretend they’re eating foods seen and mentioned on Star Trek. Aside from nailing the look of the eggs, which Monroe-Cassel does, this is all a polite fiction, because Regovas and their eggs do not exist.

For properties like The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones , which are based on our world, with food references derived from a well-preserved history of English cookery, recreating dishes will be almost literal by default. In contrast, Star Trek at its most infamous and arguably successful offers parables for real life’s moral, ethical, and political dilemmas. Often the basic Trek setup is that the Federation and some alien other must learn to accommodate and understand one another, that both their positions have value. Food and dining have long been tools of real-life diplomacy ; look at elaborate White House state dinners, and so on. The imagined gastrodiplomat premise of Monroe-Cassel’s book is acting out this pantomime — but in the world of Star Trek, where the food on 24th-century starships is replicated and not cooked. It’s impossible to know, exactly, what the human foods of this period will be like, the same way the Victorians can’t have predicted Charms Blue Razz Berry Blow Pops. The technology just wasn’t there, and nor was the inclination.

Also, most of the food in this fictional world is literally alien. It’s grown and manufactured on planets no one alive today will ever reach, produced by cultures with biologies and political, moral, ethical, and economic systems that are shaped by factors we can only guess at — badly, probably, given how unlikely it is they’d resemble our own. The most fictional idea on Star Trek is that “new life and new civilizations” from outer space are incredibly compatible with Earth’s human society, even in how they are different. Just the idea that these alien races have food items and food cultures in the ways that are recognizable to us is a bit of a fancy. Who says aliens would name the things they eat, or prepare them, or have preferences?

All of this would be nothing more than the basic science fictional buy-in, but here the premise of Star Trek ’ s food comes to us as a cookbook, which is a form that reproduces a certain kind of knowledge . The book is bound by those conventions, and Monroe-Cassel is bound by further, practical parameters: what’s available to readers right now, on Earth.

Let’s take gagh, the Klingon dish of live worms. Gagh is textually, in Star Trek, disgusting to the human characters. In its first appearance, the second-season Next Generation episode “A Matter of Honor,” Riker (of the gross omelets) does an exchange program on a Klingon ship, and everyone makes fun of him for having to eat gagh . Even the Klingons he meets are like, “Oooh, human, are you going to eat gagh?” And Riker, having bravado, earns their respect by eating gagh with gusto.

There’s a political reading to be made here. Star Trek depicts a multicultural world that mirrors our own in a lot of ways, and back on our actual Earth, foods from distant places have a long history as tools of cultural diplomacy and exploitation . One of the constant thematic tensions in all eras of Star Trek is the extent to which Starfleet is an exploratory and diplomatic endeavor, and to what degree it is a military outfit. Often the takeaway is that it’s a gray area; Starfleet is either, or both, when it suits them (meaning both in canon and in production). Riker earning respect on the Klingon ship by eating their gross foods feels a little T. E. Lawrence , where the latter’s appreciation for Arabian cultures (and boys ) was a byproduct of and adjunct to establishing an early-20th-century British presence around the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In Star Trek, Klingons are depicted as the ultimate other. Jean-Luc Picard quipping (in Patrick Stewart ’s RP ) as the camera pans over the awful-looking Klingon foods, “We know so little about them. There really is so much to learn,” reinforces the comparison.

While Riker isn’t making a direct effort to colonize the Klingon homeworld or undermine their empire, he is part of a cultural diplomacy to draw allies and member planets further into the Federation. In “A Matter of Honor,” nothing sinister is canonically happening via the crew exchange itself. But to a viewer in 1989, or now, the subtext of Riker being dropped into the Klingon ship’s mess hall is going to evoke a memory of the orientalist trope of a traveler to a distant land becoming enmeshed in the cultural milieu while drawing this place and its people into the visitor’s sphere.

So there’s a lot to unpack around gagh that could actually reveal much about Star Trek, and because Star Trek is a product of our culture, therefore, ourselves. But of course, no cookbook produced in the U.S. is going to share recipes for live worms. Instead, Monroe-Cassel recreates gagh out of udon. These long, thick noodles look, yes, a little wormy, and they can have a slimy texture when dressed correctly. If you’re looking at a still image of a plate of gagh from Star Trek, they passingly resemble long noodles, slickly coated. But gagh isn’t noodles — it’s worms. The project hinges on simply replicating the look of gagh, and something is lost in this translation.

Even as I was dyeing my Regova eggs, the new Star Trek cookbook felt off to me. It does feel weird to be excited to eat Cardassian food at all, in light of their arc as imperialists whose occupation of the planet Bajor led to a system of slave labor camps and, ultimately, genocide — I mean, it’s all pretend, this didn’t happen. But sci-fi generally, and Star Trek perhaps especially, is often firmly allegorical. It would be difficult to cover the breadth of its alien cuisines and not run into ethical questions, even if Monroe-Cassel chose to skirt them. After all, the book’s major selling point is in some ways its posture of authority — so what wasn’t clicking?

I found the answer in the Star Trek Cookbook — another one, from 1999, co-authored by Ethan Phillips and William J. Birnes. This book embodies what struck me nearly two decades ago as an embarrassing variety of camp: There’s a simpering alien with airbrushed spot makeup and orange Nehru collar on the jacket, badly edited against a sculptural tablescape that’s giving late-’90s b’nai mitzvah buffet that’s badly pasted against a starry-sky background. Also, the recipes have always struck me as attempts to “ normalize the absurd .” In my memory, this felt awkward.

The alien on the cover — wearing a costume that looks like it’s made of the moquette they use to upholster the seating on the London Underground — is Neelix, a character portrayed on Voyager (1995-2001) by co-author Phillips. Neelix, the shipboard cook on USS Voyager, is one of the more annoying characters in Star Trek, and maybe the most annoying depending on one’s tolerance for peppy boy geniuses and floppy-vigged cosmonauts, keptin. The book’s premise is that Neelix is writing down his recipes and recollections from serving on Voyager, along with some archival information he dug up about the dining preferences of the crews of the original Enterprise from TOS, The Next Generation ’s Enterprise-D, and Deep Space Nine. A running joke on Voyager is that Neelix is an awful chef and the crew hates his cooking. But, maybe that’s not the point. “As a chef,” he writes, “I could surprise them with a taste of home tucked away inside some alien morsel.” Yet “as morale officer, I now know a little bit more about them, which would help me reach out in a personal way when they needed support and kindness.”

Contained within this frame, Phillips and Birnes’s effort is basically a Star Trek food sourcebook, in-universe and out. Because Phillips is a cast member, he has access to other Trek cast members and crew. So the book contains not just recipes referring to Star Trek shows, but also sections from Voyager props master Alan Sims and Deep Space Nine props master Joe Longo , and recipes from various Trek cast members. For example, Leonard Nimoy provides a “Kasha Varnishkas à la Vulcan.” “My favorite dish,” he writes, “handed down by my mother, who brought it from her village in the Ukraine, which is a small town in Western Vulcan.” Ha ha — but also, Nimoy is one of the most beloved figures in the history of Star Trek, behind arguably the most beloved of its many beloved characters, the one that set the blueprint for Star Trek’s approach to communicating alienness: a mostly human-looking man whose style and tone marked him, for the audience, as different.

Behind the joke about Western Vulcan is Nimoy’s biography as the son of Ukrainian immigrants who were Orthodox Jews. He famously brought aspects of Jewish ritual into his performance as Spock, and the recipe attests to just how inseparable this identity was from the formation of the character: Kasha varnishkes is a totem of Ashkenazi heritage . Likewise, the mannerisms and affect Nimoy brought to Spock, a character who is a minority nearly everywhere he goes, and never allowed to forget it, feel truer for his personal history. The inclusion of a recipe like this — one of many from various cast members, although I can’t say I’m as charmed by James Doohan’s “Scotty’s Lemon Chicken” — shows that Star Trek is more than the sum of its parts. This book is not merely about the foods on Star Trek; it is about the foods of Star Trek, and I now find the earnestness of this moving, whereas I once found it, like, kinda cringe.

Still, this book is weird and unpolished. It looks pretty bad and is functionally useless as a cookbook. It is organized by series, and then subdivided into characters; the recipes in each section loosely relate to that character, sometimes in a drawn-out way. There are no pictures, only fuzzy grayscale stills from various series and a few complementary settings from the props department. It’s almost as if you’re not supposed to make the food at all, and aside from me at my next themed dinner party, it would be unshocking if relatively few people have.

Monroe-Cassel’s book, on the other hand, looks and reads like a contemporary cookbook. It’s clean and white in its overall presentation, with hyper-compartmentalized recipe pages where the formatting does a lot of heavy lifting. The photography is bold, colorful, and a little abstract , focusing on the textures of the foods, with a few top-down shots, such as you’d see in 2010s Bon Appétit or on Instagram . Both volumes are distinctly of their time both in their treatment of Star Trek, and as cookbooks.

The contrast is clearest in a recipe for quadrotriticale salad, a dish Monroe-Cassel teased on Twitter in 2021. It’s a food first referenced in “The Trouble With Tribbles,” one of the most iconic original series episodes. “Tribbles” is a good place to start if you’ve never seen any Star Trek, TOS or otherwise, and if you’re writing a Star Trek cookbook, you can’t not have a quadrotriticale recipe.

In the show, quadrotriticale is a fictional hardy modification of the real-life triticale wheat-rye hybrid grain, and so Phillips and Birnes provide a recipe for quadrotriticale bread, joking that if you can’t find quadrotriticale at your Earth supermarket, blending whole-wheat and rye flour is a fine approximation. Monroe-Cassel’s take is a salad that uses honey and beet juice to transform carrots into wormy tendrils, and butterfly pea flower powder or food coloring to make the quadrotriticale blue. Monroe-Cassel also says you can “add the grain of whatever hue you choose to this recipe,” which must be a whimsical Star Trek way to say you can use something other than the recommended couscous. I used pearled barley and gel food coloring. I did not get the delicate look from the photo, but a garish blue that felt almost violent.

This salad is easy if time-consuming to make, and as Monroe-Cassel writes, its components (carrots, quadrotriticale, dressing, optional decor) can be prepared in advance. With honey in the dressing and the carrots I found it pretty sweet, and went back and added mustard to balance it. Even still I didn’t enjoy it, but that’s personal preference. Either sweet blue food is for you, or it isn’t. Regardless, the dish’s point isn’t how it tastes, but dinner theater. Its plating is pulled from the modernist era of 10 to 15 years ago, with its scientific sheen and laboratory exactitude complemented by a winky playfulness: Looks like this, but it’s really that. Looks like futuristic blue grain from the outskirts of the quadrant, but it’s just dyed couscous.

It is wild, and says very much about fandom’s recent trajectory, that the 1990s book written by a Star Trek cast member with loads of institutional support and input feels somehow precarious and messy with unbridled wonder and enthusiasm, while the one written by a fan in 2022 is an orderly, rational, respectable attempt to make Star Trek feel contained and palatable.

What I don’t think it says much about is Star Trek: Something that’s been with us for decades, in so many iterations, shaped by so many people, can’t be any one thing , and it would be foolish to insist on essentialist readings of what Star Trek is, or does. These are both Star Trek cookbooks, after all — but perhaps the Star Trek cookbooks appropriate for their eras.

Monroe-Cassel’s book will be embraced by some type of fan. It gives Star Trek, forever shorthand for loserdom, a socially acceptable veneer in its clarity, its straightforwardness, and its conventional approach and organization. None of the recipes I made were bad: They weren’t for me, but somebody’s going to like them. (Into grains on a salad; wish they weren’t blue.) But the book from 1999 feels so much weirder, so much fuller of pleasure at the expansiveness of the Star Trek franchise and the specificity of its details. This is what I have always loved about Star Trek, too. Which is probably why I was so embarrassed by that book: its implications. Please don’t let them know I listen to crackly audio of that long-ass nearly pornographic shuttle sequence alone in my bedroom.

And yet both books are parafictions, per art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty, where “real and/or imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world as it is being lived,” and presented as fact. Parafictions, Lambert-Beatty writes , “prepare us to be better, more critical information consumers.” No Star Trek cookbook requiring the approval of its rights holders would go there. That makes these projects, especially Monroe-Cassel’s, exegetical. They collapse the fiction of the canon and the facts of its artifice for the purpose of knowing the material on some deeper level. This is only one of several ways of being a fan, but it certainly is the most profitable.

Inevitably, when I consider how I feel about fannish tie-ins, and just what being a fan means to me, I think of a particular scene from Star Trek. In the 1994 film Generations , the android Data, who’s spent his series arc on a quest to achieve humanity, has just developed emotions, and goes to the shipboard bar to test out this new ability.

The bartender, Guinan, sets down a tray with decanter, and asks, “Something new from Forcas III ?”

Data gags on the drink and cries, “I hate this! It is revolting.”

Guinan asks him if he wants more, and Data, who seems delighted, sets his glass back on the table: “Please.”

Looking forward to the next Star Trek cookbook.

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Star Trek: What Eating On The Enterprise Would Really Be Like

"Star Trek" depicts a future where humanity has finally achieved a utopian society — one where different races, genders, and species all exist harmoniously together. And while some might claim Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell), the inventor of the warp drive, ushered in this new age when his ship made contact with alien life and helped unite everyone on Earth, the truth is humanity owes a greater debt to a different piece of future technology — the food replicator.

Made popular on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" ("TNG"), food replicators are found on every starship and most Federation planets, and they can convert energy into virtually any type of food or drink. Thanks to this invention, food insecurity and starvation are truly problems of the past, and everyone who lives on Earth or serves aboard a ship like the U.S.S. Enterprise can go about their business with a full stomach — which plays a key part in maintaining the peaceful society humanity thrives in.

That said, there are a few downsides to living in a society where computers let you try cuisines from hundreds of different worlds. Due to replicator malfunctions or alien food allergies, dining aboard a starship can be an adventure in and of itself. But if you've ever wondered what sort of dishes you might try in the world of "Star Trek," read on. From getting drunk on Romulan ale to teasing your stomach with Klingon gagh, here's what eating on the Enterprise would really be like.

You can order anything you want on the Enterprise

Foodies who enjoy broadening their palates by sampling exotic dishes will feel like they're in paradise aboard the Enterprise. Not only does the ship's database contain a library of recipes from hundreds of different alien worlds, you can sample practically all of them thanks to the food replicators located in your quarters or in the ship's recreation lounge, Ten Forward.

The next generation model of the "food synthesizer" made popular in the original "Star Trek" series, the food replicators in "TNG" use the same  matter-energy conversion technology used by transporters to transform molecules into anything you want — including a five-course meal. All you need to do is ask the computer for a bowl of Ratamba stew or a Bolian souffle, and the replicator will manifest it for you immediately using the ship's replicator reserves.

There are a few limitations — the Enterprise won't let you replicate anything poisonous or dangerous — but otherwise, you and your fellow gourmets could spend many happy hours hanging out in Ten Forward and indulging in Bajoran, Ktarian, or Betazoid cuisine. And best of all? Since money isn't used among  Federation citizens , everything is free! Sure, it might get attacked by the Borg or thrown back in time every other week, but when it comes to food, the Enterprise is the ultimate cruise ship.

Doing the dishes is ridiculously easy

Automatic dishwashers may have revolutionized sanitation in the modern age, but people in "Star Trek" have an even better way of doing the dishes — just let the replicator dematerialize your used plates, uneaten food, and utensils. This eliminates the need to store drinking glasses or waste water, saving both space and resources. This also explains how a ship like the Enterprise always seems to have more than enough of everything. Thanks to the replicators' ability to recycle anything, spare molecules can be rearranged into any number of useful items like engineering equipment, medical supplies, or even clothes.

Of course, since food replicators are capable of creating anything from the ship's replicator reserves, that also means your next meal could be constructed out of atoms that used to be part of a champagne glass or a chafing dish. So, if your next replicated meatloaf tastes like it was made out of your old gym socks ... that's probably because it was.

Replicated junk food is good for you

Unsurprisingly, being able to order anything you want from a food replicator causes a lot of people to indulge, and many of the Enterprise's crewmembers like to replicate junk food. However, "junk food" in the 24th century isn't anywhere near as unhealthy as it is in our time.

By default, the Enterprise's replicators are designed to manifest food and drink with nutritional value. So when Counselor Troi (Marina Sirtis) orders chocolate ice cream or caviar from the replicators, she's actually eating healthy. At one point in the "TNG" Season 3 episode "The Price," Troi says she can tell the difference between real and replicated ice cream when she asks for a chocolate sundae with real whipped cream. In response, the computer indicates it's programmed to provide foods of acceptable nutritional value and Troi would have to override its program to manifest actual junk food.

Oddly enough, this means that if the  alien trickster Q (John de Lancie) had eaten the 10 replicated chocolate sundaes he ordered shortly after becoming human in the Season 3 episode "Deja Q," he might've ended up with better muscle tone and stronger bones. One can only dream that future miracle diets will include such replicator rations.

Bar-hopping won't get you drunk

Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) may be the Enterprise's bartender, but the truth is most of the beverages served at Ten Forward are non-alcoholic. By the 24th century, synthehol is the drink of choice for many Starfleet officers. According to Data (Brent Spiner) in the "TNG" Season 6 episode "Relics," synthehol is an alcohol substitute that "simulates the appearance, taste, and smell of alcohol." However, the intoxicating effects of synthehol drinks are easily ignored.

On one hand, this makes sense. Starfleet doesn't want their officers to show up at their duty stations hungover, so synthehol appears to be an acceptable compromise for bar-hoppers. However, this revelation horrifies Montgomery Scott (James Doohan), who knows immediately that the "scotch" he's served at Ten Forward is definitely not scotch.

Amusingly, it's later revealed in the "Star Trek: Voyager" Season 5 episode "Timeless" that the one alien species that can get hammered from synthehol is ... the Borg. That's right, Starfleet's most dangerous enemy is incapable of holding their liquor, as seen when  Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) gets drunk from just one glass of non-alcoholic champagne. A few years later, however, Seven shows the Borg nanoprobes in her blood apparently adapted to her low tolerance when she chugs back multiple shots of real bourbon in "Star Trek: Picard." That, or she's become a full-blown alcoholic.

There are plenty of ways to get wasted on the Enterprise

"Star Trek" may depict a future where humanity has risen above the bad habits of its ancestors, but apparently, humans still haven't conquered their self-destructive tendency to get completely plastered. Although synthehol may keep most crewmen sober, there are still plenty of alcoholic beverages on the Enterprise that are far more intoxicating than anything you can encounter in the 21st century.

Shortly after Scotty shows his displeasure at being served synthehol drinks in "Relics," Data reveals that Guinan keeps a limited supply of real alcoholic beverages and serves him from a very potent bottle of "Aldebaran whiskey." Other episodes reveal aliens consuming kanar, a thick Cardassian liquor, as well as Romulan ale, a blue drink that's so intoxicating it's been made illegal by Starfleet. Despite this, practically everyone from Kirk to Riker has smuggled in and shared Romulan ale at parties and even state dinners, showing that Starfleet officers aren't just explorers — they're bootleggers.

Okay, but surely Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) wouldn't approve of all this alcohol floating around his ship, right? Not quite. Turns out, he's the one who gave Guinan the bottle of Aldebaran whiskey that Scotty enjoyed, and he's more than capable of holding his liquor alongside Mr. Scott. Considering that Picard's family has owned a French vineyard for several centuries, it's not surprising that the captain has an appreciation for fine wine and alcoholic beverages.

Cooking is a lost art

Technology does tend to strip a society of some basic skills, and in the case of food replicators, that skill happens to be cooking. When all you need to do to make lunch is ask your replicator for a hamburger and fries, learning how to chop your own meat or use a stove seems unnecessary. This has led many people to learn how to "cook" by programming replication patterns — essentially replacing cooking skills with coding skills.

Which can lead to some big problems. After all, replicators can get damaged, leaving you unable to synthesize your dinner or midnight snack. A few people, like Dr. Bruce Maddox (John Ales), dabble in cooking by trying to make chocolate chip cookies the old-fashioned way in the "Picard" Season 1 episode "Stardust City Rag." However, he still has to use the food replicator to create the flour, butter, eggs, sugar, baking soda, and chocolate chips to prepare the cookies, making his girlfriend, Dr. Jurati (Alison Pill), question the logic behind his actions.

Those who can cook are very passionate

Luckily, human society in the 24th century emphasizes finding personal fulfillment by honing skills, and some people are still very passionate about cooking. In the prequel series "Star Trek: Enterprise," the crew applauded the culinary skills of their cook, Chef. In the final episode, Chef was played by Commander William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) in a holodeck simulation. Riker, who loves cooking, once invited his crew mates for an Owon omelette in the Season 2 episode "Time Squared." However, most of the crew hated his meal — except  Worf (Michael Dorn) , who described it as "delicious."

Riker's cooking skills improve by "Picard," when he makes a pizza from scratch for his family and some unexpected dinner guests. And while we're off the Enterprise, let's head over to "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," where Captain Sisko (Avery Brooks) also enjoys cooking and learned his skills from his father, Joseph Sisko (Brock Peters), the master chef of a popular restaurant in New Orleans.

However, the most enthusiastic (and essential) cook in "Star Trek” is Neelix (Ethan Phillips), the Talaxian chef/morale officer in "Voyager." Since Voyager is stranded in the Delta Quadrant , replicator rations need to be limited, making Neelix responsible for most of the crew's meals. Although his early attempts do create several cases of food poisoning, some of his later attempts are more edible, and he proves very creative with the various ingredients the crew harvest from other planets.

People still raise their own food in the future

Replicators may be able to make food out of "simulated protein molecules," but most people agree that naturally grown food still produces the tastiest dishes. The Enterprise NX-01 has a hydroponic greenhouse where they grow fruits and vegetables for their meals, and the Enterprise-D has a hydroponic laboratory that can presumably do the same thing.

Many of the strange new worlds that Starfleet visits are also veritable Gardens of Eden. "Picard" finds William Riker living on the alien planet Nepenthe, where the soil has regenerative properties, allowing the Riker family to grow very rich tomatoes, basil, and other vegetables. After sampling a tomato, the android Soji Asha (Isa Briones) can immediately taste how "real" naturally grown food is compared to replicated meals.

But the one starship that truly got to appreciate home-grown food was the Voyager. After being stranded in the Delta Quadrant, the crew had to ration their supplies, which meant harvesting plants and other foods from alien planets and cooking them aboard their ship. One of the more unusual dishes was seen in the "Voyager" Season 2 episode "Parturition" when Lieutenant Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) eats some Alfarian hair pasta. Turns out, this pasta is made from the actual hair follicles of mature Alfarian animals that shed them every year in early fall.

Klingon cuisine is very strong

Klingons constantly like to prove how tough they are — including at the dinner table, where most of the dishes look like they were created on a dare. William Riker got to sample several types of Klingon food during a cultural exchange in the "TNG” Season 2 episode "A Matter of Honor." While he claimed to enjoy the bregit lung and rokeg blood pie, even he got squeamish when he was offered a dish of gagh – aka live serpent worms. A Klingon delicacy, there are at least 51 types of gagh, including varieties that squirm, jump, or wiggle as they make their way into your stomach.

Surprisingly,  many "Star Trek" fans really want to try Klingon food , leading to the creation of several Klingon cooking blogs that instruct you on how to cook broiled krada legs ( actually spider crab legs and Moreton Bay bugs ), as well as multiple varieties of gagh (including one made of Japanese soba noodles).

And while genuine Klingon food may prove too strong for some palates, most people love Klingon beverages. Klingon bloodwine was frequently consumed on "Deep Space Nine," and many Starfleet officers found themselves hooked on raktajino, the Klingon version of coffee that could be served hot, iced, or with whipped cream. The drink was so popular, one wonders why some enterprising Klingon baristas didn't open up a whole chain of raktajino houses and become the 24th-century version of Starbucks.

Vulcan dishes tend to be bland

Where warrior races like the Klingons may prefer to eat meals rich in meat, the logical Vulcan race favors a more ... dispassionate cuisine. Many Vulcans, including the Enterprise's Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) are vegetarians who prefer eating Vulcan fruits like gespar or various types of broth. Vulcans also don't like touching their food with their bare hands, making even a vegan barbeque out of the question.

In terms of popular dishes, Nurse Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett) once made a bowl of plomeek soup for Spock in the "Star Trek" Season 2 episode "Amok Time." Considered a traditional morning meal on Vulcan, plomeek soup is usually a bland broth (although there are spicier versions). Unfortunately, Spock was suffering from the Vulcan pon farr mating drive at the time and angrily threw the soup back at Nurse Chapel. He later apologized and requested that she make him another bowl.

Strangely, in the "Deep Space Nine" Season 2 episode "Melora," the Ferengi bartender Quark (Armin Shimerman) serves a dish of "jumbo Vulcan mollusks" to a diner. Since mollusks are meat, this has led to some speculation among fans over how strict the Vulcan vegetarian diet really is. Of course, if the mollusks were replicated, this could serve as a loophole for any Vulcans who chose to partake in such a meal.

Ferengi meal preparation is an ... intimate affair

There are some meals that even replicators can't fully prepare. Take Ferengi cuisine, for example. While a replicator may be able to produce a fair facsimile of beetle puree, slug liver, or Slug-o-Cola, within Ferengi culture, Ferengi women are required to cut up the meals and chew it to make it softer for the male members of the household. Some females, notably Quark's mother, Ishka (played by both Cecily Adams and Andrea Martin), refused to do this, leading other boys to ridicule Quark and his brother, Rom (Max Grodénchik).

Quark himself ran a popular recreational facility known as "Quark's Bar, Grill, Gaming House, and Holosuite Arcade" (or just "Quark's") on Deep Space Nine and served many alien foods and drinks. Most of his offerings were replicated, but he did have certain fresh wines and delicacies shipped in and indicated some of his meals were made from scratch.

Despite displaying traditional Ferengi greed, Quark was an excellent host, leading many "Star Trek" fans to want to go to Quark's — which they got to do at the Star Trek-themed attraction "Star Trek: The Experience" at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel from 1998 to 2008 . The  real-life bar served several Ferengi dishes , including "Moogie's Famous Ferengi Flat Bread" and "Moogie's Choice Pasta."

Future food allergies can be ... weird

The 24th century has done a lot for medical science. In "TNG," Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) states that the common cold has finally been cured. Human life spans have been vastly extended, and many illnesses can be immediately alleviated with just a single hypospray injection.

That being said, in a universe where people visit alien worlds every week, the chances of discovering a new food allergy are pretty high. Luckily, many of these allergies tend to be more weird than deadly. In the "Deep Space Nine” Season 5 episode "Let He Who Is Without Sin ..." Lieutenant Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) admits she's allergic to icoberry juice (it makes her spots itch), but she likes it so much that she drinks it anyway. Other episodes show that the entire Talarian species can become intoxicated by Klingon raktajino.

On "Voyager," some people react so violently to Neelix's cooking that the  Doctor (Robert Picardo) once compared Neelix's Bolian souffle to a bio-weapon in Season 7's "Body and Soul." Tom Paris once had a severe allergic reaction to the water in Neelix's coffee in Season 2's "Threshold" (although to be fair, Paris' body was already mutating into a salamander after he broke the transwarp barrier and was developing new allergies).

Even starships can have food allergies

With all the different alien species aboard Federation starships, it was perhaps inevitable that many people would have unique food allergies — but that's nothing compared to the time a starship developed a food allergy.

In the "Voyager" episode "Learning Curve," one crewmember requests that Neelix make some macaroni and cheese, leading the Talaxian to culture some brill cheese from the schplict milk he acquired from an alien grakel . Unfortunately, the bacterial spores inside the cheese contain an alien virus that infect the bio-neural gel packs on Voyager. This causes every system aboard Voyager to become "sick," and the holographic Doctor is forced to kill the virus by raising the temperature aboard the entire ship, causing multiple crewmembers to pass out from heat stroke. 

So, while making meals may have gotten simpler in the future, major dinner party disasters are still very much a thing.

Andorian Andorian Cabbage Soup

Bajoran Bajoran Ale (ginger beer) Jumja Sticks Hasperat Makara Fizz Hasperat Souffle Larish Pie

Cardassian Cardassian Sunrise

Earth Food Chicken Paprikash Oysters Rockefeller Sisko’s Aubergine Stew Turkey Meatloaf for Thanksgiving Cocktail: Coco No-no Crumpets Cocktail: The Zefram Cochrane Chateaubriand An Earl Grey Tea Party for Captain Picard Day Corned Beef Hash and Eggs Plankton Loaf, Kelp Buds and Sea berries  Strawberry Tart   Seska’s Mushroom Soup  Chicken Curry Field Rations   Three-Course Fondue Meal Sisko’s Thanksgiving Stuffing with Tarragon Pasta Boudin Blueberry Pancakes Veal Marsala Field Rations Pasta al Fiorella Cheese Pierogi for First Contact Day Malcolm Reed’s Ravioli Miles O'Brien’s Potato Casserole The Kai Winn (Chocolate souffle) Rodeo Red’s Red-Hot, Rootin’-Tootin’ Chili Southern Baked Beans Chicken Warp Core-Don Bleu Vegetable Biryani

Ferengi Snail Steaks Jellied Gree-Worms

Gorn Meridor

Klingon Stewed Bok-Rat Liver Boiled Krada Legs (seafood combination) Heart of Targ Klingon Octopus Rokeg Blood Pie  Gladst Bloodwine (Version 1) Klingon Martini Raktajino

Neelix’s Inventions Canape Plate: Ailis Pate, Felada Onion Crisps, Stuffed Cardaway Leaves Leola Root Soup Sweet Leola Root Tart Algae Puffs Tula Cheese Souffle Tera Nut Souffle Brill Cheese Jibalian Seven Spice Omelette Neelix’s fruit compote (Rumtopf) Marsupial Surprise Alfarian Hair Pasta Leola Rice Pilaf

Other Races and Galaxies Enolian Spice Wine Petrokian Sausages ‘Owon (eggs) Thalian Chocolate Mousse Luhvian Quail Zoth-nut Soup Vermicula (Whitebait Soup) Fenalian Toddy  Icoberry Torte Gramilian Sand Peas   Riskian Cheese Pastry  Bularian Canapes Senarian Egg Broth Tellurian Mint Truffles Bio-enzymatic supplement (rice crackers) Ratamba Stew Denobulan Sausage Tulaberry Wine Uttaberry Crepes Parthas a la Yuta Yalasat (stuffed cabbage) I'danian Spice Pudding Trixian Bubble Juice

Romulan Osol Twists Jumbo Romulan Mollusk

Trill Balso Tonic (cucumber juice)

Vulcan Plomeek Soup Plomeek Tea Plomeek Broth Vulcan Spice Tea Vulcan Mocha

10 Star Trek Foods We Wish Were Real

A culinary tour of the Alpha Quadrant and beyond (and there's a lot of booze).

With over five decades under its belt, Star Trek has explored alien cultures in ways most franchises can only dream of. From religion, architecture, and customs to the geography and weather patterns that shape societies, each new series has added greater depth to various species.

Still, too little emphasis has been placed on one of the most fundamental elements of culture: food! There’s been the odd chartreuse drink in Ten Forward and several bizarre things mentioned in the replimat, but they’ve been too much show and too little tell.

Human food has dominated, notably in Captain Sisko’s quarters, while most alien dishes and ingredients have been reduced to human foods with alien adjectives and no description – Jibalian fudge, Ktarian eggs, Malkothian spirits, and so on.

To understand a culture, it’s best to break bread with the locals. The best part of traveling, after all, is eating new foods. And until they start selling tickets to Qo’noS, we’ve got to rely on what the TV shows us.

Here, then, are 10 iconic Star Trek foods that have added greatly to the canon by making our bellies rumble.

10. Raktajino

The senior staff of Deep Space Nine couldn’t seem to function without regular infusions of raktajino. Described simply as Klingon coffee – essentially Earth coffee with a Klingon-grade targ’s kick of added caffeine – it’s easy to see why and how Sisko, Kira, and the rest won the Dominion War.

As later items on this list will show, Star Trek, particularly DS9, has sometimes used foods to convey the basic traits of various alien species. It’s no surprise, then, that raktajino touches all the Klingon bases: bold, strong, energetic, and even polarizing.

Before being bonded to the Dax symbiote, Ezri Tigan absolutely hated raktajino. Afterward, she was overwhelmed by the intense love of the drink passed along from previous hosts Curzon and Jadzia, and Ezri found herself unable to resist it.

Klingons: Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there’s no denying that their glorious raktajino won the war (and countless battles against staying in bed each morning).

Writer, DS9 devotee, committed AFOL, and expat stranded in South Korea, lightyears from home.

Star Trek: 8 Best Alien Food And Drinks

The denizens of the Star Trek universe consume a wide variety of unique food and drinks.

• Star Trek explores a wide range of alien races and their unique food and drink offerings, from Tribbles that were initially meant to be a food source to Denobulan sausages enjoyed by Doctor Phlox.
• Plomeek soup, a plant-based dish native to Vulcan, has appeared in various Star Trek shows and was altered by Neelix to add more flavor, much to the chagrin of Voyager's resident Vulcan, Tuvok.
• Klingon coffee, known as Raktajino, is a strong beverage of choice on Deep Space Nine, while Slug-O-Cola, a slimy Ferengi soda, and wriggling Klingon worms called Gagh offer a taste of the less appetizing aspects of Klingon cuisine.

Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek has introduced viewers to many iconic alien races, from the logical Vulcans to the (sometimes) honorable Klingons. Fans have seen humanity, as part of the United Federation of Planets, travel out at warp speed to explore the cosmos.

RELATED: Star Trek: What Is The Mirror Universe?

Boldly going where no one has gone before doesn't just mean meeting alien races (and sometimes hooking up with them), but also sampling the weird and wonderful food and drink produced around the galaxy. From bland soups to illegal ales, the Star Trek universe offers something for even the most discerning set of taste buds.

Tucking into Tribble fillet sounds like a good way to cough up a hairball, but the rodents were originally intended to serve as a food source. The Short Treks episode "The Trouble with Edward" shows the titular scientist genetically engineering the species aboard the USS Cabot , against the orders of the starship's captain. Edward goes so far as to incorporate his own DNA into the Tribbles.

RELATED: Star Trek: How Tribbles Became An Icon Of The Franchise

His efforts result in the Cabot 's destruction when the Tribble population rapidly grows, stressing the starship's hull. Ironically, these voracious creatures would gain a reputation as consumers of food, rather than providers—hence the Klingon dislike for the Tribbles .

7 Denobulan Sausage

Denobulan sausage is, thankfully, not made from one of humanity's first friends in the Alpha Quadrant . Instead, it hails from the same planet, Denobula, and is considered a delicacy by the world's twelve billion inhabitants.

Doctor Phlox, a Denobulan who serves aboard the Enterprise NX-01, enjoys the pinkish sausage when it is served to him in the episode "The Seventh." The sausage, garnished with vegetables, is specially prepared by the starship's chef and appears to be consumed like Earth-based charcuterie. Phlox's dining partners stick to food from Earth, however, perhaps suggesting that Denobulan sausage is not to everyone's taste.

6 Plomeek Soup

Although it has not yet appeared on-screen, plomeek is a plant native to Vulcan that serves as an ingredient in many Vulcan recipes. Both p lomeek soup and plomeek tea have appeared or been referenced in different Star Trek shows, with the former being a popular breakfast choice aboard the Enterprise NX-01. It can be assumed that plomeek soup is entirely plant-based, as Vulcans do not eat meat.

Plomeek soup was considered overly bland by Neelix, who worked as the USS Voyager 's chef when the ship was stranded in the Delta Quadrant . To remedy this, Neelix chose to make the recipe more zesty, resulting in plomeek soup a la Neelix. Voyager 's resident Vulcan, Tukov, was unimpressed by the alteration.

5 Jumja Stick

The mostly static location of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine facilitated a deep dive into Bajoran culture. Fans learned about the lives of Bajorans under the brutal Cardassian Occupation , as well as the religion that gave them the strength to persevere. With such a troubled past, it's unsurprising that some Bajorans might choose to indulge in a sweet treat.

RELATED: Star Trek: Prophets of Bajor, Explained

The Jumja stick is a lollypop-like confection produced from the sap of a native plant. This sap gives the candy a sugary taste. While the flavor is unpalatable to some, Jumja sticks are popular with a number of other species, including Ferengi and Romulans, and many different variants are sold at a stall on Deep Space Nine's Promenade.

4 Raktajino

There are many differences between our time and Roddenberry's utopian vision of the future. One thing that remains true, however, is that coffee remains vital for keeping people productive. Captain Janeway credits the beverage for helping her to outwit the Borg, and even the Earl Grey-loving Captain Picard frequently takes coffee with his morning croissant.

Klingon coffee, or Raktajino, is the beverage of choice aboard Deep Space Nine. The drink, which can be served either warm or iced, is stronger than coffee from Earth. Jadzia Dax, DS9's science officer, complains that drinking too much keeps her up at night; a non-caffeinated variety is pioneered by Quark, although the resulting concoction is dismissed as being undrinkable.

3 Slug-O-Cola

The avaricious Ferengi Alliance is no stranger to unusual culinary customs, as it is typical for the female to chew up her mate's food for him. However, even among a mostly bug-based diet, Slug-o-Cola (allegedly the galaxy's slimiest drink) stands out.

This algae-based beverage may offer zero nutritional value, but it remains the most popular Ferengi soda and even made a recent cameo in Star Trek: Picard . Slug-o-Cola even becomes the focus of an alien power struggle, with a pre-women's rights faction of Ferengi arguing that marketing the drink to females will give the drink the edge over its competitor, Eelwasser .

The Klingons are dedicated to a grungy aesthetic, from their grimy bridges to their warrior code. Klingon cuisine is no exception to this pattern, featuring a wide range of disgusting-sounding foods. Targ heart, bregit lung, Rokeg blood pie—small wonder that Commander Riker initially struggles when assigned to a Klingon vessel in the episode "A Matter of Honor."

RELATED: Best Klingon Episodes, Ranked

Riker's greatest challenge is the still wriggling Klingon worms, Gagh . Although Riker eventually became acclimatized to the bizarre foodstuff, it is rarely eaten in non-Klingon diets. Even the well-traveled Ezri Dax states that it is better to flush Gagh out of an airlock than to eat it, suggesting that the worm-based meal is a truly acquired taste.

1 Romulan Ale

The blue Romulan ale is a beverage so highly prized that even Starfleet's finest are willing to bend the law to obtain it. When Doctor McCoy visits Admiral Kirk to celebrate the latter's birthday in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , the medical officer brings a bottle of Romulan ale as a gift. He explains that he is able to smuggle the interdicted alcohol across the Neutral Zone because of its medicinal uses.

The Federation embargo on Romulan ale is later lifted due to the anti-Dominion alliance between the two powers. However, it may have been banned for reasons other than politics, as even Klingons like Worf find the drink highly intoxicating. The post-war legality of Romulan ale remains unclear, but one thing is certain: no matter the law, characters will always find a way to get hold of a glass.

MORE: Best Lighthearted Star Trek Storylines

Human foods and beverages

• View history

The following is a list of Human foods and beverages :

A Human meal, being served in Ten Forward

• 1.1 Alcoholic
• 1.2 Non-alcoholic
• 2.1 Breakfast foods
• 2.2 Dessert
• 2.3 Fast food
• 2.5 Grain-based food
• 2.7 Meat dishes
• 2.8 Milk products
• 2.9 Pasta dishes
• 2.10 Rations
• 2.11 Salads
• 2.12 Seafood
• 2.13 Snacks, appetizers, condiments, etc.
• 2.14 Soups and stews
• 2.15 Vegetable dishes
• 3 Traditions
• 4 External link

Beverages [ ]

Alcoholic [ ].

A bottle of Dom Perignon champagne

• Arcanis Lager
• Budweiser Classic
• Chateau Cleon
• Chateau Coeur
• Dom Pérignon
• Moscow Mule
• Vodka martini
• Scotch whisky
• Irish whiskey
• Kentucky bourbon
• Tennessee whiskey
• Taos lightning
• Château d'Yquem
• Château Lafite Rothschild
• Château Mouton Rothschild
• Chateau Picard
• Saint-Émilion
• Sapphire wine
• Finagle's Folly

Non-alcoholic [ ]

• iced coffee
• Hot chocolate
• Prune juice
• Chocolate passion punch
• Goliath Gulp
• Carbonated water

Breakfast foods [ ]

• corned beef hash
• bacon and eggs
• eggs Benedict
• scrambled eggs
• steak and eggs
• cheese omelet
• purple omelette
• hash browns
• banana pancakes
• blueberry pancake
• maple syrup

Dessert [ ]

Chocolate cake

• banana split
• bread pudding soufflé
• cherries jubilee
• chocolate cake
• chocolate chip
• chocolate fudge
• chocolate soufflé
• chocolate sundae
• chocolate truffle
• chocolate wobble
• sugar cookie
• chocolate chip cookie
• hot chocolate
• sugar candy
• peach cobbler
• key lime pie
• strawberry tart

Fast food [ ]

• cheesesteak
• chicken sandwich
• chili burrito
• fish and chips
• french fries
• fried chicken
• grilled cheese
• onion rings
• pulled pork

Grain-based food [ ]

• quadrotriticale
• quintotriticale
• black pepper
• cayenne pepper
• mustard seed

Meat dishes [ ]

• chicken curry
• chicken à la Sisko
• chicken liver
• chicken marsala
• chicken paprikash
• chicken tetrazzini
• moo goo gai pan
• Rodeo Red's Red-Hot, Rootin'-Tootin' Chili
• Chateaubriand

Milk products [ ]

• Alsatian munster cheese
• Cheddar cheese
• Stilton cheese

Pasta dishes [ ]

• angel hair pasta
• butterfly pasta
• macaroni and cheese
• pasta al Fiorella
• pasta boudin
• Cheese pierogi
• soba noodles

Rations [ ]

• Emergency rations
• Mystery meal
• TKL rations
• Ration pack 5
• Caesar salad
• chicken salad
• corn salad ( VOY : " Faces ")
• endive salad ( DS9 : " Whispers ")
• Fiesta Salad from Burgerland ( ENT : " Carpenter Street ")
• mixed green salad ( ENT : " Singularity ")
• potato salad
• Yogurt and raisin salad ( TNG : " Imaginary Friend ")

Seafood [ ]

• Oysters Rockefeller
• plankton loaf
• Creole shrimp
• grilled trout almondine ( NX-01 's Chef )
• Trout with lemon - butter sauce ( Sisko's )

Snacks, appetizers, condiments, etc. [ ]

• chewing gum
• mandalay sauce
• marshmallow
• peanut butter sandwiches
• potato chips
• tortilla chips
• watercress sandwich

Soups and stews [ ]

• chicken soup
• egg drop soup
• French onion soup
• Pulaski's chicken soup (PCS)
• tomato soup
• vegetable bouillon
• vegetable soup
• Aubergine stew
• Fricandeau stew

Vegetable dishes [ ]

• southern baked beans
• mashed potatoes
• potato casserole
• chili pepper
• vegetable biryani

Traditions [ ]

• American cuisine
• Continental cuisine
• Creole food
• Japanese cuisine

External link [ ]

• Human foods and beverages at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• 1 Abdullah bin al-Hussein

At state dinner for Japan, blossoms and bonhomie on the menu

White house guests included actor robert de niro, former figure skater kristi yamaguchi, and bill and hillary clinton.

The first state dinner for Japan in nearly a decade was festooned with cherry blossoms. Lots and lots of cherry blossoms.

In the East Room of the White House on Wednesday evening, President Biden reminded the dinner guests — including actor Robert De Niro, former figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi, and Bill and Hillary Clinton — that cherry blossoms signified possibility. He began his four-minute toast, alongside Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, by saying that the blossoms “remind us that we can begin anew every year. That tomorrow can be a better day than today.”

Biden also told the story of receiving a large, shiny envelope of letters a few days after his inauguration in 2021. Inside were notes of appreciation from Japanese students who stuttered, just like the president had in his youth. We’re the same , the letters conveyed.

The Style section

“Well, we are the same, Japan and the United States,” Biden told the guests. “We may be divided by distance, but generation after generation are brought together by the same hope, the same values, the same commitment to democracy and faith.”

Kishida echoed these sentiments in his speech, delivered in English. But in a departure from diplomatic tradition in the Biden era, Kishida didn’t borrow lines from an Irish poet. Instead, he quoted both “Star Trek” — the bilateral relationship should “boldly go” into the future — and John F. Kennedy, from a 1961 state dinner for Japan: “The Pacific Ocean does not separate Japan and the United States. Rather, it unites us.”

Dinner began with thick slices of cured salmon, laid on a springy mattress of ruby red grapefruit and crowned with avocados, cucumbers and shiso leaf tempura. The inspiration for the sushi-like dish was the “iconic California roll,” according to White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford.

The entree of dry-aged beef rib eye contained nods to both American and Japanese cuisine: morel mushrooms from Oregon and greens from Ohio were adorned with sesame oil sabayon and a blistered shishito pepper butter.

Not even dessert was safe from cherry-blossom diplomacy. The salted-caramel pistachio cake was enveloped in a matcha ganache, flanked by cherry ice cream, and drizzled with raspberry.

Cherry blossoms patterned the sage-green tablecloths. Cherry-blossom centerpieces towered over the guests. The springtime color scheme was pastels: pinks, periwinkles and lavenders. The flower arrangements included Jill Biden’s favorites: peonies, roses and hydrangeas. Even the floor was transformed into a vinyl river of spring blossoms and gold-dappled koi fish — a symbol of “friendship, peace, luck and perseverance,” the first lady said earlier.

The after-dinner entertainment was singer Paul Simon, a favorite of both Jill Biden and the Japanese prime minister. His first song was “Graceland.”

The merry, cherry state dinner drew out the very rich — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Apple CEO Tim Cook — and the very Washington: The guest list included the secretaries of the Treasury, State, Energy, Commerce and Homeland Security departments.

It was “great” to be back in the White House, said Bill Clinton as he walked toward the dinner, pointing to a portrait of Hillary hanging on the wall. Hillary, when asked her thoughts about the upcoming presidential election, deflected. “Oh, we’re having a good time tonight,” she said.

Also present were a handful of governors from key swing states, such as Gov. Roy Cooper (D) of North Carolina.

Compared with recent state dinners — the Bidens have hosted the leaders of France, India and South Korea — it was a smaller affair (with around 225 guests ), full of formality and lacking subtlety: From the spread to the decor to the toasts, the emphasis was on the sweetness of shared achievements and the promise of fresh hopes, despite the wars raging in Gaza and Ukraine, and the specters of Japan’s neighbors, China and North Korea.

As they gave their toasts, Biden and Kishida stood in front of panel of traditional Japanese fans, each pleat signifying the many different paths a life can take, according to Carlos Elizondo, the White House social secretary.

Unlike Biden, who doesn’t drink alcohol, Kishida is known as an “enthusiastic” practitioner of drinking diplomacy, according to Nippon TV. During Kishida’s time as foreign minister, he reportedly competed with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov over who how much they could drink while discussing matters of state. This was considered to be Kishida’s “diplomatic strength” in his bid to become prime minister, reported the Diplomat in September 2021, as neither of his competitors was the drinking type.

At an arrival ceremony on the South Lawn on Wednesday morning, Biden, wearing his trademark aviator sunglasses and a navy blue suit, lauded recent Japanese actions that also serve American interests. The prime minister pushed for sanctions against Russia when it invaded Ukraine, strengthened Japan’s defense arsenal and rekindled a relationship with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol (with an assist by the Biden administration, which hosted a summit between the two countries at Camp David in August).

Speaking after Biden on the South Lawn, Kishida vowed to take Japan’s relationship with the United States even further — “covering space and the deep sea,” he said in Japanese.

Japan will join American space missions, the leaders announced, with plans for a Japanese astronaut to be the first non-American to walk on the moon.

But these dreams of celestial camaraderie between the two countries could be dashed by domestic issues. Both Biden and Kishida have been dogged by low popularity ratings. After a fundraising scandal rocked his Liberal Democratic Party, Kishida has been charged with leading reform efforts, which may include a snap election. In the face of mounting social inequality, Kishida has also vowed to pursue a “new form of capitalism” for the people of Japan.

Biden has struggled with high inflation and surging costs throughout his presidency. Enthusiasm for him has lagged among left-leaning Democrats, who have been critical of his support of Israel as it continues to bombard Gaza.

The state dinner guest list reflected these political concerns — though, when asked, few attendees wanted to discuss politics.

Neither Bezos nor Cook nor De Niro confirmed whether they planned to donate to or campaign for Biden. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen did not share her thoughts on the new inflation numbers.

When she arrived, former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards did not miss an opportunity to talk about abortion rights. “I think women’s rights are the most important things going on in this election,” she said, describing it as a motivating issue for women — and men.

The night before the state dinner, the Bidens took the Kishidas to BlackSalt, a D.C. restaurant renowned for its sustainable seafood. (President Biden had the crab cakes.)

And the Bidens gave the prime minister and his wife a few gifts: a custom framed lithograph and two-volume Billy Joel LP set (autographed by the singer), an autographed soccer ball signed by both the U.S. and Japanese women’s national soccer teams, and, of course, a framed painting of a Yoshino cherry tree — the one planted by the two first ladies last spring.

An earlier version of this story misreported the name of South Korea's president, Yoon Suk Yeol. This version has been updated.

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