Roleplaying Tidbits

Fruit Cake

from Wikipedia

>When a fruit cake contains a good deal of alcohol, it can remain edible for many years. For example, a fruit cake baked in 1878 was kept as an heirloom by a family (Morgan L. Ford) in Tecumseh, Michigan.In 2003 it was sampled by Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. Wrapping the cake in alcohol-soaked linen before storing is one method of lengthening its shelf life.

>A 106-year-old fruitcake discovered in 2017 by the Antarctic Heritage Trust was described as in "excellent condition" and "almost" edible.

> A cazu marzu adventurer, with his retinue of maggots.
My next character I guess.

But soft cheese dies too quickly to use for the trail. You could bring it for the first couple days, but it wouldn't last much longer.

Hard dry cheese that keeps forever like Gouda
Man I fucking love gouda

It's so disgusting I think it counts as almost edible when it's fresh

I never had a problem with it

So gouda, jerky, hard bread, and dried rice and lentils/beans? Dried fruit would work too, and nuts of course. They don't call it trail mix for nothing.

What else do you pack to liven up the adventure? Would a jar of jam be too likely to break?

Oh and of course you're going to do a little hunting and trapping and fishing but you can't rely on that.

Jam in a jar should be fine user

Honey would be a decent pick

you wouldn't have it every day but maybe once a week as a treat

Honey would be too useful as a medical supply to eat.

Fuck you for making me remember that line. I wish the NPCs would shut up when I'm trying to sell things

Adventurers would probably have better options for healing

Where did this meme of fruitcake being disgusting even come from?

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Any cheese since you can just cut the mold off and eat it. Soft cheese will mold through faster of course.

I mean if we're spoiled for choice I'll take some jalapeño pepper jack or havarti

you are what you eat. In my case, I am freaking cheese.

That's awesome. I love fruitcake. Knowing that it will outlive me makes it so much sweeter.

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All of it. Cheese is holy and saying otherwise is heresy.

When a few companies started to produce mail-order fruitcakes as cheap seasonal gift items around 1913. These mass produced "fruitcakes" are to real fruitcake as White Castle is to real burgers. Then in the 60s Johnny Carson started an annual bit about how it was the worst Christmas gift of all, and it went from everyone knowing that "fruitcake" was terrible, to a national joke.

>Not cooking food you procure in the dungeon

>What else do you pack to liven up the adventure?
Honey
Honey quite literally doesn't go bad, they've found edible honey in Egyptian tombs.

I am actually going to be playing a ranger who does a lot of survival cooking. I never read it before the character but I ended up reading for more inspiration on how to possibly handle monsters.

But are there any suggestions for stuff I should get for my inventory before the game starts? I more or less have creative freedom for anything 'mundane'. Any amazing ideas for multi tasking cooking related items/ingredients like in are heavily requested.

Honey/sugar is some pretty amazing stuff, because it's able to do have a number of traits all dependent on what temperature it's cooked to.

Soft, hard, brittle, flexible, it's pretty amazing, but with the weakness that it dissolves readily in water.

already got honey
its amazing antiseptic

Chili essence/sauce.
As well as its use in cooking it makes a great improvised interrogation aid...
t. once forgot to wash hands between preparing a curry and taking a leak!

I spent two weeks innawoods with a jar of peanut butter and a jar of honey. I only got a quail from hunting, and foraged nuts and some cherry guavas.

A portable drying rack for making jerky might be cool. Or a smoker. Like.. a tarp and sticks.

Salt, pepper...

Maybe a net to catch crayfish and a book on mushrooms. You can also forage for wild onions and garlic.

Oh and there's a spell that lets you.. summon.. margarine. I did it once, I don't remember what it was. This was 3.5. I remember it was margarine not butter because it was vegetarian.

But some olive oil might be better.

Terrible lubricant though.

Made batch of that once, delicious, kept for a good year and a half too.

>This thread again

won't bother with that, kinda pushing it imo to assume i would have access to that starting out. I WILL definitely make sure to ask around at towns.
Already looked into various on the trails methods of smoking and drying, That was a top priority. Bag of salt definitely was a priority to go with preserving

why you have lard and/or butter as well.

Have you ever read 'Stone Soup' ?

It doesn't help that Americans typically use neon-dyed nasty pre-candied fruit instead of actual fruit. We're lazy and require corn syrup (fruit isn't sugary enough)

True adventurers supplement their rations with dog turds.

Friendly reminder that most pine species are edible and making tea out of the needles provides five times are much vitamin C as eating a whole lemon.

>"almost" edible
To be fair, though, that's how fruit cake starts out, so pretty impressive.

Salt can be used to preserve meat you hunt or fish along the way. If you're dealing with a GM who pays attention to food, you always want to carry around a couple pounds of salt.

It can also be used as currency in a pinch when dealing with most people.

Drop net, salt, and a burlap sack. If you come across a river, catch a bunch of little fish, clean them, and pack them in salt in the sack. That can keep you fed for weeks.

And is just as unpalatable as eating an entire lemon.

Plenty of butter makes most things palatable.

I'd like to do a lot more wild foraging. I think I'll give it a try come spring.

Fuck yeah. Veeky Forums food threads are the bomb.
What fruits have the best nutrition when dried? I'm partial to prunes myself, but are there any that get the job done the most effectively?

Elderberry jam on toast.

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Apricots and Apples would be great.

Actually it doesn't really taste like anything, you get an extremely light citrus like tang but for the most part it just taste like drinking hot water.

youtube.com/user/jastownsendandson
this chanel is pretty useful if you want to make foods that match with your game. I know its limited for colonial style foods however one can adapt them for the setting

Is it reasonable to have fried breaded chicken in my setting?

Sure, fresh killed and plucked chicken chopped into pieces battered in egg yolks and flour with 11 herbs and spices all fried in a vat of whale oil

Ew whale oil. Go back to Alaska and let the real men adventure chef. Bacon grease or bust!!!

But user, you need to eat on the way to the dungeon!

I just spent 2 hours watching many of these videos. Why am I so fascinated by this stuff? Why do I want to subject my players to pemmican in-game? Why do I want to try some of this myself?

Fuck cheese, raw honey is the best food you can carry as an adventurer. The shit lasts forever and quite literally able to make itself easier to store and transport since it crystallizes after a while and can be liquefied with a bit of heat. High in sugar so it's good for an energy boost, useful for medicinal purposes as it soothes the throat and has a few antibacterial qualities, the shit can even be used on the skin to help seal and treat wounds. It's a miracle that parties everywhere don't carry around jars of honey and honeycomb. To that effect it's also a miracle that GMs don't use this as a reason to make raiding giant beehives a thing in game.

They're great aren't they. Not only just for the cooking, but also the description of the foods can be used to add immersion. Look at portable soup, practically every adventurer would carry some in the past.
Just throw a slab in a pot and you have a broth

I mean, all you need to make it is flour, chicken, and eggs. You really don't need very advanced technology to make it.

Frying is really the biggest issue.

I guess I'm thinking of just pan frying as opposed to deep frying.

That works too. It's a reasonably luxurious meal even so.

Why? Isn't like fat or oil where uncommon. They where more expensive than seasonal vegetables, but if you had a pair of pigs to feed the scraps, you could end with enough lard for the entire year, plus his meat (at least in Yurop that was the way). In the 14th-15th century people eated a fuck tone of meat,thanks to the death plague, than made lots of land to expensive to labour so they used them for pasture land, with the consequent rise of cheaper meat. In fantasy land, where entire villages go missing, I bet mobil wealth like cows and sheeps are more apreciated, because you can use recently de-ocupated lands for grazing.