Chapter Text
The Bats & Birds Eat Differently. So very different. They also cook duffrrently, if at all.
- Bruce
He can not cook for shit.
Keep this man OUT of a kitchen, AWAY from any and all fire/cooking appliances.
Mf can't even make scrambled eggs.
When Alfred is mad at Bruce, Bruce has to get takeout bc Alfred is 'turning in early'. Usually 'due to an upset stomach, sir'.
Can reliably chop things tho.
The one you want to mince onions bc he doesnt cry and makes nice lil cubes.
He never learned to cook for shit over his world travels bc he was too busy getting the stuffing beat out of him. His teachers thought he looked pathetic and very poor little meow meow-esque, Ra's and Talia in particular, and couldn't stop themselves from feeding him. This is also how he built up most of his poison tolerances.
Tried to make Alfred a father's day cake once. The kitchen needed remodeling. Bruce claimed that was his real fathers day gift, the cake was supposed to be Alfreds mothers day gift. Alfred thanked him lovingly but told him to just make a card next year. Bruce was 16.
His cooking could be a bioweapon. Has given multiple people food poisoning. The only one who can eat it is Impulse. Bruce doesnt know how to feel abt this.
As far as eating goes, the man eats like a goddamn horse when he does eat. Usually has to be coaxed into it when he is deep in a case but Alfred's cherry scones can lurr him out.
Tried a bunch of weird food with Dick at his new son's request bc Dick wanted to explore his palette. That was bullshit. But he can now stomach cheese cookies with hot sauce, shaving cream cookies, and those nasty Jelly Belly challenge jelly beans. A coffee addict, along with Babs, but he will accept tea.
Post-Jason death, he would not eat or drink unless he had to. Lost weight till Tim started making him sit up and forcefully shoved a handful of cotton candy grapes down his throat. After doing a self heimlich, Bruce was blandly and pointedly told that he was being wasteful of his food that Alfred made and Jason would yell at him for that. When Bruce snarled at Tim, Tim, with the most emotionless face a 13 year old can possibly achieve, shoved more grapes in his mouth and demanded he eat, drink some water or tea, and go the fuck to sleep. Bruce slowly got his appetite back. But not before he almost drowned in a cup of tea.
- Dick
Alright so this one is a bit weird BUT
Dick has this weird psychological block on cooking. He can only make the foods his mom and dad made him. His dad, half-Romani raised w/o much cultural/food connection, would make scrambled eggs, oatmeal, roast corn, sandwiches, and soup. His mom, raised w full Roma culture/food and Romani on both sides and would sit him on her hip while she cooked in their little caravan on the road while the circus travelled around.
(Sidenote: as a POC i GUARANTEE food is directly connected to your culture. Food is a language of your culture and tradition. Its a special part and it can help u get more in touch w your ethnic roots in a fun tasty way!! I love cooking!! I love basmati rice and knowing my chicken is halal and not eating pork and i love my tamales oaxaqueños and tamales and using fun, tasty spices like cayenne and turmeric!!)
But dick can only specifically make foods his parents made for him. He cant make a meatloaf or lasagna but you better BET he knows exactly how to make his mom's ciorbă de burtă. Dick has never been able to work past it.
During his first days at the manor, Dick refused to tell Alfred what his oarents would cook. That was their food, not Alfred's. He would sneak in chips and eat cereal till Alf found out abt that. Dick never cooked anything between jasons death and tims appearance, never used the stove except to make all the boxes of Jason's favouritebtea he had stored in his cupboards. Dick hates tea. He does enjoy coffee tho but he actually would rather just drink milk. Just plain fuckin milk like a weirdo.
That being said, the foods he can make are pretty damn tasty.
Can reliably cut things but will play with the knives. Can juggle knives. Apparently. Alfred and Bruce learned that the hard way when Dick was 9. That was Bruce's first white hair. Occasionally forgetful of when he has something on the stove but thats object permanence for you. But its only happened a handful of times before and Dick usually stands by the stove to watch the food.
He eats pretty well. He likes his carbs, sue him. He also has a bit of a sweet tooth. Never eats before patrol tho, he WILL fall asleep. He eats during patrol, oddly enough, so he could be mid flip and shoving a donut in his mouth. He still goes home hungry. THEN he will either break out the food he made before patrol and put in a tupperware then put it in the microwave or he will order out bc fuck he forgot to make food and no damn way is he cooking rn.
- Jason
He didnt know nutrition when he first got taken in by Bruce
Willis would buy bulks in canned soups and boxes of crackers, cheap to buy and easy for a very ill Catherine to eat (so this is like,,,pre-crisis Jason origins but his mom Catherine was actually very very sick and his dad was a hired thug so he could make cash for his family. So here, Catherine was so sick she had chronic pain but no health insurance/access so she turned to drugs to try and ease her pain. Willis is basically the same. Willis genuinely tried for his family but god sometimes love isnt enough to keep you afloat. Precrisis he turned to crime because he didnt have the ability to get a legitimate job and he wanted to try and take care of his son and wife. This is by far a much more compelling storyline imo, that people will turn to crime because they cant do anything else, that poor people arent born criminals but made criminals due to circumstances. Idk if anyone remembers these precrisis Jason origins but i went on a rabbit hole trip on the fanwikis and official DC timeline websites)
ANYWAYS canned soup and crackers are sustainable but they dont exactly have the nutrition a growing kid would need. But alfeed decided to include nutrition lessons in the year he homeschooled jason and kept those going as supplementary lessons even when Jason went to schoop with other people. In an effort to enforce the lessons, he also taught Jason to cook.
Jason likes SPICES. he likes FLAVOUR. Just salt and pepper makes him sad. He doesnt wanna feel sad when he eats, he wants to feel happy. Will improvise on the spices bc he doesnt trust Alfred's British tastebuds no matter how much he loves his funky new grandpa-butler.
The old Mexican lady who lived next door to Jason when he was little would make Jason her favourite tea in winter. Menta poleo ended up being his favourite tea.
Alfred made snarky commentary that "at least one young man who hasnt taken to living away from home has taken well to these lessons in being a functional adult."
Jason cooks after patrol bc it calms him down, lowers the adrenaline in his veins. My man eats like a bear. He had a pretty solid appetite pre-death but post-pit Jason can eat. Jason is literally built bigger than a fucking fridge. Canonically heavier than the Batman, despite being 2 inches shorter, by like, 15 pounds. And Bruce is like what, 205-210 pounds or something, and like 6'3. Jason is a big boi and Id be terrified to see him in the street. But Jason can also carry all his siblings on his shoulders without breaking a sweat :)
A bit more carnivourous than his siblings but give that man a fresh loaf of bread and watch that shit disappear. He likes his veggies too. He will eat raw tomatoes, raw onions, raw peppers, raw asparagus, raw artichoke, raw any veggie. There is no possible way he wont eat something UNLESS YOU BOIL THE SHIT OUT OF IT.
Boiling veggies is a fucking crime.
The first time Jason ate boiled cauliflower he started crying because there is no way he could eat this fucking TRAVESTY but then he'll be wasting food. Alfred has never attempted to boil a veggie again. Steamed veggies fuck tho.
Jason subscribes to the thought that meat is best cooked slow and on low heat which is the only way you should cook meat, trust me. Who fucking trusts meat you cook in 20 minutes? Bitch you are asking for a parasite. Who cares if the meat takes 4 hours to cook at least you know its fuckimg cooked. Just start cooking early if its that much of a goddamn problem
- Cass
My girl cannot cook at fucking all. Dont trust her with fire for the love of god.
Makes excellent take out decisions. Knows where the best restaurants are and which ones arent violating health codes.
Will eat anything and genuinely enjoy it.
Her favourite flavour of sweets is lemon anything. Lemon cake, lemon icing, lemon lollipops, lemon sorbet, sherbet lemons, lemon ice pops. She likes the zest (why are lemons considered sour btw? Theyre not?? Theyre like,,,sweet with a lil bit of sour. Tart and tangy, if you will. If yalls lemons are so bitter that they make u pucker up then theyre probably not ripe lmao eating bitter ass unripe lemons)
She can, like Bruce, reliably chop things. She's a master dicer and slicer. But cooking? It's just not in her wheelhouse.
She doesn't have specific food preferences but she pays extra attention to expiration dates because she never eants to eat spoiled/rotten food ever again.
Eating rotten and raw food before she met Babs meant she had a nest of parasites in her guts so she likes her food well done and with a 100% chance of having no bacteria or anything in it (although her immune system is probably the strongest of all her family's at this point beside Jason due to the freaky Pit shit).
Can give her food as gifts fir any occasion and she will love it.
Like in canon, Cass regularly breaks into Tim's apartment to use all his hot water and eat all his Rice Krispies. She loves to break into Tim's place for food the most of all her siblings because they can cuddle on the floor in the corner and eat with their hands and neither will give a fuck.
- Tim
So he can cook. He gets aggressive when he cooks alone though. Talks to himself when he cooks and says mean shit about his pasta and he claims it makes it taste better because it gets full of spite to prove him wrong.
He watched old cooking shows when he was little because it was the only channel that he could find that didn't bore him to tears besides Star Trek/Star Wars reruns and art history documentaries and like, The Monsters Inside Me.
Consequently, Tim is afraid as hell to cook meat like beef and he REFUSES to make pork on his own because he watched a Monsters Inside Me episode about someone who ate pork and almost died from this parasite that was in it. He was like, 5 years old and it was 1 a.m.
He can make fish though, he's not scared of fish.
He had a couple nannies over winter break, thanksgiving break, spring break, and the periods between school ending and him going to a finishing school over summer. Some of his boarding schools would send the kids home for the weekend.
They wanted him to know how to cook for various reasons. One wanted him to be able to take care of himself. Another never wanted him to burden his poor wife in the future with all the cooking. Someone else told him he could help his parents cook when they came home. Yet another mentioned she had to pass on her grandma's veggie lasagna recipe to someone and she wasn't having kids at all. So cooking shows and curiosity plus a rotating listicle of nannies taught him. There were a few kitchen fires but Tim managed to hide them well enough.
Alfred also taught Tim to make different types of breads when he showed up.
Tim can cook but cleaning up? Nope! The mixing bowl would get left in the sink till the flies started hovering around the sink. Sometimes the leftovers would rot before Tim finally got around to tossing them out. He would leave shit laying around for weeks. Who was gonna tell him to clean up after he stopped having nannies? Same person who was gonna tell him to eat regularly. Nobody.
Tim gets distracted EASILY. he could be mid bite and if he has a thought that he needs to investigate, he will abandon his food. He would get lonely when he was little and not eat because he felt too sad to bother eating. Food would bore him. Nobody told him to sit down and finish his food when he was younger. His appetite waxes and wanes. You know how cats like to eat with their people? Yeah, like that.
Tim is good at eating small foods tho. Bunches of grapes, the little cucumber sandwiches Alfred makes and Tim likes (theres this one comic where Dick and Tim are at the Bat Computer and Alfred is like 'oh i brought sandwiches'. And Dick is like 'hope theyre not those cucumber sandwiches' and tim goes 'Hey i like those cuke sandwiches'. They were roast beef sandwiches if u were curious), a tangerine.
The singular time i remember Tim eating in the RR comics its a fucking salad. Are you okay? Seriously, i didnt see him eat on his Eurotrip from Hell, i didn't see him eat while he was with the LoA, I didn't see him eat while he was in Russia or Paris or anywhere besides once and it was just lettuce and tomatoes. Tim. Tim, there is NOTHING wrong with salads i love salads theyre so good but WHY have i seen you eat ONCE and it was a SALAD??? HE DIDNT EVEN FINISH IT?? Tim, genuinely, are you okay? Like mentally?
Anyways his fridge and pantry looks like a vegan hipster's who is also a college student with anxiety and everyone gives him shit(affectionate, mostly) for it.
He hates coffee. It smells nice but he hated the way it made him feel so jittery while he was fucking his sleep schedule up when he first became robin. Soda is better. He also likes blackberry tea. His mom taught him to make it. Babs trusts Tim to bring him her coffee because he hates the taste. Its also how Tim curates favour with Oracle.
Grape and cherry are the superior flavours for candy and sodas but only drinks blackberry boba.
Forgets to eat without someone to renind him. Dexter is an excellent reminder because Dex wont eat unless Tim eats and Tim would rather shoot himself than let his cat starve.
Dex is not starving he is a very healthy active cat but he is not letting his dumbass human starve.
There are some days when the only things Tim can make himself eat are dried cherries or dried dates and tangerines.
- Damian
Does pre-eating work outs
A fairly good appetite
He is DRIVEN to never be as 'scrawny' as Tim.
Drinks his milk because he wants to be Tall. Luck is on his side tbh, Talia is like 5'7, Bruce is 6'3, and Ra's is 6'5 (thats so fucking scary why would anyone be that tall id run away so fast if i ever met anyone that tall thats fucking terrifying and even 6'3 is too damn much)
He has baby chub<3 he is 10 and has baby chub<3
He isn't allowed in the kitchen yet
He already has enough knives.
He helps wash dishes tho.
Does not care if his food is hot, lukewarm, cold, if its edible, it is edible.
He has to have his tea HOT tho
He likes his chai ~spicy~ like his mom makes it
Doesnt like birthday cake, its too sweet and shit
Damian's mom made him ghrayabeh on his birthday and makes it himself in the morning on his birthday while Alfred and Bruce are still asleep at like 4, just before alfred wakes up and just after Bruce goes to sleep.
After he gets batcow (ill amke a oneshit abt that or mention it somewhere in a fic), he no longer eats meat
Its an adjustment.
Damian spends hours searching for meat alternatives that will get him the protein he wants
Eats tons of lentils, beans, tofu, eggs, nuts, seeds.
Learns about plant based meats and goes feral. Meat!! Made out of plants!! Fuck yeah!!
Also enjoys edamame and yogurt (plain)
Makes hummus in the blender because this american hummus is fucking nasty (hard agree. what the fuck why is it like this)
Does not like peanut butter. There is something wrong about peanut butter and Damian refuses to eat it.