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If you had asked Thor what he would miss most before he moved to Midgard, he’d have said the company of great friends, the assuring presence of his family, the grand vistas and expansive palace grounds, and the rush of adventure in beautiful lands. After all, in the all too brief time he’d been mortal, that had been what he’d longed for. Earth was an adventure of a kind, but a miserable one, only brightened by presence of Jane Foster, and he couldn’t describe the lightness in his heart when his friends had found him.
If you asked him after, he’d say the food. He had not known before, but there was comfort in familiar smells and flavours. It was a revelation to discover that he cared about what went into his mouth. He had never wanted for food, but he had been in situations where he knew not to take it for granted. If you were lost in the wilderness of another realm, or exhausted from a week-long march into war, you’d eat whatever was set in front of you, and so his appetite had been dispassionate and thoughtless. Now, he could sit down with butter and honey slathered on a thick chunk of grained bread and be instantly transported back to a time when he was barely out of boyhood, still trying to get away with curling in his mother’s skirts and pretending he couldn’t hear her exhortations to share his sweet treat with his brother. He even missed chewing on slivers carved from pink slabs of striped lejre on a camp fire, with a dozen men making their own desired contributions to the meal and creating a thick sludge of flavours, which tasted nothing like the cured pork that came packaged in plastic in white store aisles, sold in great quantities as meals-for-one.
Many Earth foods had a cloying sweetness. Tony had heard from somewhere about Thor’s first journey across Midgard, and had taken it into his head that he should buy boxes of poptarts. Thor consumed them each breakfast, because Tony was his host and no prince of Asgard would insult a host by refusing what was given freely from his table. But he was beginning to grow a little sick of them, and bitterly annoyed that none of the others ate them with regularity. The poptarts had been fine when he’d been starving and mortal, but they had an overbearing taste that he didn’t enjoy in great quantities. A lot of human food had that unfortunate sweetness, from the pale confections Natasha had brought home in a pink ribboned box for each of them to try, to the squishy white bread the others shared at breakfast, and though he did not reveal it to his fellow Avengers, he resented the loss of good food.
At his first few dinners he’d wondered if he’d done Tony an insult to receive only the meanest, driest part of a fowl, but after some days of observing his companions he realised it was the breast that was the desired cut here. Even when one purchased a whole bird from a merchant, it usually came with all the tender organs, and even the liver, gutted and thrown out. Humans roasted vegetables and boiled what little meat they kept, but even that was always subtly off. The balance of flavours was weighted too heavily on the sour or savoury, or the texture was unusual and clogged with bland creams. Even the food that had once reminded him of home started to become deeply unsatisfying as the weeks wore on.
It was easier, oddly, to consume the things most foreign to his palate. He liked it when Jane dragged him into tiny diners to drink thick coffee, the taste of which hung in the back of his throat for hours. He liked waking up with her and helping her cook eggs, ‘sunny side up’ she called it, and laughing as she made him whisk the batter for pancakes or waffles. Steve would head to the kitchen after a training session together, filling a pot with litres of water and drowning wide strips of pasta for scant minutes, before they were dredged, hot and soggy, in bitter tomato sauce and shavings of a hard, salty cheese that they ate in companionable silence. Sometimes Bruce would take over the kitchen for their occasional group meals, and the kitchen would keep the memory for days. A light perfume of the tangy, sharp ingredients that made up his masala dosas and bisi bele bhaath, mingling with the gentle scent of herbs hung to dry.
Their food came with stories. Not skilled epics that every Asgardian learned to mimic from early childhood, but meandering little tales about where they picked up one such skill or gained the idea of combining unusual flavours. Steve would tell him about his familiarity with hunger, sated by dried army rations or watery soups. Bruce always had a family who repaid him with cooking, or a humorous attempt to recreate flavours he’d fleetingly experienced and barely remembered anything about, except that he’d liked them. Clint didn’t tell stories; but Thor had spent an evening watching him fry chicken in steamy oil and explaining with emphatic movements all the ways deep-frying could go wrong if you didn’t account for moisture or proper heat. Eventually it occurred to him that Thor could tell stories with food too, and he could share his old life with the new, the same way his friends had extended their kindness to him. Only, there were some problems with the idea.
Thor could cook well enough, of course. He had been on many hunting trips without his stable of servants, roasting and stewing fresh meat, and Jane had shown him how to make some human meals with the toaster and microwave, but to attempt one in the other was something of a conundrum. Earth had not the ingredients, nor the equipment, to create proper meals, and if it weren’t for the need to repay his hosts, Thor wouldn’t dare try. But if he could locate similar ingredients to those that flourished on Asgard, he did not think the methods of preparation could be so different. He decided then to make a rich, foamy stew. It was plain food, but good, and so simple he couldn’t fail too badly.
On a day that the other Avengers were suitably occupied that it seemed unlikely they would have time for food, Thor set to work. Every butchers and supermarket he visited sold only the bisected flesh of an animal, and none with all the parts Thor desired, so he took up his Starkphone and found a good place for hunting in Long Island, which was only a few dozen miles from the Avenger’s tower. He walked there at a brisk pace in the morning, and came back that evening with sixteen summer hares. He brought them to the kitchen and skinned and quartered the animals. The bones he boiled down in water and vinegar, drawing out the marrow when they’d softened. Half the hares, still on the bone, were browned in an iron pan, and he decided to finish them roasting in honey and mustard. The pan was deglazed with ale, then added to with vegetables and dill. The organ meats and much of the blood were kept for the thickness of the sauce and all was left to simmer. The pelt he kept for gloves.
Tony had no deep kettle in his kitchen, so Thor filled another pan with oil like he’d observed Clint doing, and used it to make tiny sweet cakes of hare’s blood, walnuts, and honey. It took a few tries to get the timing right, to understand properly how the oil worked to sear the cake together without becoming unpleasantly greasy. At home they would have used the dried air bladder of a fish to coat them into round, sticky balls, but Thor hadn’t been able to find one of those for sale. To accompany them, he took the hares’ liver, which he had found pleasingly sweet, and ground them with milk and ale and the juice of some apples, and he decided to rest it on a bed of honey-drenched squash. It looked almost as pretty as the fruit tarts Natasha and Tony had brought back from the bakery last week, but now with a palatable flavour instead of the unappetising creamy mix of sugary and acidic notes. He hoped the prize of liver would make up the plainness of the main meal. It was, he thought with some pride, a dessert he would present to his father, and all the better for evoking the grand feasting halls of Asgard with the meagre resources of a mortal home.
Tony arrived to the kitchen first, drawn, Thor flattered himself with thinking, by the warm smells of the kitchen. He had taken in the sight of Thor stirring a pot of thickening blood and raised his eyebrows, seating himself at the counter. Tony had deemed the whole thing ‘interesting,’ which amused Thor. He entertained them both by telling Tony tales of hanging around the kitchens as a child, waiting to steal salted fish when the servants turned their backs, and of the first time he gutted an animal, a boar the size of a man that had given him such a run around Thor had no idea in the end whether he was chasing the boar or the boar was chasing him. The mood was merry, so he neglected to mention the rather large part his brother had played in all these escapades. That was a sorrow he kept to himself.
Slowly, the others trickled in. Steve had frowned at the small mountain of pots Thor had been building in the sink, and had immediately started rinsing them and moving them to the dishwasher, waving away Thor’s apologies. Clint moved past, still in his SHIELD gear, stealing one of the orange vegetables Thor had used in his sauce. He looked surprised when he swallowed; pronouncing it metallic, but when Thor tasted the broth it was fine.
‘Thor’s been finding new and interesting uses for blood,’ Tony explained, although Thor didn’t think they were exactly new, not even for humans. Clint had looked a little queasy, but Bruce had a story, quiet and mumbling, about a type of sweetened blood sausage he’d had in Uruguay, and Natasha had taken the offered first bite of one of Thor’s honey cakes and told him it was more than good enough for dessert, and showed him how to pat the oil off with a bit of kitchen paper.
They didn’t eat formally, as they usually would around a table, but strangely, it did not come across as an insult. Natasha took a seat on an unbloodied section of the counter; Steve leaned next to her and pulled strips of meat off the bone, chewing hungrily. Thor was surprised that the stew was going down better than the desserts, given how sweet humans liked their food. If Clint pushed his food around with distaste, and Tony discreetly discarded his liver tart once Thor had explained the contents, he paid it no mind. He had no pretensions to great skill and he had known when he started that Earth was not Asgard, and that hidden behind the similarities of their food was a world of difference. But it was a distance that he was becoming convinced could be breached.
And when Natasha offered to introduce him to the use of tomatoes as a thickening agent in lieu of blood, something that Tony added would keep them from having to look at Clint’s grossed out face while they were trying to eat, Thor found that the thought of sacrificing taste for good company was not such a hardship after all.