Preserving Memories

Posted on Fri Nov 3rd, 2023 @ 6:48pm by Ensign Madelyn 'Madi' Moore & Ensign Anne Marie "Ree" Beckett

Mission: Contagion
Timeline: MD 365, morning
1781 words - 3.6 OF Standard Post Measure

"Have you ever done this before?"

One of the lingering benefits from their time spent on Relea was the immediate, if temporary, boost to food stores. Some varieties had been provided as seedlings, which Finn had been tending to as if they were actual children passed into his care, and Madelyn had also enjoyed the additional challenge of trying to propagate alien fruit and vegetables. It was the fresh produce, however, that had gone some way to lifting spirits as the drudgery of confined living returned full-force, and Madi couldn't fault the crew's efforts in making a sizeable dent in what had been gifted to them but cold storage was limited and the winter harvest had been considerable.

There was going to be wastage.

Or rather, there would be if they couldn't figure out a way to preserve some of it. Bottling fruit, making jam, pickling vegetables, all of these things sounded like very reasonable ideas until examination of the process revealed how complicated it was. How much additional ingredients it required. Would the sugar variant they'd bartered for even substitute correctly? How much salt was enough salt? The young scientist stared at the spread of utensils, foodstuff and assorted jars scrounged from numerous sources, and was instantly overwhelmed.

"Oh! Tongs!" Ree exclaimed joyously and lobster-clawed a funnel up and down for a moment before putting it back down. She'd made a list of everything that she could find comparable from agar agar to Romulan gelatin powder per gram and various treatises on drying techniques and pureeing processes just in case the canning project didn't work out quite precisely. She caught sight of the worry in Madi's eyes and mellowed a little bit. She obviously wasn't as excited to play in goo as Ree was. "You... don't look too happy. Is it the vinegar substitute? It is, isn't it? Fermenting is a terribly stinky job. And I know it smells like a wet dog ate twenty pounds of coleslaw, but it has the appropriate acidic base and neutral taste combination that we were looking for on the first run of attempts to collect supplies..."

"It's not that."

Not for the first time in her life, Madelyn found herself in the throes of overthinking things.

"There's just a lot of really good food here and, while I know we're doing this because a lot of it will spoil before we can use it, I'll still feel bad if we..." She wrinkled her nose. "It really does smell like something Sickbay should be stocking." With effort, the scientist rallied herself with a visible upwards shrug of her shoulders and then reached for one of the tureens, placing it in front of her. "Okay, what's first?" It might have been uncomfortable to admit but this was indicative of their dynamic; deferring to Beckett, who exuded the kind of confidence Madi valiantly attempted to chase, always seemed to make the most sense.

"Okay, so- process of elimination: What tastes good together naturally before we start adding things. Liiiiike... those crabapple-looking things did good with that leafy veg there in the salads and those nut things in the blackish shells. Now will the taste survive when the texture changes? Let's do a test run and find out. And if it doesn't work this way, we dehydrate it and see if it can be seasoning. Sound like a plan?" Beckett eyed Madelyn warily as she answered. "You have to be the taste tester because I literally will eat anything. I survived one whole summer off of 98 ways to use elk meat and it was not pleasant, no sir-e."

Madelyn blanched at the request but didn't protest. She had never been overly adventurous with her food and having spent the first few weeks of their banishment overcoming a pretty severe reaction to traveling so far so quickly, which had only increased her susceptibility to migraines, she had survived so far on keeping her options as bland as possible. It wasn't exciting but neither was spending a day in bed. Reaching for one of the fruits, she held it up to inspect. "Should we peel them first do you think?"

"I washed it?" Prompted Ree with a shrug. "I don't know. Go wild! Be daring."

Despite her own trepidation, Madi appreciated the fact that the other scientist rarely treated her with kid gloves. She wasn't sure that leaving this particular decision in her hands was the best pathway to success but, squaring her shoulders, she set down the fruit and started slicing it, peel and all.

"So what does elk taste like?," she asked, piling the pieces into the food processor she'd been allowed to borrow on pain of ridicule if anything happened to it.

"Like fruity beef. I'm not really fond of it, but a buck weighs like 700 pounds, so when you cull a herd, that's a lot of eating for several families. Tough, gamey: you really have to stew it or pulverize it to make it soft. I, personally, like to make a stew with a crappy cabernet and and lots of potatoes-" The ensign's eyebrows raised slightly as she looked at Madi, her words frozen mid-sentence. "We could make wine."

Madelyn froze, her hand hovering over the processor. As much as she liked to consider herself an optimistic person, the ensign also knew that she tended to dwell on things in a way that didn't allow much room for spontaneity. In the presence of a totally inverse perspective, she did her best not to focus on all the ways Ree's comment sounded entirely insane. "Do we know how?"

"No, but neither did the first people that made wine," The brunette suggested with one finger raised as if that proved her point. "It has to be in the computer somewhere."

"Won't there need to be some sort of...fermentation?" Madelyn's furrowed brow was the result of intense effort to recall anything Duncan had ever mentioned about the production of moonshine, which admittedly was not a conversation she'd ever participated in with a lot of enthusiasm prior, mostly because anything she'd been privy to had been more or less he and Anton waxing lyrical about the engineering process rather than the actual distilling. "We have the most of the plum-things," she continued hesitantly. "Maybe if you pit them, we could try?"

Ree picked up one of the plum things and turned it over in her hand, sniffed it, then cut it up and tasted a tiny bit. It reminded her of a mix between a plum and a cherry. "Technically 70% of what we're doing here is fermentation. It's how often to burp it, or let it rest, and how long, and what agent to use. Some vinegar, some sugar or honeys, and what to use as valves. *Ohmygods* this is so much to figure out, but we've got this. We're science! We *are* doing science."

The enthusiasm provoked laughter, which was a fairly common outcome. Madelyn, despite having a natural tendency to fret, was very receptive to other people's output and, as a result, fared much better in the company of optimists, of which Beckett was a prime example. Despite everything that could go wrong, the young brunette found herself suddenly intrigued by possibilities. "Okay, so I'll prep ingredients and you can just..." She mimicked tossing them into the processor, hands extended outwards like mini explosions. "If we don't make something edible perhaps we'll unlock some other mystical concoction."

"Concoction, decoction, there's so many things that we could happen across by accident. I hope they're good accidents. I mean, we don't want to be wasteful..." Ree's voice trailed off as she set about rearranging things on the table into little stations for which might be pickling, fermenting and other could be based on the alien ingredients. The simplest form of preservation for much of it was to either dry or simply suction the air out of the receptacle, but others needed flavor or solution or they'd be rendered to gray mush by the end. She consulted the computer multiple times about possible processes, and the possible ratios and weights and liquid content based off guesses to similar items back home and had at least a general idea of what should be happening. Even if they had none of the old timey equipment. It was time to improvise! "You know I never thought I'd be doing this on a starship. Helping out someone's grandmother make jam, yeah. But not here..."

"I suppose if you think about it, there's a lot of things I didn't expect to be doing on a starship, first and foremost being living out the rest of my existence." It was a pragmatic moment from a typically idealistic soul but Madelyn had felt the pull of homesickness particularly profoundly since they'd left Relea behind. "We are exemplary scientists though," she professed with a grandiose upwards jut of her paring knife. "Innovating under duress is our motto." Lowering the hand, she cut several segments of fruit before adding, "We should probably get a better motto, if I'm honest."

"We're going to get home," Ree corrected her with a wave of a bottle of vinegar. "You can't think that way. We *will* get home and we *will* get fabulously sloshed and eat too much chocolate and disappear in a blanket fort for a week until counseling drags us out afterwards. Everything *will* be okay. Pinky swear."

For all she never usually verbalised it, Madelyn wasn't sure if she felt quite so optimistic. It had always clawed at her, an insidious thought in the back of her mind, that even if they did find a way to miraculously cover the distance required to return to familiar territory, she had come close to suffering long-term health issues the first time around. It wasn't difficult to tell from the way the doctor still insisted on regular check-ups that it had been touch and go for a while, and of course now she realised that others hadn't been as lucky to make the trip alive. Was there any way of retracing that journey quickly that didn't create fried Moore pancakes at the other end? It was a scary thought because Madi wanted to be brave enough to accept the risk so that others stood a chance. In reality, she was terrified by the prospect.

"Well, until that day, we have a lot of alien fruit to experiment on." Forced cheerfulness would eventually work; it always did. Skewering her next plum with enthusiasm, Madelyn held it up for admirable inspection and then waggled the knife until it fell with a plop to the cutting board. "Time to put some moonshiners out of business."

 

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