Cuisine of Dune

The banquet scene prior to the invasion of Arrakis highlights the many underlying political tensions in Dune. Present at the banquet amongst the House Atreides members are Duke Leto, Lady Jessica, Paul, Gurney Halleck, and Duncan Idaho. The named dinner guests include Dr. Kynes, the smuggler Esmar Tuek, the water-shipper Lingar Bewt. The unnamed guests are a Guild Bank representative, a stillsuit manufacturer, his daughter, the water-shipper’s female companion, an electronics equipment importer, a spice mining equipment parts dealer, a thin woman who ran an escort service, and presumably other unmentioned guests. The ensuing dinner conversation that follows reveals the many hidden loyalties and motivations of the dinner guests and includes some of the most notable quotes of the series.

I plan on dissecting the politics and plot devices of the banquet scene in a future blog post. However, I wanted to explore the dishes that are mentioned at this dinner party for a more thorough look into the cuisine of Dune.

The First Course

“Servants began putting plates of food on the table at the Duke’s gesture releasing them —roast hare in sauce cepeda, aplomage sirian, chukka under glass, coffee with melange (a rich cinnamon odor from the spice wafted across the table), a true pot-a-oie with sparkling Caladan wine.” page 169

Roast hare in sauce cepeda

The meat part of this dish is quite straightforward; however, a quick Google search reveals there’s no record of what exactly a sauce cepeda is. In doing my research, I stumbled upon a Reddit post published 5 years ago that also attempts to dissect what exactly they’re eating. While writing my new blogs, I usually try to refrain from reading posts that may influence my writing. But, since I could find absolutely nothing on what a sauce Cepeda might be, I am inclined to agree with Hadi_Benotto (the original author of the Reddit post) in theorizing that the sauce may originate from the town of Cepeda in the Salamanca region of Spain.

A proprietary Google search for “Spanish sauce for hare” yielded one very promising result: Hare in Chocolate Sauce.

http://letseatmarbella.com/2018/09/09/hare-in-chocolate-sauce/

This recipe, posted by Garry Waite, calls for dark chocolate, red wine, brown sugar, olive oil, onion, finely chopped carrots, a bouquet garni, chicken stock, and Serrano ham. After browning the hare in the pan, remove the hare, add the onion and carrots, then the ham and the bouquet garni. Deglaze the pan with the wine, then add chicken stock. Once finished, return the hare to the pan and finish in the oven on low heat. Once done cooking, remove the hare from the pan and add the chocolate and brown sugar.

While there’s no way to know for sure what Frank Herbert envisioned as a sauce cepeda, I think this chocolate sauce recipe is a great contender.

Aplomage sirian

As for this dish, I have no idea what aplomage is. Like Hadi_Benotto, I think it’s safe to assume sirian = Syrian. To produce any results, I had to do some serious mental gymnastics—so bear with me. I figured aplomage had to be derived from a real word. Through my research, I deduced it was probably a combination of the words aplomb and plumage. Aplomb, meaning self-confidence, and plumage, referring to a bird’s feathers. To help my search, I tried looking at French recipes also, because aplomage sounds vaguely French to me. By looking for French recipes, I found the word magret, which means duck breast. This would tie in perfectly to the plumage part of the word aplomage! Then I started looking for Syrian duck recipes and found this recipe for Syrian duck mappas:

https://www.onmanorama.com/food/recipe/2023/12/22/syrian-duck-mappas-christmas-dish-appam.html

Lady Jessica remarks early on in the dinner that she has brought both the wine and the chef from Caladan. We know the Atreides trace their lineage back to Greece, so it’s easy to believe that they would have an old recipe for the roast hare in sauce Cepeda and for a Syrian duck dish (Syria and Spain are not that far from Greece! Relatively speaking!)

Chukka under glass

Chukka is an actual dish that was a lot easier to find. In the Tamil language, chukka means dry, which differentiates it from curries, which are more saucy. Every recipe I’ve found seems the be rich in spices, and recommends eating chukka with either roti or rice.

https://www.mylankanfoodjournal.com/beef-chukka/

There is another kind of chukka, it’s a kind of leafy vegetable that looks similar to spinach and is also called chukka kura. Its flavor is described as being tart and grassy. Most of the recipes I’ve found for chukka Kura seem to cook the leaves down into curry. The only recipe I’ve found where the chukka kura leaves are the main focus of the dish is this one for a type of fried patty, similar to Korean pajeon but without any flour.

http://www.prathiscuisine.com/2010/11/chukka-aaku-pesara-thalimpu-sorrel.html

As for it being under glass, I’m not quite sure why this dish would be covered while the others wouldn’t. If the chukka at the banquet was the meat dish, I imagine it’d either be in some type of bowl or on a plate. If they were serving the chukka vegetable pancakes, then I could imagine them stacking the pancakes on top of each other and covering them with a glass cloche.

Coffee with melange

This is the most straightforward dish presented in the banquet scene. From this description, we know that melange has a cinnamon taste, and there are many fan-made recipes online for making your own melange coffee.

https://www.theliteraryvegan.com/home/2020/5/12/dune-spice-coffee

https://www.innatthecrossroads.com/dune-melange-spice/

Pot-a-oie

Pot-a-oie, meaning pot of goose in French. There’s a similar-sounding dish called pot-au-feu, a French dish of slowly boiled meat and vegetables. Pot-au-feu, meaning pot on fire, would also be comparable to the traditional British pot roast. This goose pot recipe is actually very similar to Hawaiian beef stew, which customarily cooks the meat in a tomato-based sauce.

https://splitreed.com/farmhouse-goose-pot-recipe/

Second Course

“Jessica signaled for another course of food and drink. Servants appeared with langues de lapins de garenne—red wine and a sauce of mushroom-yeast on the side.” pg. 175

Langues de lapins de garenne

“Tongues of wild rabbit in a special sauce,” she said, “A very old recipe.”

I’m not sure about you, but I have never heard of anyone eating rabbit tongues. I assumed this was one of Frank Herbert’s brilliant ideas to illustrate just how sophisticated and refined the cuisine of future nobles is. I was shocked to actually find a recipe for rabbit tongues online:

https://foodperestroika.com/2018/07/25/moscow-rules-part-2-white-rabbit/white-rabbit-rabbit-tongues-potato-puree-black-truffle-and-mustard-sauce/

I guess it’s not quite a recipe, but it is proof that a rabbit tongue dish exists in the modern day! I’m not sure if truffles are still around in the Dune Universe, but they may have refined the cultivation of them to be widely available for everyone. As for the “special sauce” that the rabbit tongues sit in, there’s no mention of what may be in it. I assume it is separate from the mushroom-yeast sauce mentioned in the passage above, as the mushroom-yeast sauce is specified as being on the side.

Mushroom-yeast sauce

This sauce sounds very straightforward, and I was able to find multiple recipes containing diced mushrooms and nutritional yeast.

https://eatsomethingvegan.com/vegan-mushroom-sauce/

https://andreahillnutrition.com/creamy-mushroom-sauce-dairy-free/

Dessert

“Shall we have our dessert now?” Jessica asked. “I’ve had our chef prepare a Caladan sweet: pongi rice in sauce dolsa.”

Pongi rice in sauce dolsa

And now we’re back to foods that don’t exist! Thankfully, there are lots of sweet rice desserts from around the world that we can compare pongi rice to. We find out later in the book that pongi rice is cultivated on Caladan, which is shown in the movies to have an ocean climate similar to Earth.

I’ve researched many rice puddings, but the only rice pudding dessert I could find that features a sauce is arroz con leche Argentino, the Argentinian version of arroz con leche, which means rice with milk. When trying to research what a sauce dolsa was, I realized that dolsa sounds like dolce, which just so happened to be the kind of sauce in the featured recipe!

https://marydisomma.com/blogs/recipes/argentine-rice-pudding-arroz-con-leche

Up until now, most of the dishes served at the banquet hall have been Mediterranean or Middle Eastern in origin, so jumping to Argentinian cuisine for dessert might seem a little jarring. However, I’d like to note that every single rice pudding featured on the ‘Rice pudding’ Wikipedia page is made with milk and sugar. Except for Iranian sholezard, which is made with rose water and butter.

Extra: Sietch food

“Find a place to rest and stay out of the way, child-man,” Chani said. “Here’s food.” She pressed two leaf-wrapped morsels into his hand. They reeked of spice.” pg. 367

As soon as I read this passage, I immediately had an idea of what these leaf-wrapped morsels were. Yabrak! A traditional Ottoman dish made of grape leaves, stuffed with minced meat, rice, and spices.

Conclusion

This banquet scene is one of the few occasions on which the cuisine of Dune is described throughout the books. The other notable occasion being Darwi Odrade’s oyster stew scene, which was so thoroughly detailed that it merits its own blog post. Except for the unfamiliar ingredient names, it seems that the dishes featured in the Dune Universe are not all that different from the trove of recipes present in modern-day cuisine. My interpretation of these dishes was purely speculative, so if you made it to the conclusion, I admire your ability to go along with my mental gymnastics. When I first had the idea to write a blog post about the cuisine of Dune, I initially wanted to cook all these dishes first and then use my own pictures. My family, however, are not very adventurous eaters, and I’m not sure they’d enjoy eating rabbit or goose as much as I would. I do think I will try to make Darwi Odrade’s oyster stew, though, as the scene contains quite a detailed recipe.

As always, I hope you enjoyed this post, and if you’d like me to cover a specific topic, please don’t hesitate to leave a suggestion!

Dutifully yours,
Mother Superior