Past Presence

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #191*. If you like what you see, grab the*magazine* for less than ten dollars, or*subscribe* and get all future magazines for half price.*

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What’s left when we’ve moved on.

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Recently I have two hobbies. The first one is buying physical cookbooks on eBay. I got sick of using my phone to look up recipes, firstly because I’m sick of my phone in general, and second because I started to feel frustrated with the individual recipe tabs I use, a collage of tested options infected with popups on a screen that turns off after 30 seconds, making me tap my phone with sticky hands. I’m a decent cook for what I’m working with, I think; but cookbooks also promise to take me into a realm of intuitive cooking I’ve never experienced before. I like to measure amounts carefully and set individual timers for everything on the stove. I never feel comfortable making something until I’ve done it two or three times. So maybe, with some help, I can become a more instinctive cook?

One of the cookbooks I got recently was Nigella Lawson’s Cook, Eat, Repeat. It’s been almost a decade since I lived in the UK, and Nigella still seems to have the chokehold over England she did back then; good for her. The thing I’m realizing is that she writes cookbooks like a cross between a memoir and a find-the-word book. It wasn’t until I sat down and read Cook, Eat, Repeat like a novel that I even found half the recipes in there. She will mention “a dash” of this, “a pinch” of that, or sometimes even just have a photo of something that appears only in the index, a suggestion to throw yourself past the intermediate-to-advanced recipes in her book and just try to make the images you find; cook from the heart!

The way I’ve used cookbooks before is to identify a recipe I already know about and make it. I’ve rarely, if ever, read a cookbook the whole way through. That’s why it only just occurred to me that cookbooks can have a genre. They can be memoir, like Nigella’s; they can be a choose your own adventure, like Tamar Adler’s even more confusing-to-use leftovers cookbook The Everlasting Meal. They can be a long ad, like the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream cookbook I had as a kid that said eating ice cream in the winter makes you warmer (is that true? I still don’t know.) They all belong to one functional group, but it turns out they operate on scales of functionality. And home cooks bring their own expectations of what makes a cookbook functional (measurements or not), what makes it entertaining (personal stories or not), and what makes it beautiful (glossy pictures or hand drawn, or nothing?).

I said two hobbies, right?

I’m about ? of the way through the Legend of Heroes series, a fifteen-game long RPG sequence by Falcom. The first three games are the Trails in the Sky sub-series, a remake of the first of which releases this month. In the *Legend of Heroes,*characters from each previous game return in the later ones, including NPCs, and each time the story progresses most characters will have something new to say about it. The first three games are an artifact of how impressive this was in 2006, when Trails FCreleased, though it remains impressive today. In terms of building a consistent and, one might be tempted to say, living world, Trails is eating everyone’s lunch.

However, old Trails combat is kind of boring and complex at the same time. What I mean is that (if you don’t look up a guide), it feels impossibly dense at first. The game’s orbment system is kind of like materia in Final Fantasy 7, except each orbal quartz doesn’t let you cast spells but contributes points that, when added up, let you cast certain spells not indicated by the orbment you set. For example, two wind orbments with eight wind points let you cast Aero Storm, while Hell Gate requires Time, Space and Mirage points. Math!

Anyone who’s played enough of a long RPG can enter a zen state where they just get it, the result of hanging out with something for a long time. There are a lot of random battles in Trails in the Sky. With enough repetition you understand exactly what to do in most situations. For example, in a boss fight you want to have a dedicated person to cast “Earth Wall,” a spell that feels like cheating except the game is balanced around it. You can turbo-mode through normal battles like a champ. One of the best mechanics that every videogame should have, EXP rubber-banding, will make sure you never fall very far behind. Every character will have fallen into their niche, and you’ll have used them enough to know what they can do.

“Cooking relies on many repeated actions that, added up, teach us ease in the kitchen, and help us acquire that instinct which too many of us perceive as a gift.” (That’s Nigella again.)

In videogames, food is often only functional. In Breath of the Wild, one of the more famous food-cooking games, you can make steaks, mushroom stew and pies with fruit and whipped cream balanced on top. It’s certainly possible to try and make them for the sake of completing your recipe book – although who would discover them all without cheating? – but actually making them is mainly gathering the ingredients; really what you’re doing is creating the conditions for a curry or pilaf to appear in the pot and give you 10+ hearts. In games where you do cook, it’s often a minigame whose process of creation is its reason for being there.

Food is functional in Trails, too; you eat to access superior combat benefits. But the way it’s treated in the world is different. You can cook in the wild, but you learn to cook by having conversations that inspire you. For example, you learn how to cook a veggie sandwich after completing the White Flower Madrigal, an important historical play in Chapter 2. In every new area there are several bars and restaurants with different entrees for you to try. You also gather ingredients in full-on grocery stores as well as from monsters. What other game has made me make a grocery list?

Cooking serves the world of Trails as much as the player within it. It’s an irremovable part of the worldbuilding. Running to every cafe as soon as I enter a new place has become a tradition I exercise in each new Trails game I play. But the PSP versions have the advantage of gorgeous, now charmingly low-res drawings of the food that sell it as a real thing you could eat, and even cook yourself, if you had the real-life recipe.

As is so often the case in real life, to make something in Trails, you have to have eaten it first, which means someone else has to cook it for you. The series’ commitment to this simple exchange is an example of its ethos as a whole: that the social connections that can be so throwaway in other games are central to the mood, the vibe, in other words, the thing that makes it work. Having NPCs that comment on events, have a history and remember what you’ve done is only part of it; they also live and work in a world where they eat, drink and cook, and the game has to make that feel real in order for the whole mirage of a full world to function. Luckily for us, it does. To quote Anthony Bourdain’s first show No Reservations, speaking about French cafe culture, through food we “may also love life, and ultimately, the world.”

You can buy the PSP version of Trails in the Sky for the price of a meal, or a used cookbook. Just saying.

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Emily Price is a freelance writer and digital editor based in Brooklyn, New York, and holds a PhD in literature. You can find her on Bluesky.