Life in the Realm of Fantasy

We’re well into NaNoWriMo, and writing is going well so far. I’m on track, and the words are flowing well. At our Saturday write-in, one of my fellow writers asked me how I introduce food into a narrative. As you might imagine, I have an opinion about that: I see food as set dressing, a part of world-building.

Food scenes serve as transitions between events. The act of dining occurs, but the conversations are the point of that scene. This is an opportunity to rest and regroup.

I write books set in fantasy environments, but you create a world no matter what genre you write in. As that world grows on paper, so does the culture. An aspect of worldbuilding involves including the casual mention of appropriate food for your ecology and level of technology.

I feel it’s best to concentrate on the conversations when writing about meals. The food should be part of the scenery. The conversations around food are where new information can be exchanged, things we need to know to move the story forward.

I’ve read many unforgettable fantasy books. One that shall go unnamed stands out, but not for a good reason. The author gave each kind of fruit, bird, or herd beast a different, usually unpronounceable, name in the language of her fantasy culture. She must have spent hours devising that hot mess of fantasy foods.

The characters were great and engaging, and the plot was engrossing. But the information about each and every kind of plant or vegetable was inserted into the narrative in long info dumps that ruined what could have been a great book for me.

As a reader, I think Tolkien got the food right when he created the Hobbit and the world of Middle Earth. He served common everyday food that his target audience was familiar with.

Food is an essential component of a culture but should be only briefly mentioned. Whether commonplace or exotic, it should be similar enough to known earthly foods to create an atmosphere a reader can easily visualize.

As many of you know, I have been vegan since 2012. However, during the 1980s, my second ex-husband and I raised sheep as part of a family cooperative.

I could write a book about those five years, but no one would believe it—fantasy is easier to make sense of.

I grew up fishing with my father and have a first-person understanding of putting meat, fish, or fowl on the table when a supermarket is not an option.

That experience taught me many things. Meat, fish, and fowl won’t be served daily in the average person’s home if they must catch, kill, and prepare it for themselves.

Village Scene with Well, Josse de Momper and Jan Brueghel II PD|100 via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s a lot of work to raise an animal. Hunting is also labor intensive. Then you have a lot of messy, smelly work to prepare it for cooking.

Travelers often streamline this process by skinning game birds rather than plucking them. The feathers come off with the skin – the whole point of hunting for dinner is to get it roasting as quickly as possible.

Why not raise animals and eat them? In the Middle Ages, pigs were raised solely for meat. The wool a sheep could produce in its lifetime was of far more value than the meat you might get by slaughtering it. For that reason, lamb was rarely served. The only sheep that made it to the table were usually rams culled from the herd.

Chickens were no different because you lose the many meals her eggs would have provided once a chicken is dead. Young roosters were culled before they got to the contentious stage and were usually the featured meat in the Sunday stew. Only one rooster was kept for breeding purposes. If he was too ill-tempered, he went into the stew pot, and a young rooster with better manners took his place.

Cattle and goats were also more valuable alive. Cows were integral to a family’s wealth as they were milk producers and sometimes worked as draft animals. Only one bull would be kept intact in a small herd for breeding purposes. The others would be neutered, made into oxen and draft animals that pulled plows, pulled wagons, fertilized the fields with their manure, and did all the work that heavy farm machinery does today.

In medieval times, it was a felony for commoners in Britain to hunt for game on many estates. Poachers were considered thieves and faced harsh penalties, horrific by our standards, if they were caught.

Cucumbers waiting to be pickles © 2013 cjjasp

However, most people were allowed to fish as long as they didn’t take salmon, so hutch-raised rabbits, fish, or salted pork were on the menu more often than fowl, sheep, or cattle. Eels and frogs were abundant and were a menu staple in the average peasant’s home. Anything one could raise in a garden was carefully harvested and pickled or dried. Berries were dried or made into jams and wines, as were tree fruits. Fish were dried and smoked or salted, and even pickled. These preserves were critical to surviving winters.

Common vegetables in medieval European gardens were leeks, garlic, onions, turnips, rutabagas, cabbages, carrots, peas, beans, cauliflower, squashes, gourds, melons, parsnips, aubergines (eggplants)—the list goes on and on. But what about fruits?

Wikipedia says:

Fruit was popular and could be served fresh, dried, or preserved, and was a common ingredient in many cooked dishes. Since sugar and honey were both expensive, it was common to include many types of fruit in recipes that called for sweeteners of some sort. The fruits of choice in the south were lemons, citrons, bitter oranges (the sweet type was not introduced until several hundred years later), pomegranates, quinces, and grapes. Farther north, apples, pears, plums, and wild strawberries were more common. Figs and dates were eaten all over Europe but remained expensive imports in the north. [1]

Pies of all kinds were the fast food of the era, often sold by vendors on the street or in bakeries.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder – Peasant Wedding (1526/1530–1569) via Wikimedia Commons

Wheat was rare and expensive. For that reason, the grains most often found in a European peasant’s home were barley, oats, and most importantly, rye. In the Americas, maize (corn)was the staple grain that provided flour for bread and was an essential ingredient in cooking.

Mostly, my characters eat fish, vegetables, grains, fruits, and nuts. The primary sources of protein are eggs, cheese, and fish. Herbal teas, ale, ciders, and mead are staples of the commoner’s diet. This is because drinking fresh, unboiled water can be unhealthy if your tale is set in a low-tech world. Medieval beers and ales were lower in alcohol but higher in nutrition than today’s brews. Ale or lager might be served at every meal, even to children.

In my current work in progress, my people have a melding of familiar European and New World ingredients for their diet and do a lot of foraging. Fish, maize, and potatoes are essential staples, as are beans and wild greens. For a good list of what this diet might entail, visit this link: Indigenous cuisine of the Americas. You will be amazed at the variety of everyday foods that originated in the Americas.

Knowing what to feed your people keeps you from introducing jarring components into your narrative. But don’t make it the center of the scene unless your plot demands it. One of my favorite series does just that: Recipes for Love and Murder: A Tannie Maria Mystery (Tannie Maria Mystery, 1)

CREDITS AND ATTRIBUTIONS:

[1] Wikipedia contributors, “Medieval cuisine,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Medieval_cuisine&oldid=896980025 (accessed Nov 4, 2023).

Apples and pickles courtesy of the author’s own kitchen garden.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder – Peasant Wedding (1526/1530–1569) PD|100 via Wikimedia Commons.

Village Scene with Well, Josse de Momper and Jan Brueghel II PD|100 via Wikimedia Commons.