Cuisine is one of the ultimate distillations of culture. This is how RPGs can harness this fact.

Image by -Rita- und mit ? from Pixabay

Introduction

I watch a lot of travel documentaries and short videos, especially those that compare cultures. Not only are they inherently interesting to me, they give me vital cultural reference for games that take place in those nations, or that feature NPCs from that part of the world. On top of that, they can provide foundational building blocks when creating cultures that don’t exist in the real world, be they alien or Elven or whatever.

A recurring theme is that, to truly assimilate the local culture, you need to eat what the locals eat, and try to understand how that is reflective of the populace and their history.

Seems obvious, right? But apparently a lot of tourists don’t feel that way – for whatever reason, they seek out the food that is most like what they eat at home. They have that luxury because the modern world ensures a diffusion of major world cultures into any and every regional destination anywhere in the world.

If an American comes to Australia, lots of the foods will be exotic to them, but they will have no trouble finding something that will be palatable. If a Canadian visits Poland, they might be a little more challenged, but there will still be something they can access that will be at least vaguely similar to what they might eat at home, and so on.

The In-game Culinary Experience

In a Fantasy campaign, there will be little choice – you will eat like a local, whether you like it or not, unless moving in the most rarefied strata of society, and possibly even then. And the same is true when visiting an alien world in a Sci-Fi or Superhero game; the absence of engagement between the two cultures makes diffusion of one into the other problematic if not impossible. You either bring food with you, or you eat like a local.

Even in a Pulp campaign, there would be insufficient contact for there to be much diffusion. Again, in general, you have to eat like a local or go hungry.

That makes the food a cultural touchstone that – with a little research and imagination – can be evergreen within a campaign. Yet, looking back, I could count on one hand the number of campaigns that had even touched on this, let alone made active use of it – with fingers to spare.

Specifics

In my Zenith-3 / superhero campaign, one of the PCs has decided to be a foodie, inspired by an ongoing in-joke in which a semi-divine being cooks up exotic muffins and sympathetic refreshments which appear each morning on the pillow next to the team leader – no matter where she is. If she relocates somewhere exotic, it might take a while before they start turning up, but they will catch up with her eventually. Because this divinity was supposed to be one the greatest chefs in existence, I searched out a whole mess of exotic 5-star culinary creations (with pictures). This became a social ritual and bonding experience between the PCs within the campaign.

It occasionally gets brought up in the Pulp campaign that I co-GM.

And, most recently, it got a mention in my Dr Who campaign because he was visiting a culture that was home to a really exotic life-form, and their concept of nourishment helped cement verisimilitude for the species.

I have a vague memory that the subject got mentioned once or twice in a Traveler campaign a long time ago – but I’m not sure of that, so I’m not counting it.

And that’s it.

I already had, in the back of my mind, an article exploring these matters, when my inbox served up an article by Atlas Obscura about Fan-culture fictional food (link later) as a bonding agent within a given sub-community that crystallized the notion. The latter part of this article owes its existence to the above article. The first section covers the content that I already had in mind.

Research

To be fair, until modern times and the wonders of the internet, it was hard to properly research the subject. Unless you bought a cookbook focusing on a specific cuisine, all you had to work with was whatever you knew locally.

But Google Search is a perpetual exercise in the old programming maxim of GIGO – “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” Unless your search term is highly specific, highly directed and purposeful, it’s blind luck whether or not you find something useful.

The last time I visited my father, he got me to help him figure out why he was having so much trouble searching out recipes on Pinterest (conclusion, after considerable testing and experimentation: parts of the Pinterest infrastructure don’t play nice with the Firefox browser). But he made the point, in making the request, that there were thousands of recipes and variations posted there. I forget the exact recipe he was looking for – Asian Chicken with Plum Sauce maybe? – but the point wasn’t lost on me, because a number of the exotic muffins (see the text insert above) were also Pinterest-derived.

The process that I use these days starts with deciding what the direction should be, entering that into a Google Image search, and selecting the item that looks most interesting. Once you have a target, “Open Link In New Tab” (or the non-Chrome equivalent) brings up the page on which the image is featured. Much of the time, there are little or no specifics included – to get those, you often have to add ‘recipe’ to the search term – but I prefer to start with the more general search because it helps refine the ideas and provide additional inspiration. If I need to, I can then refine the search term and add ‘recipe’.

I’ll go into where the process can go from there, a little later in the article.

First though, I want to focus on getting that Direction.

Article Road-map

There are nine types of connection between a culture and its cuisine:

• National Character I: Reflections
• National Character II: Nationalism Amplification
• Echos Of History I: Tribulations Of Yesteryear
• Echos Of History II: Past Glories
• Sublimations Of The Forbidden
• Osmotic Pastimes
• Celebratory Specifics
• Religious Expressions
• Yesterday’s Favorites

Each of these needs specific examination. I particularly want to call attention to the last item on the list, because it speaks to generational change and nostalgia and the role that they play.

After that, there are a couple of broader topics that need scrutiny:

• Environment & Local Ingredient Restrictions
• Stories Of Sun and Rain
• You Need A National Character
• You Need National Pastimes
• Specific-Occasion Cuisine
• One or Many? The Ubiquitous vs Multiple Expressions
• Abstract / Narrative References

And then, we get into the parts inspired by the Atlas Obscura article:

• Blind Culinary Creation
• Directed Culinary Experimentation
• A Foundation
• Substitutions & Variations
• Exotic Flavors
• Delivery Vehicles
• Recipe Creation
• Sample Size
• Accompaniment
• Socializing The Society

Lots to get through, so without further ado:

Cultural Connections

There are nine ways in which elements of a cuisine reflect or connect to the culture. Most specific dishes will only connect in one or two of these ways. Direction therefore comes from choosing one that is appropriate to the contemporary moment in which the cuisine is being experienced and then developing the cuisine to match. Over time, the basic cuisine will be supplemented by a sprinkling of the others, sometimes frequently or regularly, sometimes only on specific occasions.

National Character I: Reflections

A National Character is a generalized set of philosophies and cultural traits that, in combination, create a generic persona. Individuals usually diverge from this generic persona, but share in some or all of the traits to some extent. It is easy to drop a reference to the generic archetype to convey a perceived foundation for a personality. Some examples, each of which should instantly conjure an impression of the archetype to the reader: A typical Frenchman, a typical Scot, a typical Texan, a typical New Yorker, a typical American, a typical Australian.

Particular foods can be reflective of this specific character, or are considered so by the locals. Australians are generally considered to be outdoors types, big on sports and social activities, and so the Barbecue would be considered reflective of that character. Barbecues are also cultural touchstones in the Texan sub-culture, but there is a substantial difference in terms of what foods get placed on the grill, and how they are spiced (or not) – Australians will barbecue steaks, meat patties (rissoles), sausages, seafood (occasionally), ham, pineapple slices, eggs, and chopped onions. We may lightly toast buns. Selected salad items may be added to the hot meat, most chilled or at room temperature.

Texans will frequently have spiced or marinated the meat first, this is far less common in Australia, and they might roast bell peppers (called capsicum, here in Australia). The meat is usually beef, chicken, but can sometimes be lamb, kangaroo, or even more exotic types. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a Texan barbecuing any meats other than beef and maybe shrimp. So while there is a certain degree of overlap, the overall cuisines are quite distinct.

National Character II: Nationalism Amplification

There are certain foods that are considered especially evocative of what it means to be Australian. This goes beyond simply reflecting the national character, there is a more tribal social element.

America views itself as a melting pot, but its many imported cultures tend to agglomerate into small regional clusters of people of like ancestry – Chinatowns and Italian Quarters and so on. Australia doesn’t actually characterize itself this way, but there’s more actual “melting” here – we’re totally fine with blending different cuisines together to create a hybrid that is quite distinct from its roots. I’ve had a Beef-and-black-bean Pizza. I’ve had Turkish Kebab meat with Greek Salad in a wrap. I’ve had Mexican Tacos in which the meat was seasoned (in part) with Chinese 5-spice.

99% or more of these fusions don’t catch on. But occasionally, there will be something that does – and that then feeds back into the traditional preparation of the base food. Australian Chinese food tends to be a blending of several different Chinese cuisines – sometimes represented by different menu items, sometimes with one influencing the other.

But even more than that, we tend to take something we like and make it Australian. Turkish kebabs, certain Greek foods, Italian pasta and Pizza, Southern-style fried chicken, and so on. Spicy Portuguese Chicken is the most recent of these assimilations. We take the American burger and add cheese, beetroot, a fried egg, and pineapple – and feel shortchanged if any Burger with “the lot” doesn’t include these items.

And that’s all a reflection on the egalitarian nature of Australian Society. America is all about ‘equal but separate’ – Australia is more ‘equal and inclusive’. Their approach keeps the cuisine more pure and representative, ours creates more cross-pollination and makes the members of those sub-cultures more “Australian’ in the process. In the US, you hear regular references to “Irish Americans” and “Italian Americans” and so on – there is no such nomenclature here, they are either “Irish” or they are “Australian,” and the functional definition of “Australian” expands to include the new cultural referents. Nothing wrong with either approach (though both have their pluses and minuses), they are just different.

Because there is so much unique wildlife here in Australia, it’s possible that we are more aware of this than other places.

Echos Of History I: Tribulations Of Yesteryear

Some foods are reflective of some past period of privation or trouble. April 25th is ANZAC day in Australia (and New Zealand), when the soldiers of past conflicts are commemorated and remembered, somewhat like Veteran’s Day in the US. While they are available all year round, each year at this time there is a peak in the availability of Anzac Biscuits.

Interestingly, there is no one accepted recipe for these, despite the impression created by the Wikipedia page to which I’ve linked, but recipes tend to fall into two different families – the hard, dry, version (probably closer to the original), and a softer, chewier version (my personal preference). Some versions achieve this by including molasses with the golden syrup. Does the US even have Golden Syrup?? Okay, you have something almost the same, called “King brand syrup”. So, a least some of you will know what it tastes like.

Such foods tend to be plainer and simpler fare than normal. They reflect the restrictions and limited diet that was forced upon the populace during the hard times, and serve as a reminder of those times and commemoration of those whose lives were lost or ruined in the events.

It is possible for the date to be shifted forward or back, where a particular date is already taken by an event with strong cultural connections, or for the existing celebrations to be modified to incorporate the influence of the more recent events.

An example would be the long-term impact on the Australian city of Darwin of the devastation wrought by Cyclone Tracy.

Darwin and Cyclone Tracy

I can’t personally vouch for the authenticity of the following beyond the bare facts – it might be just urban legend.

Cyclone Tracy was a tropical cyclone that all but destroyed the city of Darwin, the night of December 24, 1974.

A cyclone is called a Hurricane, Tropical Storm, Typhoon, or Tropical Depression in other parts of the world. “Tracy” was expected to pass clear of the city, but it changed course without warning. After 10PM (local time) wind gusts began reaching 217 km/h (117 knots, 135 mph) before becoming so severe that the instrumentation failed. Residents were celebrating Christmas and left without warning, partly because an earlier Cyclone, Selma, had passed the city by without harm, partly because news outlets only had skeleton crews on-hand due to the holiday, and partly because of overconfidence.

70% of the city was leveled, including 80% of housing. 94% of dwellings were uninhabitable. 66 people were killed, and more than 25,000 of the 47,000 inhabitants were left homeless. Over 30,000 had to be subsequently evacuated, and many never returned.

This was not the first tropical cyclone to strike the city; others had occurred in January 1897 and March 1937. Nevertheless, in the years after WW2, and in particular in the 20 years from 1954, the city had undergone rapid expansion. The building codes of the time were required to give attention to the possibility of cyclones, enforcement was slack and standards inadequate to cope with a direct strike. Complacency had set in long before.

Selma, which had been forecast to strike the city just ten days earlier but which had turned aside, added to the local complacency; there was an element of “the boy who cried wolf”. Not enough took the real message of Selma – that such storms could change course unpredictably – out of the event. As a result, life went on as normal even while the storm was gathering, with residents attending parties and wrapping Christmas presents.

The intensity and track of the cyclone destroyed virtually all telecommunication and radio equipment in the city, so it took a while for news of the event to reach the rest of the country. By mid-morning, though, contact with emergency services had been made; because of the skeleton-staff situation nationwide, it wasn’t until mid-afternoon that most of the country learned of the disaster.

Of course, there were consequent crisis points in the aftermath, but there was also an up-swell in public support extended to the population. Many charity drives were held in the immediate aftermath nationwide, most of them completely unofficial, as the rest of the country rallied around the devastated city. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised either in cash or donated goods within a 24-hour period. Most evacuees had lost everything on that Christmas eve; it was not uncommon for them to arrive and disembark from the air transport that ferried the majority to be informed that free accommodation had been arranged for them at such-and-such an address, here’s some cash for immediate living expenses, here’s a week’s groceries, and a small gift pack for the children. In less than a month, the #1 single on the charts was a charity single, “Santa Never Made It Into Darwin” – it felt at the time like it was only a week later, but memory of time at that age is spotty at best.

I was 10 years old at the time, and remember the reactions of the children most particularly. The youngest seemed to cope better with the disruption, and the older teenagers; it was the kids aged around 8 to 14 that were old enough to have some appreciation for what had happened but not mature enough to cope with it. Since I was right in the middle of this age bracket, I sympathized.

Over the next 4 years, the city was completely rebuilt, all to new building standards. Enough reconstruction had taken place that the city was able to accommodate fully a population of the size that had been resident before Tracy. Nevertheless, some 60% of those evacuated never returned to the city; their places were taken by others. In the 2021 census, there were 139,902 residents, almost triple the pre-cyclone population.

You can glean all of the above from the Wikipedia articles to which I linked earlier in this section. What isn’t adequately covered are the recovery and long-term impact that the event had, according to some reports.

They state that affected residents tend towards simpler foods in the week prior to Christmas, in memory of the privations that occurred after the events of Christmas 1974, with emphasis on charitable donations of goods and services. The money saved is then expended on a bigger and more lavish celebration on Christmas Day. However, there is limited take-up of this tradition by the newer arrivals, and memories of the event are fading as the population ages. Within a generation of this writing, it will either be cemented as part of the cultural landscape, or have died out almost completely.

I could find no canonical references to certify the above. For all I know, it was someone’s speculation on what they thought would happen; it’s certainly plausible enough to be believable, but with no evidence to back it up, it remains just a (possibly apocryphal) story. There is no mention of it on the “Darwin After” page of www.cyclonetracy.au, for example.

I did find reports that many survivors actively avoid engaging in normal Christmas activities due to PTSD arising from the disaster. Certain Christmas Carols and loud noises can be triggering, according to reports, especially to parents who lost children and those who were too young at the time to understand what was happening, according to this report from 2019, the 45th anniversary of the disaster.

I can certainly see such people avoiding any reminders of the events. At the same time, those who returned have been lauded for their resilience, and it remains plausible that some have found this to be a stress-relief mechanism. So I just don’t know.

It’s certainly not without antecedent. Similar patterns of privation-and-blowout have occurred elsewhere, such as following WW2. So it’s plausible, but unconfirmed.

Echos Of History II: Past Glories

This logically leads on from the preceding social connection – feasts to celebrate past achievements and, in some cases, simple survival of harrowing events are hardly uncommon, and even part of the normalization of response to tragedy.

Sublimations Of The Forbidden

People can sometimes express things normally forbidden within the culture through food. They don’t break the taboo in question, but they sublimate the restriction into a culturally-acceptable form – a normally ascetic population who permit one night each year of extravagance, for example.

Osmotic Pastimes

Another aspect of American culture exemplifies this behavior, but variations are common in cultures all over the world. Food deemed suitable for sporting events, and especially social practices surrounding grand finals and events like the Superbowl – easy to prepare in advance, easy to eat informally tend to predominate and be part of the ritual celebration of such events.

It’s the weekly routine leading up to those events that has generally has the greatest impact on a cuisine, though its the social practices surrounding the big event that have the greatest cultural impact. For that reason, it’s often easy to dissociate the two.

In Australia, the Australian Meat Pie, Sausage Roll, and even (to some extent) the Sausage Sandwich, are all foods that are easily prepared and consumed while enjoying the game, either directly at the sporting venue or indirectly by gatherings around the television set.

The US cultural equivalent is probably the Hot Dog.

This cultural connection generalizes this behavior into a cycle: Sporting event influences culture, culture produces appropriate cuisine, cultural events surrounding the sporting event popularize and focus around the cuisine, which becomes part of the traditions surrounding the sporting event, which further influences the culture.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that something similar took place in Ancient Rome surrounding the Gladiatorial combats.

A snapshot: Game-day food in Australia

Often, the cuisine spreads beyond the association with the sporting event which caused its development, normalizing it as a regular part of the culture. It’s quite common for workmen to have a meat pie or two for lunch, for example – the virtues that make them acceptable fare for the sporting event translate into advantages at other times.

A 2003 survey found that the average Australian consumes more than 12 meat pies per year. The resulting once-a-month average seems rather low to me; I would put the figure at 2-3 times that. From which I can only conclude that there are parts of Australia that consume vastly lower quantities than those sold in all the areas that I’ve lived in.

But let’s accept that official average; the current population of Australia is about 26 million. So that’s 312 million meat pies per year, or about six million a week. Throw in Chiko Rolls (a fried snack made from cabbage, barley, carrot, green beans, beef, beef tallow, wheat cereal and onion, all enclosed in a thick egg-and-flour pastry tube, designed to survive enthusiastic handling at football matches) at 17 million a year, and an unknown number of sausage rolls (my estimate: about 70% as many as meat pies) and you get a strong picture of the local everyday takeaway diet.

But then there’s the fish-and-chips, (350,000 tonnes of seafood a year, or about 13.5 kg per person each year, or 260 g a week per person – so that’s 2.6 average servings according to the official dietary recommendations, but I would expect it to be 2 larger servings than standard!), and 289 million hamburgers added to the total – and none of those are the most popular take-away food here.

That honor is reserved for the Chicken, with the average consumption per person being 47.46 kg per year – that’s around 2.7 billion servings a year of slightly less than 0.5kg each.

I almost overlooked Pizzas! Australians eat 264 million of those a year, all told.

The average Australian has takeaway food (‘fast food’ in America-speak) 60 times a year – delivered, 28 times, and pick-up in person 32 times. That’s 5 times a month, or a little over once a week – at least, that was the case before the current cost-of-living crisis. According to new research, home penny-pinching has led to a massive increase in takeaway in our diets – to the point that per capita, we are eating it more often than the US does.

And none of that counts game-day food cooked at home. Anyone who doesn’t think this is reflective of the cultural landscape must be blind.

Celebratory Specifics

Certain times of the year have their own special dietary traditions. I’m excluding from this category non-secular events, I’ll get to those in a minute.

Two examples come to mind more readily than any others – Christmas (different in every country), and Thanksgiving (US only).

Australian Christmas Foods

Australian Christmases take place in temperatures ranging from the low 30s (Celsius – around 90° Fahrenheit) to the low 40s (111° Fahrenheit). Despite this, a baked meal (usually lunch) is traditional, often with several different meats (ham, chicken, turkey, beef, seafood) and vegetables, plus a Christmas pudding and hot custard, plus other sweets like Pavlova and ice-cream.

On past occasions, bombe alaska (link is to a google search showing up how many different recipes for this dessert there are in Australia) has been sometimes served up. Plus, of course, fresh fruit and salads.

It’s also common for gingerbread houses and fruit cakes and chilled cheesecakes to be consumed at this time of year. You can buy eggnog in milk-style cartons, but those aren’t as popular here as they are elsewhere, and things like mulled wine are practically unheard of.

Another quite common practice is to have a barbecue for Christmas.

I did a google search for “Australian Christmas Food” just to be sure I wasn’t forgetting something iconic – here are the top 11 results:
 

• • Australia’s top 50 most popular Christmas dishes of all time
     
  • 10 iconic Aussie Christmas foods, ranked
     
  • 70 traditional Aussie Christmas foods
     
  • 39 essential recipes for the ultimate Aussie Christmas
     
  • A Very (Easy) Aussie Christmas Feast
     
  • Australian Christmas recipes
     
  • Reddit: What do Australians eat during summer Christmas
     
  • The best recipes for an Australian Christmas (Jamie Oliver)
     
  • 60 Australian Christmas Lunch Ideas
     
  • It wouldn’t be an Aussie Christmas without these iconic recipes
     
  • A Guide to Australian Christmas Foods

 
That list makes it very clear that this is a much bigger sub-topic than I have time to pursue any further! That said, there are a couple of general statements that I can make.

Half of Australia observes something fairly traditional in terms of Christmas cuisine – mostly sourced from England, with a few domestic recipe inventions, and the occasional imported influence from elsewhere (Asia and Europe, particularly). The other half has compromised with the climate to a greater extent, developing local variations (for the season) on more summer foods like chilled salads, seafood, etc. But it’s absolutely central to the ‘normal’ culture to do something extraordinary for Christmas, even if its just a couple of family members at home.

There have been past occasions when more than 50 of my relatives have gathered for the Christmas day dinner, coming from all over the country (but most especially from all over the state). (It’s easy to reach those numbers when about 20 relatives still live in my old home town of Nyngan, about 1% of the total population – and that’s down as a percentage!).

Every culture has its own Christmas traditions, including Christmas cuisine – but they all have a Christmas Tradition of some sort.
 

• • Christmas Around the World
     
  • The Eight Strangest Christmas Traditions on Earth
     
  • 8 Christmas traditions from around the world
     
  • Unusual Christmas traditions from around the world
     
  • 20 Unique Christmas Traditions from Around the World
     
  • Christmas Around the World (for Kids)

 

Thanksgiving

From the ubiquitous to the not quite unique – according to Wikipedia (via Google), Thanksgiving is a national holiday celebrated on various dates in October and November in the United States, Canada, Saint Lucia, Liberia, and unofficially in countries like Brazil, Germany and the Philippines. It is also observed in the Dutch town of Leiden and the Australian territory of Norfolk Island.

The culinary associations focus on ingredients native to the Americas, including turkey, potato, sweet potato, corn (maize), squash (including pumpkin), green bean, and cranberry. — Thanksgiving Dinner | Wikipedia

Because the majority of my readers are from the US, with Canada in a strong third place, I don’t think I need to go too much further with this – the point is made. But here are a couple of links, just to compliment the Australian ones listed above:
 

• • 11 Traditional Thanksgiving Menu with Recipes
     
  • Best 50 Traditional Thanksgiving Dinner Recipes
     
  • 33 Traditional Thanksgiving Dinner Menu Ideas
     
  • 31 Thanksgiving Menu Ideas That Are Solid Holiday Gold
     
  • A Classic Thanksgiving Menu to Feed a Crowd
     
  • Quora: What is a ‘traditional’ Thanksgiving dinner and is there a time that it is traditionally served?
     
  • A Traditional American Thanksgiving Dinner Menu

Again, the clear takeaway is that special occasions demand a special cuisine. And, the constituents of that special cuisine are usually iconicly connected to the subject of the celebration or the national identity, though that’s a slightly more problematic connection to make.

Religious Expressions

I listed Christmas amongst the traditional secular cultural connections because I’m unaware of any especially strong religious influence over the cuisine on offer. Other expressions of religion are more strongly influential (I’m not going to go into as much detail here, purely to try and avoid offending anyone).

Lent

Lent is a christian religious period of the year. It is a 40-day period that starts on Ash Wednesday and culminates in my second example, Easter.

Lent | Wikipedia

During Lent, On Ash Wednesday and Good Friday: Everyone of age 18 to 59 must fast, unless exempt due to usually a medical reason, and on all other Fridays, everyone of age 14 and up must abstain from consuming meat.

Fish, on the other hand, are perfectly acceptable, presumably because they were not considered “meat” back when the rules of the festival were laid down.

Some religious subgroups go a lot further. I know some people who refuse to eat red meat or chicken at all during the 40 days, some who have updated their practices to go full vegan for the 40 days, and some who also ban sweets and confectionery (other than fresh fruit). Abstinence from Alcohol is also not uncommon.

In terms of the impact on cuisine, it will obviously depend on how restrictive individual practices are, but a healthy and nutritious diet is still required, most sources describe the onset of malnutrition as taking only a week or two, though overt symptoms might not lead to diagnosis for some time (Search for ‘dangers of fad diets’ for more information).

There are two schools of thought: the traditional, in which only approved or approvable meals are acceptable, and the modern, in which nutrition is taken into consideration within the confines of the restrictions being required.

The stronger the restrictions, the more dependent on a restricted diet people become, and the greater the incentive to provide culinary variations of flavor to maximize the variety within those restrictions. There are innumerable fish recipes, for example.

Easter

Easter foods traditionally involve a feast to end the period of privation of Lent. There aren’t many specific foods that are associated with the holiday, and they are quite secular these days; here in Australia, they are Hot Cross Buns and Easter Eggs.

The latter are just a particular way of presenting chocolate, though there are frequently more decadent examples on offer than at other times of the year.

Hot Cross Buns originate in England. A hot cross bun is a spiced bun, usually containing small pieces of fruit and marked with a cross on the top, which has been traditionally eaten on Good Friday in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, India, Pakistan, Malta, United States and the Commonwealth Caribbean. — Hot Cross Bun | Wikipedia

In my Australian experience, Hot Cross Buns become available up to 2 months prior to Easter (from the start of March) and are consumed far more frequently than just Good Friday. It’s also quite common for them to be consumed cold, but accompanied by a hot drink, though some people do heat them up in the microwave and serve them buttered. It’s quite uncommon to add any sort of topping, however, perhaps because the flavor profile of the spice doesn’t go with many jams and spreads.

A couple of singular experiences need to be mentioned in this context: Last year, some stores began stocking hot cross buns in the week following Christmas (notably much earlier than usual), and this year, supermarkets began stocking unusual varieties – a caramel hot cross bun (not very nice), a coffee-flavored hot cross bun (sold out before I could try them) and a banana-flavored hot cross bun (ditto). I have had a variety with diced and baked apple in the past, and that was quite nice. And I have once heard of a ginger flavored variety that might be quite nice, but I’ve never seen it offered for sale.

It’s my suspicion that these are secular ‘refinements’ to the traditional hot cross bun, the result of viewing them as a ‘seasonal commodity’ more than anything else.

There are, nevertheless, a number of different recipes out there – largely because a lot of hot cross buns are very dry and somewhat tough and dense compared to normal buns. It can actually be quite hard to eat two of them, if they are particularly bad in this respect – you really do need to accompany them with something liquid!

Beyond these, there are obviously the Jewish festivals as examples. I don’t really know enough about these to be able to unpick them without giving offense to someone. For example, I know nothing about any connections between diet and Yom Kippur. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, has an obvious culinary connection in the form of a celebratory feast, though I don’t know what dishes would traditionally accompany that date. There are many more, but I don’t know the culinary traditions associated with them – I just know that there are some.

Yesterday’s Favorites

Each generation generalizes the food they grew up with into the foundations of cuisine, then build on that foundation. It can take multiple generations for a given food to work its way out of popularity, or to become a fixture within a national cuisine.

Or it can happen very quickly if there is a connection with a traumatic event of some kind.

A tradition begins with a set of circumstances shared by a large segment of the population, which catches on as a solution to whatever the restrictions imposed by those circumstances might be.

These imposed solutions are normalized in the experiences of children growing up in that time – not in all cases, but in some. The reasons can vary – it might be a connection to their childhood, or a structural element to their lives, or simply because they enjoyed the food.

One generation later, and if there is any sort of structure to the practice, it becomes institutional and a tradition.

And a generation after that, its origins are largely forgotten.

Most of these generational ‘landmarks’ are accompanied by some refinement or variation, often being made over by advances in technology, culinary practices, or accessibility of ingredients.

I have two examples to offer that shed more light on the rise of new ‘traditional foods’.

The Great Potato Famine

In the second half of 1845, Potato Blight caused a partial failure of the potato crop on which the Irish depended. A year later, the blight returned and had an even more severe effect on the potato crop, driving the country into a nightmare of hunger and disease. On the eve of the famine, the population stood at 8.5 million; one million died as a result over the next 6 years, and another million emigrated. The most severe impacts were in the west, where some counties lost more than 50% of their population. The death toll alone was enough to be nationally significant – almost 12% of the population. But the migration, which became normalized practice, which saw as many emigrate in 11 years as had done so in the preceding two-and-a-half centuries, was at least as devastating to the country; between 1841 and 1900, some 6 million would leave the country, and in 1901 the population stood at just 4.4 million, despite decades of recovery. — Source: Blog by Ambassador Mulhall, 3 December 2018, on Black ’47: Ireland’s Great Famine and its after-effects. After the famine, many Irish women migrated to America to escape poverty, and were exposed to new ingredients and foods not common in Ireland, such as a greater variety of meats and produce. Entering domestic service in America, they had to adapt their cooking to please the upper-class in America. This was problematic at first due to Irish women clinging to foods and ingredients common in Ireland. This caused much prejudice towards Irish women and many would mock the Irish’s lack of cooking skills without considering the famine and poverty Irish women grew up with. Newspapers, including the Women’s Journal, published articles which contained prejudice towards Irish women for seemingly being unable to know how to cook. Irish women in domestic service later gained the experience with ingredients abundant in America and altered Irish cuisine to be foods for pleasure. In Ireland food was designed based on caloric intake, instead of for pleasure, such as foods in America. Traditional Irish dishes started to include more meat and fruit and allowed for Irish food to stray from the stigma of being bland. The last quarter of the 20th century saw the emergence of a new Irish cuisine based on traditional ingredients handled in new ways. This cuisine is based on fresh vegetables, fish (especially salmon and trout), oysters, mussels and other shellfish, traditional soda bread, the wide range of cheeses that are now being made across the country, and, of course, the potato. Traditional dishes, such as Irish stew, coddle, the Irish breakfast, and potato bread have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity. Chef and food writer Myrtle Allen – an early protagonist of such attitudes and methods – went on to play a crucial role in their development and promotion. Schools like the Ballymaloe Cookery School have emerged to cater for the associated increased interest in cooking. — Source:Irish Cuisine | Wikipedia

WW2

This example is another of those items that I’m not 100% sure of. I think that I either read, or heard in a documentary, about it, but cannot remember when or where.

The story, as I remember it, is that anti-German sentiment imposed additional constraints on the British diet beyond even those deriving from the wartime restrictions. Anything that was too Germanic in sound or social association became wildly unpopular, and could even lead to social ostracization and suspicion of collaboration.

At much the same time, a sense of solidarity with the French led to a rise in popularity of French Cuisine, though this was retarded by wartime restrictions.

Is it true? As with the earlier example, it sounds plausible, but without a source to cite, it has to be taken with a substantial helping of salt.

Wow, around 6000 words on just the social connections with food. I may have to abbreviate my thoughts on the remainder of the article just to make deadline!

General Discussions Of Specific Subjects

Having amplified the ways in which cuisine connects with a society, it’s time to start thinking about the restrictions that need to be taken into account when crafting a dish for an in-game society, plus a few random associated thoughts..

Environment & Local Ingredient Restrictions

What you can grow limits what can be cooked. Obvious, right? Well, it’s not entirely true – even in the middle ages there was trade in foodstuffs. What usually had to be done was to preserve it in some way, and that hasn’t changed. In the real Middle Ages, of course, they didn’t have refrigeration, but wizards and their wand-crafting capabilities solves that problem rather neatly.

Of course, Wizards with the appropriate skills don’t necessarily come cheap. And that means that imported ingredients will also be very expensive, so only the wealthiest can afford to break the limits posed at the start of the previous paragraph. That usually means Kings and elite specialists who can charge like wounded bulls for their services – top-tier clerics, for example.

So, those with government or religions backing them, or really significant individuals.

It’s also very true that nature wizards and druids can enhance crop yields with appropriate magics. These used to be (rather disparagingly) called “Hedge Wizards” in the campaigns I played in when just starting out. It’s entirely possible that a little encouragement might enable crops that otherwise would not survive to prosper. And, because you only need the services of such a wizard once a month or less under normal circumstances, this probably expands the pool of available ingredients considerably, and makes them available to the merely wealthy.

On top of that, there should be edible plants around that never existed in reality. And, of course, there are sourcebooks absolutely full of strange wildlife that might make tasty – and different – meat for a table.

The first rule in a Fantasy environment has to be to take these considerations into account.

The story is vastly different in some sci-fi environments – starships tend to be able to carry frozen product from one planet to another with no difficulty whatsoever. Whether or not they can do so in bulk is more uncertain, but the fact that we can do the equivalent is a solid indicator that it’s possible. The more that can be carried at a reasonable cost, the further down the social classes of society these ingredients can permeate.

Which is really not all that much different from the Fantasy situation, when you think about it. Just more-so.

But the technology involved suggests that a better process would be to decide what the market penetration should be; knowing either the cost per ton or the amount that can be freighted in then gives you the other factor, then all you need do is justify that in game terms. Maybe the region of space is unstable, or blocked, forcing ships to go the long way around? Maybe there are hostile forces out there? Or, to go in the other direction, maybe there’s something about the trade route that is especially conducive or easy?

You are likely to end up with several ‘classes’ of goods, either way. Identifying those classes and what’s in them is the desired end-product of this process.

Of course, you can also design your game world in such a way that no-one has thought of doing this, or there is some reason why it can’t be done, or is prohibitively expensive. There will still be exotic local ingredients, but most of the potential gets locked away. But, be warned: if you take this lucrative potential industry away from NPCs, you leave yourself open to PCs deciding to be food magnates…

Stories Of Sun and Rain

Seasons and specific time periods demand variations in cuisine that can outlast the practices / circumstances that inspired them.

The more primitive the society, the more dependent on natural seasons they will be. Ultimately, you can define the technical prowess of a society by the strength of their ability to break free of this dependence. Three technologies are especially significant: storage / preservative tech (or magic); glasshouses or some other sunshine / climate control; and irrigation.

Of course, industrial-scale glasshouses are a rather more difficult proposition than smaller ones, even if the latter are scattered all over; you still won’t get bulk crops out of them. Smaller quantities or more concentrated ingredients are a different story.

You would expect the primary protein to be a locally-sourced product, either wild or domesticated, or some combination. To this basis would be added locally-sourced vegetables and grains. But there would be exotic herbs to supplement whatever can be found naturally, and there might be a few small-scale products like mushrooms and fruit that can also be profitably produced.

The availability of ingredients is not a year-round constant, and once again this factor can be overcome (at least to some extent) with advanced magic or technology. Bear in mind the lesson of some fruits – they actually the cold of winter to trigger fruit production. And there are some Australian plants that need the heat of bushfires on a semi-regular basis to prosper, too.

So there are going to be seasonal variations in available ingredients to at least some extent, and that extent is a food-tech / magic issue. This in turn will dictate that certain dishes can only be produced at certain times of the year, again to a variable extent. The wealthier an individual, the later in a season they can have products that others can’t, simply because they can afford the cost of importing them from somewhere whose growing season runs just a little longer.

The final portion of my opening statement is that even when these restrictions are overcome, the practices of serving up such dishes as used to be seasonally-restricted will tend to continue to follow those restrictions (at least for a while) due to social inertia. There might be no good reason anymore why Doltrop Soup is only consumed in late winter, but it’s a tradition that dictates that this is the best time of year for that particular dish, and those who consume it outside the ‘natural’ time of demand will be seen as pretentious, at the very least.

On top of all that, working habits (especially in rural / agrarian areas) will also be dictated – to some extent – by the dependence on the climatic cycles. Pick somewhere reasonably analogous here on Earth, in terms of climate, and a reasonably representative time period, and see what you can find out about the agricultural year. Do farmers have to be up early to harvest? and so on.

The second step in creating a cuisine for your society is to take the underpinnings from your first answer – the level of access to magical or technological solutions – and apply it to this secondary question.

You Need A National Character

Even where a cuisine isn’t directly reflective of some aspect of the national character, that character still provides a guideline, because the other cuisine elements have to fit into that picture somewhere. So you need a defined national character to reference.

These don’t grow on trees, and can take weeks or months of study of real cultures to define and adapt – and 99% of that effort will probably be wasted, ultimately.

Fortunately, this is a problem that I have solved in a previous article: The Poetry Of Meaning: 16 words to synopsize a national identity (5442 words).

A related article might also be useful: A Legacy Of War: The Founding Of National Identities (1783 words, a short one!)

You Need National Pastimes, Holidays, etc

You’ve probably got at least some of this worked out already, but a more systematic approach will fill out the picture of the society even more – and you will need all of that detail to integrate the cuisine and the society. Again, this is a problem that has already been solved – my 4-part series Distilled Cultural Essence (1021 + 1703 + 1897 + 2149 = 6770 words) is full of detailed and specific thoughts and questions to define a culture.

You don’t need to answer all of them – you’re unlikely to ever need that level of detail – but you should at least think briefly about each, and then cherry-pick the ones that seem the most definitive to you of this particular culture. In particular, if you’ve already thought of an answer to a specific topic, it’s fine to skip over it – though reviewing the questions posed might elicit additional details that you haven’t considered.

Again, there’s another post that might be of value: Traditional Interpretations and Rituals Of Culture (5367 words).

And, from WAAAY back in prehistory (Roleplaying Tips #296, to be exact), I listed 31 Questions To Define a Culture (1165 words) – and then spent several times the length of listing the questions on how to use them.

Expressions

How do the locals demonstrate their support of their pastimes, holidays, and festivals? Are there changes in what they wear, are there decorations of a specific type, are there particular greetings?

Consider Christmas. Consider Halloween. Consider the local sporting team… those three sources of ideas will get you through this question quite handily.

Rivalries

Most sporting teams eventually acquire a rivalry, an opposing team that fans of the first team love to hate. Who are the rivals of the local team, and how do their fans express support for the team?

Sometimes, things get even more complex – two rivals can come together to oppose an even more substantial rival.

Consider the State Of Origin series (Australian Rugby League). There are two teams – the NSW Blues and the Queensland Maroons.

Every week in the regular competition, teammates are expected to work together against whichever other team they are confronting. But in the middle of the season, those teams are (temporarily) broken up; the cream of those players that derive from New South Wales are selected for the Blues, the best players who derive from Queensland get selected to play for the Maroons, and the two sides then meet in a best-of-three series, before the regular season resumes. It’s quite often literally teammate against teammate.

Or think about the State-level cricket competition, where players from the different teams get called up to play for the national team in one of the different incarnations of the sport. In modern times, that’s often all they do, play for the national team, but in times past, they would return to their state squad when not required in that capacity. Teammates become rivals become teammates again.

Remember how I said “often all they do, play for the national team”? Well, it’s not quite true – outside of our regular seasons there are additional competitions, both international and domestic, and – you guessed it – sometimes rivals end up as teammates and vice-versa.

Sporting subcultures can be extremely complicated…

Opinions

Some opinions are so ubiquitous within a culture that they can be considered another aspect of that culture. Beyond that, there’s the question of socially-acceptable ways of expressing an opinion (if there are any) vs socially unacceptable approaches. Opinions and how they are handled by the society can definitely be definitive.

Long ago, in the super-spy spin-off of my Superhero campaign, Team Neon Phi, an NPC member of the Secret Police entered a bar to test the loyalty of those present (in a fairly repressive culture). His technique: to posit an opinion critical of the regime and observe who spoke out in support of the opinion, and who didn’t speak out against it but remained silent. The first group were then apprehended as they left the bar by other members of the secret police, while the silent ones were placed on a suspect list for close examination. What the NPC didn’t know was that some of the ‘patrons’ were actually the PCs in disguise to conduct a mission against his country… One of the PCs suspected (rightly) that it was a trap, and vocally condemned the offending statements, but the others didn’t pick up on his signals to them, and remained mute…

Legends Of The Game / Legends Of History

Some players will achieve legendary status. The reasons can vary, depending on how good the local team are – anyone who exceeds the typical standard will be lauded.

Similarly, in the broader context, there will be some people who are legends of the culture, the society; they will stand out in the History books. How are they celebrated? Statues? Annual Holidays? Songs? Stage plays? Oral traditions? Holograms?

Legendary Encounters

Most sporting codes will also have certain matches that had something extra that pass into folklore. These will frequently get inserted into conversations almost at random in most cultures, but sometimes a society takes this an extra mile. What are the legendary encounters, what made them memorable, and how are they celebrated?

Seasonal Fevers

Does anyone remember Major League, the baseball-based comedic movie? How the team of misfits went from almost being reviled by the despairing fans to household names and heroes?

Every year, every team approaches a do-or-die moment, a point in time that cements their position in the pecking order for that year. Those on top want to show no weakness; those close to the top want to topple those on top, while making sure that they make the playoffs (or whatever the equivalent is); those almost good enough want to squeeze their way into the playoffs at the expense of someone else (‘win this or our season is over’), and those at the bottom want to avoid what we in Australia refer to as ‘The Wooden Spoon’, i.e. coming dead last.

Fans respond to the imminent approach of these critical moments with increased fervor, reaching fever pitch when the moment itself arrives. It doesn’t matter how good or bad the team are, there will be such a moment and the fans will drink it in.

How will behavior change? How will the moment’s imminence be expressed?

These considerations construct a national character, refine it, and apply it, bridging the gap between the culture and the connections-to-culture of the cuisine.

Which means that, at last, we’re ready to think about specific dishes. Well, almost – let’s segue into that with a couple more relevant questions to pose…

Specific-Occasion Cuisine

There are three considerations that define special occasion cuisine. They are Preparation, Socializing, and Tribal Food.

Preparation

Any preparation required must be either extremely simple or able to be carried out in advance. This restriction generally runs all the way through to the cooking and serving of the food.

Socializing

Whoever is doing the cooking / service has to be able to socialize while doing so. That happens naturally at a Barbecue, it can take a little arranging in other settings. That can be ignored if the operation is commercial retail at a sporting venue.

Tribal Food

Finally, the food has to have a tribal quality, something that the fans (all of whom presumably barrack for the same team) can bond over. It’s a description practically begging to be filled with ‘fast food’ or its cultural equivalent (rat on a stick?)

When it comes to different occasions, though, the requirements can vary. Contrast the above with the Christmas Feast, for example. Nevertheless, the three considerations still apply in some measure.

One or Many? The Ubiquitous vs Multiple Expressions

Sometimes, one specific food is iconic to a particular social connection / event, sometimes there is a whole range of them. Sometimes, even though there is a range to choose from, only one is required to satisfy the expectations of the occasion.

This is an important question because it defines how many dishes you have to come up with. If there’s only one, then you can afford to generate two or three and pick the one that you like best; if you have to come up with a 6-course feast, or a 12-course degustation, that’s not going to happen. You might still generate two more than you need so that you can exclude the ones that are the least satisfying, though.

Abstract / Narrative References

All of the above means nothing, unless and until it manifests in-game, with descriptions. You need to be able to set the scene (Special decorations? Costumes? Behaviors?), get through the opening sequence (Special Greetings? Social Faux Pas to avoid?), and match the description of the event itself with the food while allowing the PCs to interact with the scene and achieve whatever their purpose in participating is – even if that’s nothing more than “getting on with the locals”.

The time to start planning all this is before you actually create any dishes. There is an emotional trajectory to such occasions – a buildup, a cool-down, another buildup, a climax – that you need to take the players (and their characters) through, or the whole plot sequence will fall flat. Your cuisine needs to invoke drama of the required level, not more and not less.

But what if it’s not that big a deal? Once you have a rough outline, you can compress the heck out of it. Yes, this often means making the assumption that player agency is irrelevant until you get to the important moments, and can be assumed / glossed over (provided that you are careful to incorporate anything the players say specifically they are doing to achieve their goals), but the players will forgive that if you are clearly doing so to get them to the “important bits” more quickly.

Practical Expression

When I originally conceived this article, the path forwards was somewhat different, in that it was aimed more at re-purposing adapted reviews of a particular dish to derive narrative text, as described above. But then the Atlas Obscura article lobbed into my inbox and changed everything.
 

 
(wow, I didn’t intend to quote from it so extensively – Kudos to the author). Now, I’d known about the fannish gravitation to food, and cosplay, and filking, and all sorts of other activities since way back in the early 80’s. Heck, I’ve even been a judge on a Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster competition (the difference between the winner and the field was astonishing).

But I had never before put that thought together with the concept of RPGs needing recipes for fictional meals. The balance of this article was going to be an intellectual exercise in changing existing recipes to simulate the culture in an abstract way; suddenly, a window opened into the possibility of practical, tested recipes that were quite unlike anything players had experienced before. What’s more, there were resources for recipes out there that I had never considered.

GMs who needed the assistance could recruit the best cook they had access to, even if they didn’t game, bringing the world to tangible life for players and learning a potentially valuable skill along the way.

But it meant that I needed to actually invest a bit more care into the gastronomic process than the original concept required – which should explain the comment from early in this post to the effect that the Atlas Obscura article left fingerprints all over the final section.

I had visions of long shards of thin toffee that had been dusted with chili powder and salt while still liquid. Or toffee-coated glace cherries infused with alcohol.

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my own culinary discovery here, before. Take a packet of glace cherries and place them in a bowl. Cover with a spirit-based alcohol – scotch or vodka or whatever. Add chopped whatever for flavoring and stir – then leave the bowl in the refrigerator overnight. The alcohol, carrying the added flavor, penetrates the glace cherry to its hollow center, creating a literal flavor bomb – bite into the cherry and you get a burst of the flavored alcohol. What’s more, the alcohol can survive the fruit being baked into a cake or used in some other recipe.

So, with things taking a turn toward the practical, let’s explore the process of crafting a recipe to fit the concept arrived at in the earlier parts of the article.

Blind Culinary Creation

To start with, there is a significant choice to be made. You can either craft variations on dishes that are well known to your personal culture – proven recipes from family and friends, manipulated until they deliver the outcome you want.

There are a couple of Benefits to the approach – the source cuisine will generally be well known to the players, providing a cultural referent that makes the distinctiveness of the results more accessible and potentially more palatable.

But there are some massive downsides to consider as well – the results are going to be a lot more limited and less exotic than they could be – and there is no certainty that you will be able to get where you want to go due to the restricted foundations. That can lead to a lot of time wasted on failed experimentation.

Directed Culinary Experimentation

So, what’s the alternative? Answer: deliberately crafting a dish to suit a particular Social Connection even if the base recipe is from outside your own cuisine.

Upsides: can bring the exotic front and center, but can be more challenging to cook, and recipes may be less vetted than you would like. That can mean that you learn more, and maybe expand your personal world in the process, so it’s by no means all doom and gloom.

Downsides: You’ll need to make adjustments, sometimes blindly (because it’s not always obvious from which country a recipe originates) – did you know that the Australian measure of a “teaspoon” is different to the US “teaspoon”? Google is your solution to this problem. And you might need to source exotic ingredients – or substitute best-guess equivalents. And you might need exotic cooking implements, or to again make arbitrary substitutes. Finally, it’s probably fair to expect a greater percentage of failed experiments simply because of unfamiliarity with the foundation cuisine.

But the biggest advantage to this approach is that it opens the world to your internet browser, making it more likely that you’ll find what you need.

Another culinary discovery of mine. Preheat a fry-pan with a little vegetable oil. Take a slice of 6-8″ diameter Devon (called bologna or baloney in the US). Lay the slice of meat into the pan – as it cooks, the sides will rise to form a natural cup shape, and the flavor deepens considerably. As soon as the cup is large enough, or the devon stops rising, break an egg into the cup. Fry until the white starts to show white, then very carefully (using a spatula and a wooden spoon) invert the cup (spilling as little egg as possible). You may need to use the spatula to lift the edge so that you can tell when the egg is done. Top with a sprinkling of dried breadcrumbs, salt, and pepper. Do two at once per person for a meal – you’ll probably want a vegetable-based side dish as well.

The process

Regardless of the approach selected, the process is pretty much the same.

A Foundation

You start by selecting a foundation recipe that shares some of the qualities that you want in the finished dish. It’s often helpful to narrow the search to the cuisine of a particular nation, based on a similarity of climate and geography between the source nation and the fictional one.

Try to avoid the most obvious ones if you go down this route – Swiss, yes, French, No; Danish over German; Scandinavian over British; African or Central or South American instead of the USA – only if you are using the directed approach, of course.

It can often be hard to judge what a food will taste like from the recipe alone (though I’m told that some people can do so). Food blogs and TV shows on cooking can be massively helpful through reviewing a particular cuisine; what they describe probably won’t precisely match the recipes you find online, but it at least gives you a starting point.

Substitutions & Variations

Next, you may need to replace one or more ingredients due to availability. But that just gets you some local interpretation of the dish – for a human culture, that might be all you need, but if you need something more exotic, you’re going to need to get more creative.

Contemplate a meatloaf made from diced apple and slices of apricot instead of meat, for example. Or making it with a meat other than ground beef. Consider a different sauce or a marinade – a soy-sauce and honey chicken-based meatloaf (pre-cook the chicken, obviously)? Why not?

.Making one change often demands making another, as the resulting recipe isn’t quite right. Something will often be clashing with the introduced flavor. Fried tomato doesn’t go half as well with fried eggs as I thought it would, for example, but plum sauce isn’t too bad.

You may well need to adjust the cooking time – watch your culinary creation closely. I found the hard way that some of my own experiments cooked brilliantly on the outside but were still too raw in the middle – drop the temperature a bit and lengthen the cooking time was the obvious answer, but that didn’t quite work either. The solution was to microwave the dish for about 10 minutes and leave it to rest for 5 more before finishing it in the oven. But cooking the dish in layers and then assembling it worked even better, and gave me more control over the process.

Exotic Flavors

The more unusual the flavors that you are incorporating, the less likely it is that your first attempts will succeed – and the more likely it is that you will end up with something genuinely unique at the end. Making a sponge using ginger beer instead of milk? With chunks of glace ginger stirred through the cake mix? It ends up being a strange batter – not great as a cake, but chopping up the ginger bits makes for an exotic way to batter chicken or fish prior to frying them.

It helps to have a solid understanding of the science behind the common cooking practices. There are shows that can help you with that – start with Alton Brown‘s Good Eats.

Two questions to perpetually ask yourself are “Why do this?” and “Why not do that?”

Why rest dough? Why rest meat? What’s the relationship between thickness of cut and how the meat cooks?

Why not add diced fried onion and bacon to a bread roll dough? Why not add grapes and wine to a cake? Why not stuff a bell pepper (capsicum) with diced tomato and braised pork mince? Melted gummies coating fresh fruit or fruit segments? Replacing the cashews in a cashew chicken recipe with pistachios – I’m not sure that the flavors will play nice with each other. Adding chopped pistachio to the crumb for a fried fish, on the other hand…

Delivery Vehicles

There’s quite often an element or ingredient in the recipe that exists purely to carry the flavor of other ingredients, or that can be used for that purpose. If a recipe calls for vinegar, imagine chopping some mint or herbs and infusing the vinegar first.

Alternately, you might find that your culinary creation needs some sort of delivery vehicle to convey a flavor through the whole dish. Milk, Yogurt, Vinegar, sauces and gravies in general, are commonly used for the purpose, but so are infused oils and pureed fruit, and jams and cream. Essentially, just about anything that’s liquid can do the job. But there some things that are rarely considered for this purpose – caramel, for example.

So start by looking at the liquid and semi-liquid ingredients you’ve already got. If the recipe has apples, think about dicing and baking the apple to turn it into gelatinous chunks of fruit and then adding whatever the flavor is that you want to carry through the dish.

Recipe Creation

Quite often, it will be a case of two steps forward and one back – you substitute one ingredient, add an exotic one for flavor, change the cooking time and then the cooking process to harness a delivery vehicle, only to find that one of the ingredients isn’t playing ball and also needs to be replaced.

Learn what ingredients frequently get paired, and why. And keep an eye out for the occasional oddball – raspberries and steak, I’m told, are such a combination if handled correctly.

Sample Size

Always bear in mind the purpose – you don’t want to feed your players a whole meal, you want them to just get a little sample so that they can associate the flavor with the setting. So think about how much you will need, and how it is going to be served.

Accompaniment

Most foods are not consumed in isolation – there’s usually a side dish, or a drink, or both, to accompany it. Don’t neglect this. DO make sure that the combination is palatable.

Socializing The Society

Finally, do your best to make the tasting an event. Try to source some exotic music that seems appropriate to the culture, for example. The more you can bring it to life for the players, the more real your game will seem.

Conclusion

So, wherever the PCs in your campaign are now, what’s the local ambrosia – and what’s the meal it’s supposed to be paired with?