Culinary Worldbuilding

[SugoiMe]

Where has this thread been for the last two weeks? Oh, wait, where have I been? Yeah, gone. lol

Food is something that I've only looked into recently. It occurred to me when my MC was thrown into a new place. Some of the aspects of this culture are snippets taken from other places. One of those is Japanese since I've been living here for a few years. I decided that it would be interesting to put sashimi and tamagoyaki into a mealtime scene. But of course, I couldn't use those terms, so instead I described the food. Also, what sorts of eating utensils do your characters use? Is it the usual fork and knife, are their chopsticks, do they use their hands? Adding a little snippet of how they eat enriches the fantasy world, I think.

 

[Tom]

And they are a ghastly food!

Not if you cook 'em right. My friend's Italian mother makes this amazing zucchini soup, and grilled, spiced zucchini slices are pretty good.

 

[Shreddies]

--Also, what sorts of eating utensils do your characters use? Is it the usual fork and knife, are their chopsticks, do they use their hands? Adding a little snippet of how they eat enriches the fantasy world, I think.

Sporks. When in doubt, go with sporks.

 

[ChasingSuns]

Personally I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it, although I do incorporate it depending on the region. I have some pretty specific terrain and weather conditions in certain regions, so I have to do some research to see what would sound like a believable diet for those living in said regions. Occasionally, if I want somewhere to seem extra exotic/foreign, I'll throw in a unique dish of sorts. However if I don't have a reason to incorporate it then I won't give it much thought.

 

[K.S. Crooks]

I mention food to show that tie ha passed and to add realism to long journeys. I don't mention what they are eating the majority of the time because it would be foods that travel well such as fruit, breads, cheese, etc. If I create new foods in these situation I would need to explain then. I feel it distracts from the main focus, that being the journey or struggle at hand.

 

[Bruce McKnight]

I got really deep into this when I started worldbuilding. I had the geography laid out and started laying out plant life (where does rice grow, what about garlic) and animals (like a bay where eels are plentiful and considered delicious and a plains area, depleted of population by war, that became sheep grazing land where mutton is consumed regularly). This made it easy to start to put together regional dishes, because if the north half of a country is overgrown with rice and the middle of it is sheep grazing land, guess what? They eat a lot of rice and mutton!

Trading partnerships, geography, and political relations all play a part in trade, which also influences what these countries eat.

It wasn't very hard and added a lot of depth.

I have also recommended this book in the past because it's awesome:
What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank by Krista D. Ball

 

[Ophiucha]

I spend entirely too much time thinking about food in my worlds, I think. Food is to me as linguistics is to Tolkien; I basically write entire stories just as an excuse to explore magical culinary techniques, ingredients, and traditions.

One story that I've been workin on for quite a while, and that I'm currently on about my eighth draft of, has a five-course meal as the framing device for the whole novel. Ash is a powerful source of magic in the world of this story, so my protagonist - who is the king's personal chef - creates a huge meal for him and his guests with each dish featuring ash in some way. I ended up cooking all five of the courses (as closely as possible, anyway, since one of them had horse and my parents were willing to experiment with eating ash but drew a line there) as a sort of taste test, to make sure it seemed both tasty and suitably extravagant, and that really helped me describe them as decadently as possible, since I do spend about a page describing each course.

I also cut an ingredient from the dessert course, since it was poison. Works great as a justification for using food as a framing device for the whole novel, but I'm not a fan of it in my meringue.

 

[Jay_Ehm]

You could say I'm a pretty big eater, and some of my favorite non-animated shows are the food shows on the Travel channel like Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern and Food Paradise. In fact, when I was in preschool I wanted to be a chef for a while. It's no surprise, then, that I usually include a character in any story I'm writing who likes to eat (or at least has some specific favorite foods) and thus explores a bit of the world's cuisine. One of these characters is Gustav, the king of Fyrherte and one of the big good guys in one of my current projects. His favorite foods are hagfish with a sauce made from their own slime (yuck) and candied squid pops (double yuck!). He unfortunately validates a stereotype of his people with his odd taste for seafood cooked in vile ways, and this is played for comedy. I just really like including food in my stories with Bizarre Foods and the Redwall series of books by Brian Jacques being some of my big inspirations. It makes the world have a nice sense of depth when the inclusion of food is appropriate.

 

[Tom]

Time to add my two cents to my own thread!

I approach worldbuilding from a very anthropological standpoint, so food and other aspects of cultures are things I focus on especially. I really like experimenting with food--unusual spices, unorthodox cooking methods, the works. For most of my stories, I find historical/traditional dishes from the cultures my fantasy cultures are loosely based on. For instance, I've researched how the ancient Irish baked their bread in beehive ovens, and looked up cheese made with horse milk for a nomadic horse-centered culture.

When I plan cuisine, I try to design the foods so that they reflect the overall character of their culture. Mild, sweet, spicy, rich, plain--each flavor and texture tells me something about the people who make this food. It's really fun to do, and it's led to some interesting foods.

 

[Jay_Ehm]

I approach worldbuilding from a very anthropological standpoint, so food and other aspects of cultures are things I focus on especially. I really like experimenting with food--unusual spices, unorthodox cooking methods, the works. For most of my stories, I find historical/traditional dishes from the cultures my fantasy cultures are loosely based on. For instance, I've researched how the ancient Irish baked their bread in beehive ovens, and looked up cheese made with horse milk for a nomadic horse-centered culture.

Sometimes, the opposite happens with me. I'll make up a food dish that people in a country or world eat and find out that it or something similar to it exists in real life. I merely typed 'squid candy' into google search when I was making my previous post to the thread this morning, and found out that squid candy actually exists- In Japan. Now, I came up with the idea purely because I wanted King Gustav to have an amusingly weird taste in food and thought of something I personally would think was gross or weird. To know that this thing actually exists somewhere makes me want to try it just to see why my character thinks something like it would be so good.

 

[Miskatonic]

Not if you cook 'em right. My friend's Italian mother makes this amazing zucchini soup, and grilled, spiced zucchini slices are pretty good.

Zucchini makes tomatoes taste like candy bars!

 

[Miskatonic]

Check out the Toriko manga if you want to see an entire world that revolves around food and where chefs are rock stars. It's a guilty pleasure of mine because it's pretty darn funny.