In Volume 1 of Morinaga Milk’s Himitsu no Recipe (ひみつのレシピ), we met Wakatsuki and the President of the Cooking Club, on whom she has a raging crush. The feelings appear to be almost entirely one-sided, however and, as we head into Volume 2, Wakatsuki’s delusion about the two of them is clearly headed for a fall.

The problem is two-fold. One, the previous president of the club has taken to returning from time to time and it is quite obvious that the current president has deep admiration for her sempai. Wakatsuki sees the older woman as a rival.

More importantly, Wakatsuki is not a member of the cooking club because she enjoys cooking or wants to learn to do it. In fact, she’s a hot mess in the kitchen  and manages to sabotage nearly every meal with stereotypical “bad cook” tropes such as replacing sugar with salt. Sigh.

There are other only moderately funny scenes on top of this, culminating in the cooking club reluctantly eating crickets for a meal.

But Valentine’s Day saves the story, as Buchou offers to help Wakatsuki make chocolate and they exchange feelings and sweets. As the book closes, Wakatsuki tells the club in the most transparent way that her lover’s identity is a secret. I imagine no one was fooled.

As I said in my review of the first volume, this is not Morinaga-sensei’s strongest work. It’s not terrible, but there’s no self-awareness, no honesty, no real connection between the two. And as I worked on my lecture for Kanagawa U., I realized that that’s what I’m looking for in my Yuri – honesty.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 4
Characters – 5
Yuri – 6
Service – 5

Overall – 5

It won’t kill you to read this, but I’m glad Seven Seas went with Gakuen Polizi for their next Morinaga title instead.