"Now this was a fine stew. It was said by the old man that a good chef was the true strength behind an army...

Veggies don't tend to last very long on their own. Salted, dried meat, hard cheese, hard bread, and dried fruits are the go-to rations because they're relatively high in calories for the trip and have a sufficient amount of nutrients in them.

Veggies can travel well if pickled, however, but pickling means storing them in glass or stoneware jars in vinegar and pickling fluid, so that adds a lot of weight per volume of food you're carrying.

All that salt assumes a convenient source of water nearby, like a river or lake. Some salt is good to help replenish a body's electrolytes, but too much dehydrates you. Hot water can also be used to make broth, soften the hard bread, and melt the hard cheese, as well as get a good deal of salt out of the salted meats, making the normally hard food actually edible.

Because of this, a cookpot is a good idea to carry in a traveller's kit. While it's heavier than a jar of pickled veggies, it can be used more than once and provides for every meal. Spices are also a good idea to add flavor and even cover up food that's turned a little off. They're also cost-effective given the pinch or two you'd need per meal, and weight effective in that a small pouch or jar is enough for an entire journey. Not to mention it breaks up the otherwise monotonous mealtime ration flavors.

Not even modern MREs have veggies

>What are dehydrated green beans
>what are dehydrated peas
>what is dehydration...

>Meat, cheese, bread
Thats gonna cause some blockage. You need fiber in your diet

You could add some dried lentils and beans into the mix. Not much harder to carry around, keeps well, and just needs a water source to soak up and turn into edible food again, like with all the rest of your rations.

One of our players is a nutritionist and another is a historian so the rations are super accurate for what people in medieval times would likely have been eating and in accurate counts. It's really cool. I don't really think we get any benefits from it, but it is nice to know that my orc barbarian is nice in healthy.

Also these are the orc rations from that series.

Mmm yeah, boiling a bunch of bread and cheese together and sucking all the flavour out of the meat is exactly what I wanna fucking do when I'm on an adventure and shivering at a campfire in a cold forest where my death looms at any moment. Are your teeth made of jelly?

You dip the hard bread in the broth for flavor and to make it less hard because that bread is typically hard as shit and the meat goes in the broth as well to make it more meaty. It's a lot better than eating hard-ass bread and jerky in between mouthfuls of lukewarm water while there's death around every corner. Also you can throw spices into broth but you can't really sprinkle spices onto hardtack.

Hardtack and hard cheese are basically theoretically edible nutrient rocks, almost as hard chewing on tree bark or bazooka bubblegum.

It needs to be softened partially so it doesn't dehydrate you, and partially to keep your teeth intact; medieval fantasy is generally a place without adequate access to expert toothcare, so a broken or chipped tooth is going to cause a lot of hurt down the road, if not crippling pain or the potential for a fatal infection. Your teeth might very well be jelly after chewing on that stuff raw, although that'll be because there's little enamel left, only exposed nerves.

These rations are hard and dry to prevent anything from growing on/in them, and anything softer generally has enough water to support their growth, spoiling them. But boiling the meat in water makes a more flavorful broth that you can soften the hardtack with, and the hard cheese gains more flavor when melted. Plus, dry spices can be readily added to the broth to give you a much needed flavor boost.

You can try to tough it out by chewing on shit dry, but that's a rather short-sighted and unwise course of action for the sake of bravado when there's ready means to make travelling rations easier to eat and handle.

The halfling rations look the best
Dwarf rations look second best
But damn if I wouldn't eat some Orc food

Dried meat and cheese is my weakness this looks fuckn tasty

...

Would you have the enemy leave behind booby trapped rations in an 'abandoned' camp/base/outpost/whatever?

Got more of those pics with the food labelled like that?

>What is poison

How many days rations is this? I never had a problem of what my characters were eating, but how much.

Delay of seven seconds, this is probably meant to be smuggled and used by its owner rather than used as a trap.

The guy who did these said that they were meant to represent only a couple days' rations. Stuff you'd eat on the first couple days of the journey while they were still good, before you had to switch to the less-perishable goods.

>Beans and peas
>Veggies

user

>Spices are also a good idea to add flavor and even cover up food that's turned a little off. They're also cost-effective given the pinch or two you'd need per meal, and weight effective in that a small pouch or jar is enough for an entire journey. Not to mention it breaks up the otherwise monotonous mealtime ration flavors.
Not to mention they're value-dense enough to make decent barter goods. Like carrying gemstones.

Gotta load up for them sick GAINS!

>green beans and peas aren't veggies

Are...are you serious?

They are legumes.

I know, but functionally they're the exact same thing for terms of nutritional purposes. If you count them in the protein side of things you're looking specifically at shit like peanuts, etc. Peas and green beans are fucking universally accepted as being a "vegetable" if we're going by nutritional value which seems to be the case of the entire argument.

...

>Beef Jerky
>flame roasted habanero peppers
>and a bone

I assume the idea is to put it on the bread slice and make weirdo half sandwiches. Though I like anyone who's willing to just pop a habanero in their mouth.

>Russia
>Only one meal, crackers and paste
Hey, it's a lie! Where is my chocolate, tea, coffee, and yuppi?

That's just for food subsidies, they are still a legume.

I'm pretty sure peas are both a legume and
a vegetable user

They are a fruit.

>canada
lmao looks like something they'd give you in elementary
but yeah I pity the chinese. that doesn't even look edible ffs

Ready to get your mind blown?

Bananas are berries.
So are tomatoes.
Strawberries are not.
But avocados are.

Botany is fucked up.

technically, pea pods are fruit and the individual peas themselves are legumes. but they're not vegetables.

some of y'all motherfuckers need some science in your lives, I swear. fruits are edible fleshy structures protecting seeds and vegetables are edible leaves, stalks, roots, tubers, etc. legumes/pulses are edible dry seeds of flowering plants.

Fruits are the sweet bits and vegetables are the blander but more nutritious bits. Learn colloquial, you scientist.

>No French ration on the pic because all the others are way inferior.

>using botanical definitions of fruit and vegetable in a culinary thread

...

but that's disingenuous as fuck, not all fruits are sweet, vegetables aren't bland (unless your diet consists solely of fast food hamburgers and microwave pizza) and both of them are highly nutritious. fruits just sometimes have high amounts of sugar and should be consumed in moderation.

tomatoes and cucumbers are fruit, for example, and onions and peppers are the exact opposite of bland. personally i find most vegetables are tasty, except brussles sprouts and cilantro.

Why is rice never in these rustic travel rations?
All you need is a handfull of rice and a cup of water, 10 minutes of cooking and you're filled for 4+ hours.

>nutritionist and another is a historian
Neither of which require not being a fucktard to be

first off, orcs like their food to fight back and make them fight off the pain that you would get from eating them.

secondly, off all the things in this thread, the orc has the right idea with the bones, since A, they make a really fucking good stock, and B, if you ain't got a pot but you got a fire, you can cook them up, crack em open and get that sweet sweet, highly caloric dense and fatty delicious bone marrow

Anyone got the "sack of oats" posts?
That has a similar role being filled by oats.

Most (certainly not all) fantasy settings are pretty much not! pre-columbian exchange Europe, and besides certain environs bordering the Med, Europe doesn't lend itself well to the large scale cultivation of rice. A better question is, why the fuck are potatoes everywhere?

Not even that stickler against anachronistic trans-Atlanticism Tolkien could deny the magnificence of the poe-tay-toe.

Kingdom Come has opened the alternative to potatoes for me: lentils.
Just replace potatoes with then everywhere and thats it.

>not just cooking monsters

Fuck I love potatoes.

Why do people get their panties in a bunch about ""anachronistic"" potatoes in a fantasy setting that isn't even explicitly trying to be historically accurate?

>eating creatures with weird or supernatural traits
>eating creatures that eat meat themselves
It's like you want to have a poorly tummy and an eyeball with teeth growing out of your asshole.

m8 you understand why it's called hardtack, right?

Shit could chip your teeth.

>eat creatures that eat meat themselves

do you not eat fish? any shellfish? squid? a majority of ocean based life?

FYI, fish eyes are delicious

>>eating creatures that eat meat themselves
Your Abrahamic Religion-centered culture is showing

>not cooking them properly
>being a lil' bitch
You gotta eat big to get big, how can you wrestle dragons into the ground if you're some 40kg beta virgin?

you can boil ANY grain just like rice
rice is just very mild and tasteless while groat is still kinda chewy and nutty

I'm not personally anti-potato, not!Europe is still not Europe despite whatever similarities they may share. But a lot of people DO take the time to try and add historical flavor to settings, but then they go and describe hearty stews made with potatoes and venison or sailors ridden with syphilis. Fantasy is fantasy, throw in whatever you want, but what bugs me is when people tout their settings as "historical" and have things blatantly anachronistic.

>eating creatures that eat meat themselves
So fun fact about chickens, they eat meat.

youtube.com/watch?v=mI14FgUc3ig

The reason people don't eat most meat eating beasts is that their meat tends to be rather bad tasting or hard to eat, due to all the muscles predatorial animals have. There is of course some exceptions like bear meat but it has some other problems if you don't cook it properly.

>Elf requires 70kcal a day
>cat boy the same
>elf's creation and technician don’t eat
>strongmelee dude eats but barely so, at least he got sick twice
T-thanks anima.

That's the stuff you eat when it's available.

Bear liver is the tits.

This user is underselling it.

Chickens eat fucking chicken if left unattended. It's one of the constant warnings with raising/caring for chickens: do not let them bleed. Chickens will tear apart other chickens for having drops of blood on them. Then they'll tear apart the chickens covered in the first chicken's blood.

Chickens will bite at and eat meat from cuts in their own backs.

You know that Ogre god, the Devouring Maw? Probably a chicken.

That's opportunistic behaviour. Meat isn't their main source of nutrients.

They're basically small velociraptors.
Just because chickens don't have dedicated hunting behavior doesn't mean they're not meat eaters. What the fuck is wrong with eating carnivores anyway?

I used to own chickens

They eat ANYTHING

>irresistible blood frenzy instinct in a helpless little whimp
>people still think t-rex was a scavenger

>What the fuck is wrong with eating carnivores anyway?
They're a step too far removed from the sun.

Plants derive their energy from the sun.
Herbivores take that energy from plants.
Carnivores take that energy from herbivores and other animals.

The further you get from the original source, the more pointless garbage is added to the nutrients you actually want.

To be fair, that’s usually what old East Asian militaries did. Travel with a shitton of rice, and at the end of the day cook it up and throw anything in the pot that you managed to scavenge along the way for flavor.

I’m pretty sure there’s a Chinese document somewhere that mentioned why actively campaigning against stepp nomads was such a pain; Chinese troops preferred settling down and cooking food, while nomads could live on jerky and mares milk in the saddle. Some (supposedly) would drink horse blood straight out of the neck veins.

So lizardfolk are Cajuns?

I think I read somewhere an idea about a lizardfolk village styled as New Orleans voodoo settlement.
Young hatchlings catch crayfish in the marshes, while a huge, fat momma-lizard takes care of the gumbo cauldron.

The only things mine won't eat are citrus fruits.

Then you're not preparing them properly.

Is she THICC?

Yes, obviously. And yes, you can seduce her. You'll be forced to fertilize her eggs somewhere far away in the marshes.

>Including veggies in a calorie-dense field ration

Shiggy. Get your fiber from grains and dried, candied fruits. You're trying to hike across the wilderness, not cut for summer.

I would argue botany is perfectly logical and it's just the culinary use of terms that's fucked up

These are so fucking stupid and I wish you faggots would stop jerking off to this kind of tumblr bullshit.

What about focaccia?
Never in my life have i seen it outside of italy and it looks like something good and easy to carry around. You don't even need to heat it up before eating

debbie downer

isn't it soft? soft breads don't take rough handling very well, and usually have a fair bit of shortening/fats in them which go rancid/grow mold quickly.

but to get down to brass tacks, it's a pretty basic flatbread, and historically that stuff is common as fuck pretty much everywhere besides non-Mediterranean europe and some parts of asia

>(supposedly)
lmao
even your great-grandparents probably went to the slaughterhouse to ask for a nice foamy mug of horse blood ("it's good for the cold") if horse was considered edible in your country.

Bakeries usually serve them here in Denmark, too.

soft, greasy, turns into shit when it's hot and improperly stored, turns moldy in a couple of days
I often buy it as a snack to carry around in my backpack when I'm touring some city and it's barely palatable at the end of the day.

Are peppers not fruit?

>negatives
The opposite of a bonus is a malus, user.

What do adventurers eat when they can't get dog turds?

"easter bunny eggs"

Chickens are disgusting creatures. They really will eat each other alive, even if they have plenty of food.

>ever seen naturally hatched chicks?
>they get tramped flat and ripped apart by their own mothers

the pic is bait, you know?
mreinfo.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=244
mreinfo.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=8661&p=64848

Oh? I didn't realize they were that bad. Is that all chickin or just some breeds?

>ever seen naturally hatched chicks?
>they get tramped flat and ripped apart by their own mothers
My chickens have never done this. We always allow at least one hen to hatch her own eggs, and they guard them fiercely.

My chickens had to separated until the babies grew up, the grown ups pecked one baby so hard it pierced its skull and almost killed it, if we would have left them they would have been eaten alive. Karma came back to bite the older chickens though, coyotes killed all the older ones in the adult pen one night.