I haven’t liked eggs\u00c2\u00a0since I was 3 years old.\u00c2\u00a0 Eggs as ingredients don’t bother me–in cake, custard, ice-cream, meringue, chocolate mousse, chocolate souffl\u00c3\u00a9, pancakes, waffles–I just don’t think of them as food.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t eat flour straight out of the bag, either.<\/p>\n
Which is why characters in my pre-Industrial fantasy stories don’t eat nearly as many eggs as they should.<\/p>\n
In my last post on food in fantasy fiction<\/a>, I argued that the much-maligned stew was a perfectly reasonable meal for your characters to eat, even though they\u00c2\u00a0wouldn’t be cooking it while trekking through the wilderness on some epic quest; but that you, as the author, shouldn’t be lazy and write simply that they ate “stew” without telling the reader what went into it.\u00c2\u00a0 I promised to write more about worldbuilding through food, and hinted that I might be talking about eggs next.<\/p>\n Humans have been eating eggs since prehistory, and chickens may have been domesticated as early as 6000 BC.\u00c2\u00a0 The ancient Roman Apicius cookery manual has recipes for eggs.\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s a sauce that includes egg yolk\u00c2\u00a0as an ingredient:<\/p>\n 9.3.2 Sauce for stuffed squid: pepper, lovage, coriander, celery seed, egg yolk, honey, vinegar, liquamen [fish sauce], wine and oil.\u00c2\u00a0 Thicken it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Most of the Apicius recipes are just a list of ingredients, without quantities and with\u00c2\u00a0few if any instructions.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0But this sauce sounds suspiciously\u00c2\u00a0like a flavored mayonnaise.\u00c2\u00a0 (The Romans ate\u00c2\u00a0many food items\u00c2\u00a0that would be familiar to a modern Western diner.\u00c2\u00a0 Chicken wings were apparently a popular snack–wing bones have been excavated from underneath ancient public baths, along with lamb chop bones, olive pits, and nut shells.)<\/p>\n Eggs are usually the main ingredient in the ancient Roman dish known as a patina.\u00c2\u00a0 A sample recipe:<\/p>\n 4.2.5 Another patina, of asparagus [served] cold: take prepared asparagus, pound in a mortar, pour on water and pound thoroughly; strain through a colander.\u00c2\u00a0 Put prepared figpecker [a small songbird] to one side.\u00c2\u00a0 Pound in a mortar 6 scruples [1\/4 oz] of pepper, add liquamen, grind again.\u00c2\u00a0 Add a cyathus [1\/12 pt] of wine, a cyathus of passum<\/a>; pour into a pan [with] 3 oz of oil.\u00c2\u00a0 Let it come to heat there.\u00c2\u00a0 Grease a dish.\u00c2\u00a0 In it mix 6 eggs with oenogarum [i.e., the peppered liquamen-wine-passum-oil mixture described above]; put this with the asparagus liquor in hot embers.\u00c2\u00a0 Then arrange the figpeckers, cook, sprinkle with pepper and serve.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Apicius has several patina recipes, named after the pan they were cooked in.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0This was like a shallow covered casserole dish with a raised lip all around the lid that would hold hot embers on top and allow you to heat the contents of the pan from both top and bottom.\u00c2\u00a0 As far as I can tell, the patina is a lot like an Italian fritatta<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Persian cuisine has a similar dish called a kuku<\/a>, and according to my Persian cookbook<\/a>, it was traditionally cooked exactly the same way as the Roman patina, in the same sort of pan.<\/p>\n Eggs weren’t necessarily cheap in pre-Industrial societies, but they were less expensive than meat, and they stay fresh longer.\u00c2\u00a0 Most Americans and Canadians these days keep their eggs in the fridge, but it isn’t necessary if the eggs haven’t been washed before reaching the consumer<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Unrefrigerated, unwashed eggs will easily last about 3 weeks.\u00c2\u00a0 Meat … not so much.\u00c2\u00a0 Eggs are quick and easy to cook, requiring no specialized equipment.\u00c2\u00a0 They might be a bit fragile to carry on a long journey, but people would certainly\u00c2\u00a0eat them in their own homes and in taverns and inns.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, “eggs and bacon” is one of the food options Sancho Panza asks the landlord about in that Don Quixote passage I mentioned in my post on stew<\/a>, although as a supper rather than a breakfast item.<\/p>\n Eggs are popular in non-Western cuisines, too.\u00c2\u00a0 China has century eggs<\/a> and salted duck eggs<\/a>, and steamed eggs<\/a> (similar to an omelet) are a traditional dish.\u00c2\u00a0 Omelet variations<\/a> (including the aforementioned frittatas and kukus) are cooked and eaten around the world (from tortilla de patatas in Spain to tamagoyaki in Japan).\u00c2\u00a0 Cilbir, a Turkish preparation of poached eggs and yogurt, goes back to at least the 15th century.\u00c2\u00a0 Eggs aren’t typically eaten by Indian vegetarians, but egg dishes are popular among the Parsi community and other omnivores.<\/p>\n So why don’t more characters in historically-based fantasy fiction eat eggs?\u00c2\u00a0 I know that I neglect to think of eggs as a viable food option for my characters because I don’t think of them as a viable food option for myself.\u00c2\u00a0 But what’s everyone else’s excuse?<\/p>\n Perhaps it’s because the food described in fantasy fiction isn’t supposed to represent what members of a culture with a particular environment and technology level would actually eat.\u00c2\u00a0 Fantasy food is either aspirational or revolting–lavish descriptions of banquets with at least a dozen courses of roast meat, or bland stews with unrecognizable root vegetables boiled into submission.\u00c2\u00a0 And on one level, this makes sense.\u00c2\u00a0 You’re probably not writing that six-volume epic fantasy series because you wanted your readers to imagine what the various members of your made-up\u00c2\u00a0society might eat for breakfast–if they eat breakfast, which not every culture does–and how their breakfasts might be different from those in Middle Earth, or Narnia, or Westeros.\u00c2\u00a0 The problem, though, is that it’s all too easy to fall into overused food clich\u00c3\u00a9s, where your characters eat exactly what the reader imagined they would before ever opening your novel.\u00c2\u00a0 And at that point, why mention the food at all?<\/p>\n So,\u00c2\u00a0next time your characters stop for dinner, whether at an inn or\u00c2\u00a0someone’s home, why\u00c2\u00a0not offer them an omelet instead of stew?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I haven’t liked eggs\u00c2\u00a0since I was 3 years old.\u00c2\u00a0 Eggs as ingredients don’t bother me–in cake, custard, ice-cream, meringue, chocolate mousse, chocolate souffl\u00c3\u00a9, pancakes, waffles–I just don’t think of them as food.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t eat flour straight out of the … Continue reading