What magical food and drink can you imagine? That is, not just food and drink made by magical people, but stuff which has an actual magical effect of some kind.

Canon gives us some examples of magical alcoholic drinks: firewhisky and gigglewater. There are also some foodstuffs like pepper imps, which make you breathe fire.

One that I invented all the way back when I was writing AP was a breed of cow called Selwyns, the meat of which will always be cooked to the preference of whoever is looking at it. If you like rare, it will be rare. When I look at the same piece of beef, I see it cooked medium.

Ideas?

 

There was one fun tonks/harry/fleur fic where they went for drinks and they were obviously magical and it was awesome. Let me find it.

edit: found it, it’s https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12729845/1/Adversity-Breeds-Excellence

fun, if slightly cliche at times.

 

That's the example I was going to bring up as well. It's not a great story by any means, but that potions bar was a great bit of world building

 

In my fat!Harry comp entry I thought of 100 acre rocky road, an ice cream flavor that you'd still taste after you finished until walking 100 acres.

How about Polyjuice juice? Drop a bit of your favorite fruit into this juice and it'll turn it into a juice of the same kind. Drop an orange seed, get orange juice. Apple stem, apple juice. Etc.

 

There is one from blood crest that takes the opposite road, with a potion that tastes incredibly bland but satisfies your hunger and nutritional requirements.

 

It's very hard to come up with food and drink that don't just have effects that sound like Weasley products...

Just spitballing here.

Maybe something silly like a steak that has faux intelligence spelled on it that tells you not only how to cook it, but how to eat it as well. Silly comes in from weird personalities and reactions to being cooked/ eaten I guess...

Maybe certain drinks that can make you specific kinds of drunk?

Maybe something like a vegetable that completely changes flavour profile, smell and texture based on what you cook it with? Everegetable?

Maybe you feed Pixies something and they shit out a salt like dust that adds a new taste category?

I have ideas, but often they just sound like potions or something...

 

Polyjuice contains expensive and rare ingredients such as boomslang skin, so I think it would have limited application for food except maths for the wizarding equivalent of fine dining. What would a potion imbued with Phoenix feather taste like? Maybe the drinker would burst into flames (harmless) after drinking. But I don’t think Polyjuice would be the right potion for that and wouldn’t actually sustain you as food.

I love the toad in a hole example brought up above. I don’t think I’ve read that piece from Carnivorous Muffin.

when thinking about magical food, I can’t help but think about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Alice in Wonderland. Fizzy drinks that make you float away. Gobstoppers that last forever—how does that work with Gamp’s Laws of transfiguration?

Biscuits that miniaturize you. think of a mini-Harry adventuring through Hogwarts, escaping crushing stampedes of students or trying to escape the Slytherin common room that’s subjectively miles long.

 

I always just considers magical food to be near perfect normal food. Perfectly ripe strawberries, fluffy bread, flawless vegetables.

I think you could have the odd bit of proper magical properties. But I think magic just guarantee everything is near perfect always.

 

I love the idea of there being drinks that gives the drinker a certain type of drunkenness, so white wine with a drop of elf tear to make the drinker weepy and forest strawberry cider with sprinkled alihotsy root to make a giggly drunk.

I've used Waltzing Blackcurrant Liqueur in my stories, it's purple and glittery and it waltzes gently inside your stomach when you drink it, also on the floor if you spill it. Different takes on shepherd's pie depending on what magical meat you're using, hippogriff stew with smetana is popular in Russia and there's a cheese that you can make from a species of abraxans that live in the mountains in Northern Italy that's very popular on take-away pizza because the pizzas become able to fly for short stretches. In other places they just use owls for take-away food. Sunday goat roast is always served at the Hog's Head, although few people have the stomach to order it.

 

I know I mentioned it in the previous magical food thread, but there's two ideas that have stuck with me on using magic to do more than just have a 'dragon egg omelette'. One's using magic to create the food, and the other is the food casting magic on the eater:

1 - Using magic to get previously unobtainable 'food'.
Ever wondered what Tardigrade tastes like? Use an engorgement charm, make one big enough to eat. Could also be used to make a Turducken of legendary proportions by using lesser engorgement charms on multiple birds, so you can have the outer layer be a Sparrow.

(depending on how you interpret charms lasting, especially on food, can change how valid you make changing size here, but if it's just prep?)

You could also use this in the harvesting of actual food - creatures from the deepest depths of the sea, gathered by enchanted suits of Early 20th Century Diving Gear. But you could also use this in combination with generally inedible things - apply a heatproof charm to yourself, and enjoy the forbidden honey that's molten glass; or swig a troll-mouth potion, and chow down on some granite chowder.


2 - Using magic to amplify/change food, and the eater
In canon, chocolate is used to just remove bad feelings. Whether it's a special chocolate, because wizards have a weird reaction to it, or Rowling's an addict, we can't be sure

The specific example I used last time was:
The difference between the 'Tonic of Good Cheer', and braised goat a la Zosimos is merely how long you leave the meat in to stew, after all. The best dishes, generally agreed upon to be served in Khemmis, by restaurants who've had centuries to perfect the recipe, might use the most choice cuts from the chimeric goat herds bred for the purpose; but even a maggot-infested scrap of hoof, fished out of an offal pile, will be an almost religious experience if the holly leaves were properly suspended within the gingered pine-sap before brewing. Although, this kind of falls into the first one also?

But the idea of using spells and potions to have secondary effects - like the ton-tongue toffee, but less harmful. So perhaps Tom's Shephard's Pie helps you ignore your inner ear, and so you can ride the carts in Gringott's Bank all day without worry. Or a 'light buttered toast' that allows you to jump further for a few hours, popular amongst children acting out 'Martin Miggs and the Muggle Moon Mission'.

 

For some reason, I've never thought about this, but the deep sea creatures would probably be reachable by magic. And would probably have a whole cadre of magical properties too, in a hp story.

It is kind of amusing to think of brave adventurers going to the depths of the ocean, braving the dark depths, to provide a slightly more exotic meal. Then again, shark fins are a delicacy, so it would probably happen.

 

Have you seen deep sea creatures? They hide down there for a reason.

Put them in your mouth if you want, lol. Not me.

Good premise for an Eldritch HP story though

 

I know I read this idea here, and it might have been you, but the proposed magical food used space enlargement fuckery to put the biggest bird on the inside, and the smallest bird on the outide. But what's planted on the serving tray is a tiny golden snidget, and it's a mind fuck

 

Depending on how strict people are on the Experimental Breeding Ban, and whether this would count against it, it wouldn't surprise me at all if some suitably enterprising/whimsical/crazy Wizard Farmer decided to breed some magical cows that give chocolate milk.

 

I find it hard to believe they don't just have a taste good charm. The idea of magical food being only about perfect food seems rather pointless; at Hogwarts they eat mostly normal food, though with magic it would almost certainly taste better than the same made by muggles. In one of my stories I had a character eating dragon steaks that were a superb experience overall, in that they made him feel strong and proud, but left him with a strange longing for the sky.