the family recipe only comes out on wins, which means most of my extended family has functionally never eaten it, which means it has taken on the mythic status of a food nobody can accurately describe. my aunt swears it's a braise. my uncle swears it's a soup. it is neither, it is a losing streak with garlic in it. every fanbase has one of these — a dish, a shirt, a chair — some sacred object rationed out by a scoreboard nobody in the kitchen controls. thirty two versions of the same superstition, thirty two people convinced theirs is the scientific one. it's not seasoning. it's grief with a lid on it