Dokunie Cooking Review
毒贄クッキング/Poisoned Sacrifice Cooking

From time to time, I come across something that catches my interest. Sometimes it is a recommendation from a reader of this blog. Sometimes, it is just something that catches my eye on Twitter. I don’t remember which was the case with the four volume Dokunie Cooking manga series, but it seemed weirdly interesting enough. Plus it had a cute elf babe, which didn’t hurt.

***SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!!!***

The Story, in Brief

Dokunie Cooking tells the story of an indebted maiden elf named Poppa who lives in a village of living acorns. She’s selected to be the virgin sacrifice to the local tentacle monster. However, Poppa’s foot odor is so severe, the monster won’t eat her. She tries numerous things to get rid of the foot odor, but to no avail. In addition, she tries to tempt the monster to eat her in other ways, but always fails. This results in the two of them having an odd relationship where Poppa is always hanging out in the monster’s cave, playing console games.

The angel Kerubiel arrives to dispatch the monster, but her conflict with Poppa results in Poppa destroying a valuable sword the angel was renting. So Kerubiel is forced to work at a local fast food joint to pay her debt. Kerubiel and Poppa end up having an odd friendship filled with love and hate. Over time, additional monster and angel characters are introduced to this odd mix. Eventually, secrets are revealed.

A Somewhat Amusing Manga

The whole bizarre premise of Poppa desperately trying to get “Monster-san” to eat her was always somewhat amusing. The normal trope for a monster and a female humanoid sacrifice is that the female is going to scream a lot and hope the knight shows up to rescue her. So the fact that Dokunie Cooking goes against this trope by making Poppa so determined to be eaten is oddly amusing.

Poppa as a character is amusing in and of herself. When the angel Kerubiel was introduced to the series, Poppa was shown to be fearless no matter whom she saw as standing against her. So she kicks an angel’s butt, a minotaur’s butt, and more. And then she has utter disdain for those whom she has defeated (even if only for a time). 😂 And she has a sadistic streak in her a mile wide. I found this other elements of Poppa to be the most amusing part of the series.

An Unfocused Series

The biggest problem with Dokunie Cooking is that Minazuki-sensei clearly wanted to do some wacky comedy series that parodied the cooking manga genre as well as fantasy genre. That’s why many of the early chapters included some recipe on some actual food dish, substituting elf for any meat item. Add to this a helping of fanservice, since Poppa is a lovely looking elf with “huge tracks of land.”

While I’m sure this seemed like a good idea at first, Minazuki-sensei drifted from that. And to be honest, the introduction of Kerubiel gave the series a lift for me. Poppa now had a different foe for a time before they became friends. Minazuki-sensei attempted to steer things back to the “cooking” parody place, but those efforts were “meh” to me.

Finally, Sensei decided to actually start telling a proper story with the introduction of the loli-babaa Chief Angel. It added intrigue to the series and this is what got me to become actually interested in things. But I sense that this shift to a plot focus was too little, too late. As such, after the introduction of an actual plot, things are rushed to a conclusion.

As endings go, it works (and returns the series to its comedy roots one last time) despite being rushed. Its just a shame Sensei didn’t put more story elements in at the start. I think that would have made things more focused.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

In the end, Dokunie Cooking is a somewhat amusing manga series that attempts to parody cooking and fantasy genres with a side helping of female elf fanservice. The series ends up meandering a bit before going for a plot story, followed by a rushed conclusion that answers most but not all questions raised. If you don’t mind fanservice, it isn’t a bad manga to check out and think about what might have been.