Basic Trope: A character has perfectly good cooking skills, but often creates recipes that sound and/or taste disgusting.
- Straight: Alice cooks up things like turnip cookies, strawberry tripe pudding and beef steak marinated with cod-liver oil.
- Exaggerated: Alice will combine ingredients never remotely considered by any sane person such as cockroach lasagna, earthworm ice cream and monkey brain marzipan.
- Downplayed: Alice is fairly conventional but once in awhile makes up an oddball recipe.
- Justified:
- Alice loves to experiment with cooking and desires to create the world's most original recipe, but just doesn't understand that some things just should not go together in a dish.
- Alice studied molecular gastronomy and apprenticed under Heston Blumenthal, putting the theory into practice with her cooking. Despite the weirdness and apparent incompatibility of the ingredients she uses, her meals are actually quite tasty.
- Alice loves practical jokes.
- Alice was a five star chef before World War III, she just has to make do with what remains after the bombs fell.
- Alice's cod-liver marinated beef steak may not be tasty, but given Bob's Polkaditis, is just what the doctor ordered.
- Alice is a child who has never cooked anything before.
- Alisa Kornikov specializes in meals from the motherland that haven't caught on internationally.
- Inverted: Alice's dishes seem very appetizing, but tastes horrible due to the fact that she cannot cook.
- Subverted: Alice, despite her reputation, makes many tasty meals.
- Double Subverted: ...until she tells her guests exactly what they just ate, which sends some of them running to the bathroom.
- Parodied: Alice regularly adds ingredients like wax, wood-chips and lighter fluid to her dishes.
- Zig Zagged: Alice bakes turnip cookies for Bob. He thinks they're delicious until he finds out what they're made of. Once he get used to the idea, he admits that they were still pretty tasty and he would eat them again. Then the next time Alice makes them, she serves them with a spider leg garnish.
- Averted:
- Alice is a Lethal Chef.
- Alice's cooking skill is never brought up.
- Alice sticks to conventional recipes.
- Enforced: "We need a believable character flaw for Alice...how 'bout we make her tastes in cooking downright freakish?"
- Lampshaded: "Alice sure likes creating the weirdest dishes I have ever heard of".
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: Alice's friends use her unconventional cooking as a threat/punishment.
- Defied: Alice absolutely refuses to stray from a recipe when cooking.
- Discussed: "Hey, Laika! Dinner at Alice's tonight! Five bucks she will make her infamous pineapple and pig's blood pie".
- Conversed: "Why is it good cooks on TV are always trying some outrageous recipe?"
- Deconstructed:
- Alice's unwillingness to stick to more conventional dishes causes her to lose the love of Bob.
- Alice's tendency to experiment causes her restaurant to close down because the customers find her unusual dishes off-putting.
- Reconstructed:
- But Bob tries her unconventional dishes and is so impressed, that he asks her to marry him.
- Alice's experimental tendencies attract the attentions of foodies and her restaurant soon becomes famous for its unusual dishes.
- Played For Laughs: The first mention of Alice's cooking prompts a Scare Chord. Later, Charlie, after having snarfed almost the entire batch of turnip cookies without knowing what they were, gets an I Ate WHAT?! scene and a Spit Take.
- Played For Drama: Alice's lifelong dream is to become a great chef, but her poor choices when it comes to combining ingredients makes it hard for her to get anyone to hire her as a chef. This causes her a lot of stress and angst.
- Played For Horror: Alice's bizarre melange of a meal included multiple ingredients Bob was allergic to and the resulting anaphylactic shock ends up killing him.
Back to Cordon Bleugh Chef, before you find out what was in those cakes of hers!
