- You gotta cook a lot of custards before you kiss the Flan Prince.
- While, according to the Daily Yomiuri in its review of Kitchen Princess , “It’s nothing new to introduce food or cooking into manga… The Kitchen Princess stands out as it allows readers to enjoy the feeling of being a little chef while following the story and trying the recipes Najika introduces themselves.”
- I was tipped off to the world of manga by Mike Rhode of ComicsDC . Not that I was completely in the dark, but I was definitely in dusk. One could rapel on the wall of manga at the closest big box book store, and wearing a helmet would not be overly prudent. Someone is reading this stuff. Make that someones.
- The Kitchen Princess series – there are four volumes in English and eight in Japanese – was especially interesting to me for obvious reasons, although I love the manga art and the fantastical stories. In each of these satisfyingly flippy paperbacks there are 4 recipes. The odds of finding a sandwich recipe? Well, who knows, I have not read the results of that study, but I would venture a guess at somewhere around 11.2% .
- The recipes tend toward fanciful, French and feminine. When mapping your way to a heart via the scenic gastro route of the stomach, does the food matter? Or is it simply a matter of aligning your compass deftly? My cook’s heart is warmed by the earnest motives sending Najika to the kitchen – “to assuage the sorrow of a friend or to win back the hearts of people who once rejected her.”
- And why the sobriquet “Flan Prince”? While aspiring to become a great chef like her late parents, Najika also dreams of being reunited with a boy who saved her life when she was small. Despondent over her parents accidental death, she had been wandering tearfully along a riverbank and fell into the water. The boy who rescued her then consoled with a tasty flan. I told you it was fantastical.
The Lunch Encounter 