Food!

Princess Mononoke

Glaugust is here, one of the prompts is from Vyra is about food. 

I have had a hard time writing anything good for the blog recently, partly because I've had fiction writing to get done, partly because my job is overwhelmingly busy at the moment, and partly because I was trying to finish the weird dungeon that just went up, and struggling through misgivings about it. 

The wise and kind Purplecthulhu has correctly identified that a vibe shift is in order. 

Food

The Barony:

• Most people eat a salted meat oat porridge day to day as travel rations. This is most likely what 'rations' represent, if you have bought them in the Barony. You fry them in oil and then add water, or cook them in milk, or mix an egg through. Usually the oats and the meat come separately, and there are beloved mixtures of both that give subtle changes in flavour. Popular additions that can be found in the wilds while travelling: honeycomb, herbs from the roadside, berries, nuts, etc. etc. 
• For non-travel food, fish and seafood are a huge part of diet, so much so that settlements further inland are thought to be malnourished and deprived because they don't have easy access to them. Most fish is cooked with citrus, which grows in the northern Barony, or apples, which grow further south. Always eaten with fried bread. 
• Potatoes exist and are beloved. The miracle of the soil. 
• Expensive meals are mostly sweets and pastries, both of which are a delicacy in the capital. The Baronials are extremely fond of them. Common: Turkish Delight, candied fruits, and laboriously constructed and ornamented pastries. Fine-milled wheat flour exists, but is uncommon and expensive, associated almost entirely with sweet pastries. Most bread is dark, salted, and eaten toasted. 
• Alcohol in the Barony, like in the White City, is mostly harsh, clear white spirits, which are heated before you drink them. Beer and wine don't really exist as we know them, but there are various, usually sweet, 'specialist' alcohols made from fermented fruit. They will all get you extremely fucked up. 

The Steppe

• People in the Steppe eat lots of meat. They cut it into chunks, rub it with salt and spices, skewer it, and cook in over a flame. They are especially fond of interspersing chunks of fat along the skewer, so that it partially melts on the fire. 
• Most cooking, if you have the time to cook, is in stew pots. They are known for spicing their food to levels unacceptable to Northerners. Most stews have a meat and potato base, but they have other tubers in the south as well, which often take the place of potatoes. Then lots of salt, lots of oil, lots of spice. 
• 'Rations' in the south are probably jerky, black bread, and maybe hard white cheese made from horse or dog milk. Expensive rations might include imported dried fruits. 
• Steppe nomads living by the sea will fish, but they don't have the same relish for seafood as their northern neighbours. 
• Expensive Steppe meals will be hospitality banquets, featuring whole roasted animals, tubers cooked a hundred ways, buckets of 'popped' and salted maize kernels, strong red wine, and bitter green salad leaves (a local type of roquette hardy enough to survive in the cold). 
• Other than their strong wine, Steppe nomads are obsessive about clean, fresh, cold water. They have a hundred ways of talking about it, and ascribe it healing properties and sweeping health benefits, often to the amusement of others. 

Further South

• The Southern Nomads are said to eat people, prepared the same way the Northerners prepare horse and cattle flesh. The two kingdoms don't get along - this might be a myth.
• Certainly not a myth: the Southern Nomads produce the only hard candies in the world, and trade them with their neighbours for extortionate amounts of money. They have an aniseed-ish taste, keep well in paper wrapping, and are each worth their weight in silver.
• Apparently they also make wine out of spinal fluid and petroleum? That can't be true. 

The White City

• Rice is the staple crop, grown in the northern empire and exported everywhere in enormous, centrally controlled caravans. 'Rations' are going to have a sticky rice ball base, and will probably layer on plantains and spiced meat or fish as a filling. A larger, sit down meal will have these same ingredients, but more of everything and not rolled into a ball.
• Seafood is just as important in the Empire as it is in the Barony. They love fish, olive oil, octopus, pepper, cress, spinach. 
• The white spirit that the Baronials drink was invented here, and drinking is a serious past time. You only ever drink it hot. Water is cold, alcohol is hot. Many apartments in the white city will have a dedicated room and stove for drinking together. 
• They ship ice from the south for their water, at enormous expense.

The Mountains

• The mountaintop walled gardens are the only place in the world where tomatoes, strawberries, peaches, and roses grow. You can steal them and try to do it elsewhere but it won't work. Something about the mountaintops sustains them. 

BONUS: a real, non-elfgame recipe!

My favourite liver pasta. You need:

• A courgette
• A beef or lambs liver
• A jar of kimchi
• Pasta

Slice the liver very finely, and then fry it brown in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Cut up the courgette into thin, quartered slices, and fry that in with the blood and oil/salt mixture. You want the liver and courgette browned but not burned, and lots of blood and oil in the pan.

Mix through the kimchi to taste, and simmer the whole lot until it's piping hot. 

Mix through pasta, keep in on the high heat for about thirty seconds, allowing some liquid to cook off. 

Serve with cold sparkling water, unless ye be a heathen tap water drinker.