Impossibly Delicious Food

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"What was the fruit like? Unfortunately, no one can describe a taste. All I can say is that, compared with those fruits, the freshest grapefruit you've ever eaten was dull, and the juiciest orange was dry, and the most melting pear was hard and woody, and the sweetest wild strawberry was sour. And there were no seeds or stones, and no wasps. If you had once eaten that fruit, all the nicest things in this world would taste like medicines after it. But I can't describe it. You can't find out what it is like unless you can get to that country and taste it for yourself."

—The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis

On the flipside of Foreign Queasine and Alien Lunch lies this. This is the foodstuff of legends, often produced by a Supreme Chef. Food Porn doesn't do it justice. The Delicious Distraction pales in comparison. Just one bite will prompt anyone to moan with pleasure. Countries have gone to war for the taste. It's an Impossibly Delicious Food — like Impossibly Cool Clothes, it's food that's over-the-top in terms of deliciousness.

Generally takes two forms: Either it's a food that's some combination of ridiculous ingredients, known for their yumminess, or its exact composition is never described, only vague flavor. (It will also often be in terms of other foods well-known for tasting good.) But that description is enough for us to form our own opinions. Sometimes the food is actually stated to be magical or godlike. A Trademark Favorite Food may also be treated in this fashion.

Just watch out. Some of these foods are so good, they're addicting in very, very bad ways. Women who are pregnant, could be pregnant, or are nursing should not eat Impossibly Delicious Food. May Contain Evil.

No real life examples, please; this is a YMMV Trope, and we don't need the Edit Wars. No, that even includes chocolate.

Examples of Impossibly Delicious Food include:

Advertising

  • A recent[when?] Snapple ad, where the people of the company are all talking about the "stuff" in their new drink. Their only description of ingredients is green and black tea.
  • One A1 Steak sauce ad has a cooker who thinks the sauce tastes so delicious, he can't resist licking a drop that fell on an open barbeque.

Anime and Manga

  • Howalon in Gakuen Alice is a candy said to be somewhere between marshmallow and cotton candy, only twice as fluffy and delicious.
  • A common occurrence in Yakitate!! Japan. One of Azuma's breads is so good that anyone who eats it briefly dies and goes to Heaven.
  • Yumeiro Patissiere: This happens a lot when they try different sweets. One example is a cheesecake that made them see a choir of Cows mooing Ode to Joy.
  • The Wallflower: Sunako's food.
  • Toriko's entire premise is this mixed with a good helping of Fist of the North Star.
    • One food item in particular was so delicious that it seemed to grant enlightenment in whoever ate it. Giving it to the world leaders was what stopped an entire world war. They named the ingredient "GOD".
  • One Piece: Sanji's food.
  • Black Butler: Sebastian's food is this mixed with a good dose of Food Porn.
  • The eponymous prodigy bartender of the manga Bartender is supposedly the only one who can create the Glass of God, an impossibly good alcoholic drink.
  • Kore wa Zombie Desu ka?: Some of Haruna's cooking.
  • Played with in Kyouran Kazoku Nikki. The son of an assassin turned his back on his father's trade and set up a Chinese restaurant based on his mother's recipes. People who eat his food tend to fall into comas. His father taunts him that he's a killer through and through. The real reason is that the food is so delicious it overwhelms an average human's senses.
  • Pokémon, Miltank milk, as Ash and his entourage quickly find out after Whitney - who raises Miltank on her family's farm - offers it to them; Whitney actually sells it, along with milk-based products made from it like cheese, butter, and ice cream.
  • In Space Dandy, the ramen sold by "Pops" at his small stand on the other side of a wormhole. An alien of an unspecified race, he has spent thousands of years perfecting his recipe for ramen noodles, and he seems to have succeeded, the stuff he sells being ambrosia-like in quality.
  • In an episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! SEVENS, the duelist mercenary Noodle Sorako claims to be an alien from a planet where cooking ramen is the "hat" of her people. Regardless of whether this is true or not, when she shares it with the cast, they have power fantasies when they try it.

Comic Books

  • Umpty Candy in Judge Dredd is like this. It's so delicious that Justice Department had to ban it an exile the creator from Earth to maintain order, and in the modern series, there are major criminal operations devoted to smuggling and dealing it.

Film

Literature

  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; The bottle Alice finds labeled "Drink Me" contains a potion that Alice finds delicious, the flavor described as a mix of cherry tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast.
  • Everything Willie Wonka's factory produces in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
  • The fruit in Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti. Unfortunately it's also a metaphor for drugs. Or sex. Or... something. (Maybe temptation itself.) Once Laura eats some she loses the will to eat anything else, it's that delicious—but from that day on the goblin sellers of the fruit are invisible to her.
  • The Queen's Museum and Other Fanciful Tales by Frank Stockton: The story "Christmas Before Last" has the Fruit of the Fragile Palm. It's similar to a coconut, but the inside is so delicious that it's worth as much as diamonds or pearls.
  • This happens quite a lot in Harry Potter. Who else became thirsty for a taste of butterbeer after reading about it?
    • Several fansites have come up with recipes for butterbeer, usually involving things like hot apple cider and melted butter.
  • Elliot S! Maggin's novel Superman: Last Son of Krypton had an alien spice that made food to which it was added so delicious that humans couldn't stop themselves from eating it.
  • One Homer Price story is about "Ever-So-Much-More-So", an invisible powder which makes anything moreso of what it is. It's introduced as a thing you put on food to make it better, but it also "works" on other things — for example, if an ornery person eats things with it sprinkled on, it makes that person Ever-So-Much-More ornery.
  • The white fudge in The Candy Shop War, to which the entire town of Colson, California, quickly gets addicted. Pity about it being a vehicle for mind control and all that.
  • In P. G. Wodehouse's novels, Bertie Wooster's Aunt Dahlia employs the French cook Anatole, who's so good, that Bertie is willing to take part in the craziest schemes if his aunt threatens to forbid him from Anatole's meals.
  • Food from the titular Abbey in the Redwall series is normally described in such a manner as to make your mouth water. Eventually, a cookbook was printed, so now you can make your very own turnip'n'tater'n'beetroot pie! Redwall isn't everyone's taste in literature, but any writer who can make children want to eat food made mostly of vegetables has to be doing something right.
  • Aside from the page quote, C.S. Lewis used this trope in Perelandra with not one, but two Venusian fruits.
    • And with Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
  • The bizarre short story "Biscuits of Glory," collected in one of Bruce Coville's anthologies of children's stories, features biscuits that are "heavenly" in a near-literal sense. In a normal person, this causes levitation. When given to a ghost, it "feels like it went to heaven," and is exorcised. Of note is that this is ultimately a negative effect, because nothing else can compare to the taste of the biscuits.
  • Mentioned briefly in A Wrinkle in Time. When Meg is recuperating from her brush with IT among Aunt Beast's people, the food that Aunt Beast gives her is described as "incredibly delicious"—just one more way in which aliens are superior to humans.
  • Fourth-dimension-flipped ketchup in The Boy Who Reversed Himself is so good, it renders its consumer euphoric, suggestable, and desperate for more, at least temporarily.
  • A major plot point in one of Bone Chiller's novels (a series of children's horror fiction novels similar to Goosebumps). A new lunch lady makes food so delicious that all the students and teachers flock to the cafeteria every day to get a taste of her meals, and even fighting over them. It's so good that the main character cannot bear to eat anything other than her cooking, comparing his cornflakes he ate for breakfast to sawdust. However, over a series of strange events the he realizes that the lunch lady is actually a giant insect who implants eggs in her cooking so that they will incubate in the hapless residents, controlling their movements until they eventually hatch and discard their hosts' bodies. The main character manages to bring the bug lady down with the help of a fellow student (who was allergic to outside food and had to bring her own lunch to school).
  • The Wind Singer had the underground mud people eating some kind of smoky, sweet roasted nut/fruit that Bowman and Kestrel found tastier than anything they'd had in their whole lives.
  • The obscure Tesco Children's book Guzzle is about two children who invent the world's greatest soft drink, to the point where nobody can stop drinking it. It gets to the point where even health experts won't reveal how healthy it is because they're too busy drinking the stuff.
  • Occurs in Orson Scott Card's Treasure Box - the weird rich people eat food that appears to be the platonic ideal of food, the best food you could possibly imagine, every bite perfection. Turns out that's because you ARE imagining it.
  • In his short story collection Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman included a story called "Sunbird", about the ultimate food sought out by a club whose members make a habit of eating the rarest, most difficult to get foods. The members of the club, aside from the cook (who "practiced" from foreknowledge in preparation) get burned up from eating it.
  • In Doorways in The Sand by Roger Zelazny, mirror-reversed bourbon is described this way. The protagonist spends most of the book mirror-reversed, so he can appreciate ordinary bourbon like this; at the end of the book, when he gets flipped back to normal, he thinks that while he won't miss much about being reversed, the bourbon will probably haunt him for the rest of his life.
  • In Robin Hobb's The Soldier Son trilogy, Everything Nevare eats becomes this once the Speck magic starts to get under his skin.
  • The native family Flinx encounters in Mid-Flinx were out gathering fruits called sugararries when they got lost. When he shares his supplies with them, Dwell reluctantly admits that chocolate is almost as good as those fruits.
  • The wine which the angel Islington serves to Richard and Door in Neverwhere is described in terms of this trope.

Live-Action TV

  • In the TV version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Ford discovers some hagra biscuits baked by the Dentrassi and tells Arthur, "Your mouth will love you for the rest of your life." Unfortunately, the Dentrassi baked these particular biscuits for the Vogons; after one mouthful, Ford realises just how much Dentrassi hate Vogons.
  • The Soup Nazi's soup in Seinfeld.
  • There was this one Saturday Night Live sketch when Lindsey Lohan was hosting where the characters are in a fancy restaurant and eat this impossibly good chocolate dessert. Their expression of this deliciousness is taken Up to Eleven when one guy starts smashing plates on his head and Lindsey starts smearing the chocolate all over her face and chest.
  • Fraggle Rock had the Grapes of Generosity, which are so delicious that anyone who finds them will not want to share them.
    • it also has the Mossmelon, and the Legendary Tooth (doozer) Tower, which were used to snap Wembly out of his stubbornness.
  • Stargate SG-1 has kassa, an addictive form of corn distributed by a group of bad guys as a means to control various planets. One SGC team member takes a bite out of curiosity and describes it as "sweet corn heaven."
  • The coconut cream pie from the iCarly episode "iPie". Sam says she wants to marry the pie and Carly apparently wants to do the pie equivalent of motorboating...S
  • Kold Kream ice cream in the episode "Catching Cold" of R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour the Series is this. It's comes with a pretty deadly price to get a good supply of it though...
  • The best burger in New York on How I Met Your Mother. There were other burgers that produced this sort of reaction in the group, except Marshall, who had previously tasted it; but when they finally found it, their reactions were the strongest. Double Subverted when Regis Philbin claimed after all of that the burger was still not the right one, and then after a moment of thought, realized that it was.
  • The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant has aliantha berries, which double as Impossibly Nutritious Food.
  • "The Golden Girls" plays with this on occasion, but the dish that stands out is Rose's Sparhuven Krispies. They smell downright foul, but if you eat them right, they taste just like cheesecake, fresh strawberries, and chocolate ice-cream.
  • The whole reason Chairman Kaga set up Kitchen Stadium.
  • Supreme Chef Reese's food is supposed to be like this on Malcolm in the Middle. In an episode where he pulls out all the stops to make a magnum opus Thanksgiving dinner, he's able to coerce his father and little brother into working like slaves and putting up with his Prima Donna Director tendencies just by periodically giving them a taste of whatever he's currently working on and watching them melt.
  • One episode of QI discussed how it took over three hundred years from its discovery for a specimen of the Giant Tortoise to be presented to the British Museum, simply because people kept eating them before the ship could reach its destination. Contemporary reports describe it as being unbelievably delicious, which the guests naturally took Up to Eleven ("right, this time we'll take nine of them, and we'll eat eight"). Unfortunately, they're a protected species now...

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

  • In the classical The Odyssey, the food of the famous Lotus Eaters is so good, whoever eats it never wants to do anything else.
  • See also: ambrosia, nectar of the gods. (Or in other pantheons, booze of the gods, honey of the gods, milk of the gods, elixir of life, etc...)

Tabletop Games

  • Essential Food from GURPS: Magic is basically food in its purest, most perfect form. (It's created by magic, of course.)
  • Preparing such foods is a special ability of Lilim of Gluttony in In Nomine.

Video Games

  • Ultimate Curry/Finest Curry in the Harvest Moon games, which nearly everyone loves and will do almost anything to taste. A large number of bachelor(ettes) even have one of the two as their favorite item! However, Carter and Alisa both despise the stuff.
  • The Ultimate Dessert in Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?
  • Planescape: Torment has a series of Short Story anecdotes in the form of memories. One tells the story of a wine connoisseur who is offered a wine so delectable that he is willing to literally do anything to get another taste.
  • In EarthBound, the Delisauce condiment. Nobody knows what it tastes like, but it makes everything incredibly delicious (thereby maximizing its recovery effects).
  • The sunny side up dragon egg in Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice, which prompts Mao to give a lengthy speech about how good it is.
  • The Golden Apple in Super Paper Mario, which causes so much contentment that whoever eats it sleeps peacefully for a very long time.
  • In Suikoden II, the justification for all the Cooking Duels with your army's Supreme Chef is the "Blue Moon Bird Recipe," a recipe for a foodstuff said to bring the person that eats it "happiness," though we never get to see it prepared . Serious Business, indeed.
  • In The Sims 3, an expert chef Sim can prepare Ambrosia. It takes two rare ingredients, but it's so potent that the consumer gains a powerful, positive moodlet for A WEEK. It also brings Sims back from the dead - ghosts can interact with it.
    • In The Sims 2's Free Time expansion, sims with the Family aspiration can learn to prepare Grandma's Comfort Soup. It gives a strong boost to food and comfort meters, and automatically cures sicknesses (which normally would need to be waited out or treated with the medicine station from the Science career).
  • The Black Emporium of Dragon Age II has a barrel containing "The Pickled Apples of Arlathan." In its codex entry, Brother Genitivi describes a taste of a sliver of one of those apples as the epitome of what an apple tastes like. The five sovereigns he paid for that taste, he says, were well spent.
  • MMmmmmm... I'm in paradise...
  • Chansey eggs in Pokémon are said to be this, in addition to being delicious, it's healthy. It's evolution Blissey takes this a step further: even one bite will cause the most sour sourpuss to become unfailingly caring and pleasant to everyone.
  • The "Sinner's Sandwich" from Deadly Premonition contains turkey, cereal, and strawberry jam. York is initially convinced that it's to punish the sinners. Then he tries one, and it's delicious. So did the fans, and it really is pretty damn tasty.
  • Oko San's route in Hatoful Boyfriend culminates with him and the heroine leaving school on a quest to find the mythical True Pudding, a seven-colored dessert so perfect that one bite will grant the consumer eternal happiness.
  • In Monster Girl Quest, Ama-Ama-Dango, a sweet food available at Illiasburg’s posh luxury inn, made from rice and special Happiness Honey, the latter of which is made by beekeepers in Happiness Village. Alice loves it, and when she finds that Happiness Village has been taken over by the Harpys, she directs Luka to make a stop there.

Web Comics

  • In Girl Genius, Agatha's improved coffee engine makes coffee that's perfect. And reveals to the drinker the mathematical perfection of the cup itself!
  • The cookies baked by Piffany in Nodwick. Armies will halt their invasions and rebuild the towns they destroyed in return for them. The gods themselves will threaten holy wars to get some, and do anything you want for the recipe. Oh, and you know how Nodwick is a Chew Toy for whom even his hundreds of deaths is no escape from constant mistreatment at the hands of Artax and Yeagar, and whatever monsters they encounter? He's still a lucky bastard because when Piffany makes her cookies he gets to lick the bowl.

Web Original

  • SCP Foundation: SCP-294 produces whatever drink you input on its little keypad. When it was asked for "the perfect drink", it made a drink so unbelievably tasty that the guy who tried it said everything afterward was a drag and committed suicide two weeks later. Two different researchers later asked for "their favorite drink". Each one got a different beverage; each one found their own drink just short of the perfect one. When they swapped the consensus was, "Good, but mine's better."
  • Hoagizine.
  • In Space Beasts there is Lambas Bread -- a foodstuff so powerful it can bring the dead back to life!
    • Also the Elves and half elves' wasabi is so impossibly delicious, once they start eating they just can't stop! For Fairies and half fairies peanut butter has a similar effect

Western Animation

  • The Simpsons:
    • The éclair planned to kill Homer in the episode "Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner".

Man: Come on, you're going to kill him with a pastry? I've seen this man eat a bowl of change!
Chef: This éclair is over one million calories. Twenty-five pounds of butter per square inch. Covered with chocolate so dark that light cannot escape its surface.
[The other restaurateurs lunge for the savoury picture.]
No, no, no! This is just a picture. But Homer Simpson will find the real thing both delicious and deadly.
Akira: Ah, yes, Death by Chocolate.
Chef: ... and poison, I'll stick in some poison.

  • Homer also once made a deal with the devil for his soul in exchange for the perfect donut. He tries to cheat Flanders Satan by not finishing the donut.
  • There's also the trip to the gummy bear festival.

Homer: In this sweet land, Donoughts are foul as poison. You'd spit them out you would!

  • Adventure Time:
    • The episode "Tree Trunks" centers on Jake and Finn's quest to get the eponymous little green elephant through the dangerous forest so she can taste the legendary Crystal Gem Apple herself. It's so good that she vanishes into another realm, and turns into an evil goddess of said realm.
    • Similarly, royal tarts. They're so delicious, Princess Bubblegum has Finn and Jake escort them to a royal meeting under the possibility of theft.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: Krabby Patties.
  • In Jimmy Neutron, Jimmy invents the perfect candy. It's so delicious that all the people in Retroville develop an addiction to it and act like zombies, caring about nothing but getting more of his candy (luckily, Jimmy never got to try it). Jimmy, of course, saves the day through additive punishment.[1]
  • The Guacamole of the Angels from El Tigre, made by maidens squashing the avocados with their feet.
  • Tiny Toon Adventures: Hamton J. Pig accidentally spilled a super-condiment on himself, causing everyone who met him to attempt to eat him.
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force had the Broodwich. A sandwich so tasty none can resist. Eating it transported you to a strange astral plane where guys with axes try to dismember you. Shake can't stop eating it though. He tapes it to the ceiling when he decides to stop eating it, but he can't stay away. Frylock chastises him get rid of the damn thing because he'll eventually give in and finish eating it. Of course, it ends up a moot point because Shake took off the sun dried tomatoes because he finds them disgusting, so he never has a desire to truly finish the sandwich.
  • Futurama loves this trope. In Fry And The Slurm Factory, Fry is put in a death trap to drink concentrated slurm until his stomach bursts. He can't stop eating it, even long enough to save his friends. When Leela frees him from it by dumping it down the sewer, Fry tries to chew his own arms off to follow it.
    • The entire Earth ends up with an addiction to Popplers. They're so delicious, people even have a hard time stopping eating them when they find out the truth behind what they are. Then again, in a world of Soylent Cola, it's hardly surprising.
  • The cookies baked by Grim's grandmother on The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy were so tasty, everyone kept cheerfully eating them even after she announced that the recipe included dung beetles.
  • Quite a few in Codename: Kids Next Door:
    • The legendary Fourth Flavor, an ice cream flavor so delicious that only the one with the purest of taste buds could find and taste it. This was the "holy grail" of a candy hunter and ice cream enthusiast like Numbuh Five, who dreamed of doing so. At the end of "Operation: F.L.A.V.O.R." she got her wish, although we had to Take Her Word For It that it was as good as she imagined.
    • In another episode Numbuh One is kidnapped by Professor Triple Extra-Large who wanted his help to make the perfect snow cone since Numbuh One is immune to brain-freeze. To Numbuh One's dismay, the rest of the team "rescues" him right after he found the perfect one, but before he could tell Prof XXXL.
    • "Operation M.U.N.C.H.I.E.S." features Rainbow Munchies, a cereal so delicious that everyone, heroes and villains alike (except Knightbrace, a dentistry-themed villain, he hates unhealthy food) love it. Sector V and a supermarket full of bad guys are driven to fighting over the last box on the shelf. Knightbrace eventually gets the box and threatens to destroy it, which is enough for the kids and the villains to call a truce for the purpose of beating the stuffing out of him.
  • In an episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog, when Courage is searching for a storm goddess' pet dog (it's a weird cartoon) he finds that the dog has fallen under the spell of something called the God Bone, a giant bone that is so delicious that a dog who licks it will keep doing so until it starves to death. Despite a stern voice that bluntly warns anyone who enters the room of the danger, it appears that dogs simply cannot resist it. (The numerous dog skeletons surrounding it seem to confirm this.) Courage falls under its spell too but saves himself and the other dog by somehow managing to pick the giant bone up and carry it with him.
  • In the 1986 version of The Berenstain Bears there was the Wild, Wild Honey, which Papa Bear attempted to get - or even simply taste - many times, claiming it was "better than money". Unfortunately, it was jealously guarded by Queen Nectar and her hive of fierce bees.
  1. ↑ He electrified the candy.
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