While the thread is near the top, I have been looking at the problem from a slightly lower level.
Jiri Petrew has covered the economics and specialization of cooking well enough that I do not feel the need to add much, beyond my own personal preference for the “communal cooking” mess hall option (although that might have something to do with the fact that, under the current interface, it is really the only workable one). I will focus instead on recipes and reactions: more details on the many possible methods of preservation that would probably be available at the tech level of Dwarf Fortress, and more detailed descriptions of the individual prepared meals, along with how to implement the reactions to make all of them. This will be a long one, so I will use spoiler tags to condense it into manageable sections.
Further reading: Cooking techniques other than “mincing” (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=20434.0) and A Gastronomic Adventure Into DF (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=147117.0).
Many preservation techniques call for fermentation, which is much closer to real life with the option of long term unattended reactions (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=139552.0).
To start off, I will review the methods of preserving food, gathering as many as possible into one place for later reference.
Food Types
To avoid confusion, here is a list of food types, to clarify terms used in subsequent sections.
Plants cluster:
Plants can be grown in prepared fields, or collected from the wild. Like animals, plants have different parts, although domesticated plants are usually grown for only one or two per species. Plants are the overwhelming majority of the food I produce in my forts, which is appropriate to the technology level: a dwarven fortress is inherently a settled community, and those historically got most of their food by farming. Those that used animals as their primary source of food, whether by hunting wild herds or driving tame ones, historically roamed over very large territories.
1. Fruit: Culinary fruit, or “sweet fruit,” including most brewable fruits (whether from shrubs or trees), as well as citrus. Usually fairly perishable, although keeping it in a cool root cellar can help. Fermenting into the respective wine or cider helps a lot more.
2. Squashes: Most other “fruit” plant growths, including squash, cucumber, tomato, and peppers. While botanical fruits, these tend to be lower in both sugar and acid content than the sweet fruits, which affects their culinary properties (they are culinary vegetables), and which preservation options work well. With three exceptions (the tomato, tomatillo, and artichoke), these cannot be brewed into an alcoholic drink, the primary method of long-term preservation for the sweet fruits.
3. Leaf vegetables: Edible leaves such as lettuce and cabbage. This also includes flavoring “herbs” like mint. I am also lumping in edible stems like celery and asparagus. These tend to be fairly perishable and difficult to preserve. One prominent exception is cabbage, which apparently pickles well under brine, producing sauerkraut. Rhubarb might make a jam. Most spices dry relatively well.
4. Root vegetables: Tubers, bulbs, etc. including potatoes, carrots, turnips, onions, and ginger. Can usually keep in a root cellar for several months, but the majority are tricky to preserve beyond that. Some dry well, particularly the spices. Root vegetables are also particularly resistant to withering in the fields, and historically have been left for continuous harvesting over the winter (“whole livestock” preservation method).
5. Grains: Most seeds eaten for food, including tree nuts. As a rule, seeds store fine at room temperature, as long as they are kept intact and reasonably dry. The main threat is vermin, not rot. Bread is covered in its own section, under “Prepared Meals.”
> Plants that are used for flour really should be traded in whole seed form, which is a threshing reaction that the current game ignores. Flour has a much shorter shelf life than the whole seeds.
6. Oil: Usually pressed out of certain seeds (with the exception of olive oil, which is pressed from fruit). Many types are shelf-stable for several years at room temperature; flax seed oil, also called linseed oil, is a prominent exception due to the way it hardens (a property which supports its famous use in paints).
> Processing seeds for oil also produces a press cake, which is usually edible and can probably be treated as a flour. I’m not sure where olive pomace should go.
Meat cluster:
Many animals are used for food. The majority is “butchering returns,” collected when the animal is slaughtered, but some can be collected periodically from the live animal.
1. Meat: The item called “meat,” whether from land animals or butchered fish (comes from the muscle tissue layer). Very perishable in the raw state; usually preserved by some form of drying (smoking or salting).
2. Fish: Seafood cleaned at the fishery. Also perishable, but usually easy to preserve. Similar preservation properties to meat (culinary properties are a bit more distinct, and merge with those of larger fish processed at the butcher shop), so many of my comments below will treat fish as a subtype within meat, rather than mention fish separately.
3. Organs: Lung, liver, tripe, kidneys, etc. Also perishable; often somewhat more difficult to preserve than meat.
> Heart is mostly muscle, so it should take most meat preservation techniques. Most other organs probably won’t, though.
> Intestines (and sometimes stomach/tripe) are the frequent choice for sausage casings, and some recipes do involve salting or smoking the sausage to give it a long shelf life. These have generally fallen out of favor on Earth with the easy availability of refrigeration, but they do exist.
> I have been told that the first things most carnivores go after are the liver and the stomach, which may suggest that they are the most perishable parts. Next are probably the brain and lungs.
> Brain has its uses in certain tanning techniques (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckskin_(leather)). There is not much advantage to this process in the current game, since the wide range of ingredients involved in vegetable tanning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanning_(leather)) is not implemented either. Brain can also be eaten, but in modern times this is known as the vector of certain diseases. I don’t know what preservation techniques work on brain prepared for eating, although buckskin tanning involves smoking.
4. Fat: Most uses seem to actually call for tallow, which is refined fat with most of the other components (from the animal’s fat tissue layer) cooked out. Tallow is the preserved form, and it doesn’t really preserve further. Unfortunately, the information I have managed to find on its shelf life at room temperature seems to assume modern technology (inert atmospheres and airtight containers). I don’t know how long tallow keeps at room temperature with DF (roughly Roman to medieval) technology.
5. Milk: Raw milk is very perishable. There are several preservation options, covered in their own section (“Cheese and other dairy products”).
6. Blood: Blood can be collected in a watertight container as the animal is butchered. If the animal produces edible meat when butchered, its blood should be edible as well. Like milk, blood contains a broad range of nutrients in simple forms, and is highly perishable as a result. There probably are methods of preserving it, but I have not managed to do much research on the subject.
> Like milk, blood can be collected intermittently from the live animal (and, unlike milk, can be collected from male animals, and even birds and reptiles).
7. Eggs: Eggs have a similar nutritional profile to meat, but significantly different culinary properties. Most of these stem from the fact that raw eggs are liquid, which affects how they mix into other components of a prepared meal.
> Eggs have a shell, and, as long as the outer cuticle remains intact, the egg will have a shelf life at room temperature at least as long as the incubation period (the normal time between laying the egg and hatching the embryo). Preserving them beyond this is tricky, although I have read about pickled eggs. Note the cuticle is significantly less durable than the bony shell, and washing the egg frequently breaks the cuticle, providing paths for fungi and bacteria to enter. My research indicates that regulations in the EU leverage this, but regulations in the US call for washing to remove other things on the shell, and assume refrigeration to control the microbes. DF can go the EU route, or simply treat them as highly perishable, to be cooked and consumed quickly.
> All of this is specifically about bird eggs. Reptile eggs are probably similar enough to go in the same category, although I have read that many reptile eggs do not set up during cooking the way chicken and goose do.
> Roe (most seafood eggs) is quite different from bird eggs, and treated here as an organ. Most species can be preserved with salt (salt curing or brine pickling).
8. Bones: Bones don’t usually count for much in calories, but some recipes for stock do call for bones, which are cooked in water to leach out the flavor. Afterward, it is easier to remove meat, cartilage, and so forth that had been stuck to the bones, although I do not know how suitable boiled bones still are for bone carving uses.
> Marrow might also be worth considering. Other than its location (which affects the procedures and difficulty of retrieving it), it can probably be treated as an organ for most purposes. Marrow appears to not be implemented in the current game (creature templates should mention it right after bone, close to where cartilage is now).
Preservation methods
There are a lot of different options for preserving food. Each option works better on some food types than others.
0. Whole livestock: “Keep the animal alive, so its own immune system keeps the meat fresh, and butcher it just before eating.”
This only works with tame animals (wild ones are hard to keep contained), and they need a reliable supply of food.
> Jiri Petrew expressed the view that fresh meat will usually be traded in livestock form, and that it is likely to be relatively expensive. I do agree that meat (at least of domestic species) will usually be traded in the form of living animals, but I tend to disagree with the expensive part. Livestock probably aren’t currently as expensive as they should be (a barrel of flour bags can buy several animals, especially if the bags are dyed), but we as players are working with the budget of a whole village, not just a family, so purchasing a small herd should be within our means most of the time.
> The distance livestock can be traded depends on the terrain of the route: if it is over areas that allow the animals to graze or browse, they can be driven extremely long distances. If food for the animals needs to be carried as well (carnivores all the time, herbivores in ocean, desert, etc.), it gets harder.
> Implementing this in the game will require animals owned by the caravan to be driven or guided (preferably several animals by one caravan member), and drop the current practice of carrying domestic animals in cages (although cages do make sense for wild animals and trained arena animals). Caged herbivores can be fed by caravan members cutting vegetation for them along the way, with the same terrain restrictions as grazing.
> I don’t know how distinct “importing for meat” and “importing for breeding stock” should be.
B. A variant on the theme of “whole livestock” does work for root vegetables, but not for most other plant foods. Technically, the relevant point is not the root part, but the plant as a whole being biennial or perennial (and even then, it doesn’t work for fruit or squash; seeds are harder to call).
> Note that most root vegetable crops are biennial, and consume the calories stored in the root over the second year to produce seeds. A given plant will not provide both. The main exception is potatoes, which are perennial, and produce several tubers per plant as a way of propagating themselves. Neither of these effects is implemented in the current game.
Cooling Series
Most food items spoil more quickly while warm. Therefore, storing food in a place that is reliably less warm will make it last longer.
> The game apparently does track temperature and heat flow, but it does not display this information to the player. Proper implementation of cooling as a preservation method will require this information to be displayed, so cold rooms can be positioned and designed correctly.
1. Root cellars: “Store food away from the heat of the day. With a bit more work, it can even be kept away from the heat of the summer.”
Root cellars rely on the “thermal mass” of the surrounding soil (or occasionally rock) to control temperature swings. One z-level below ground is probably sufficient to absorb temperature swings over at least one day, protecting food stored in the room from the higher temperatures of mid-day and afternoon. Three or four z-levels will likely be sufficient to absorb seasonal variations: the room will be nearly constant at the yearly average temperature.
> Note that “the yearly average temperature” can still be high enough to be problematic in some climates. Tropical (Hot) and subtropical (Warm) climates don’t have a winter to provide a low swing. This leaves only daily temperature swings to work with. That can still be significant, and some molecules are specifically degraded by light, more than heat, but such root cellars are still not nearly as effective as those in colder climates.
> Dwarves mostly live underground, so storing food underground is natural for them. Normal dwarven food stockpiles inherently provide a root cellar effect, especially if located a respectable distance from the entrance and anything that requires a fire.
> The root cellar is mostly used for root vegetables (hence the name), fruits, and squashes (but not too close to each other: one bad apple spoils the whole barrel, and even a good apple causes problems for potatoes). Limited effectiveness (unless supplementing other preservation techniques) for meat, organs, and leaf vegetables. Usually redundant for grains and oil. I don’t know about tallow.
2. Ice box: “Store the food in a box with ice at the top, which will keep it colder.”
Ice boxes (and ice closets) will not work in the current game, since latent heat of fusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion) is not modeled: water currently has a heat of fusion of zero, which is what allows ponds to freeze and melt instantaneously. If heat of fusion were mentioned in the raws, it should be very close to the melting point, making its absence easy to check.
> An ice box generally works well on the same categories of food as a root cellar. It is less dependent on climate.
> Depending on the ratio of ice to food, some of the food might freeze, which damages most plant-based foods but extends the shelf life of most meats and organs. Freezing plants in a way that will have them relatively fresh after they thaw is possible, but the methods used on Earth usually involve liquid nitrogen, so I assume that it is beyond the tech level of DF.
> In climates that feature periodic freezing, ice can be harvested locally and stored in an insulated ice closet for use during the summer. This is even easier in permanently frozen climates like glaciers. If liquid water is also available, it can be poured on snow to make denser ice.
> Ice can be a viable export good, provided that insulation (or sheer mass) is sufficient to keep a worthwhile amount of it frozen during the journey. For best results, an entire wagon should be dedicated to ice and insulation, and filled as completely as possible. Merchants carry ice in huge lots or not at all.
A. On smaller scales, an ice box would be a furniture item, taking up (probably) one tile. Since it is not designed to be moved (or at least should be moved only while empty), total capacity (food plus ice) should be at least as large as the largest mobile container in the game, which is a minecart (and this is several times the size of a barrel, so the cabinets will consolidate stockpile space even without ice). As a food container, an ice box should be able to be placed on a food stockpile, and may demand such placement.
> Quality of furniture ice boxes may affect how long a given block of ice lasts (better sealing of the container, better placement of insulation layers, etc.).
> Even when the box has ice, food inside still has a shelf life, due to problems like freezer burn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freezer_burn). Given how infrequently dwarves eat, I don’t know what the shelf life of even raw foods should be to make sense, let alone how much an ice box should extend it.
> Ice boxes only took off after the industrial revolution, but that was due to improved transportation making ice supplies more reliable, not because the concept is beyond DF technology. There is apparently evidence of ice houses (or at least written orders for them to be built) before 1000 BC.
> As an inherent aspect of operations, ice boxes provide a supply of freshly melted water. If the water source that the ice froze from was drinkable, the melted ice will be as well.
> Nether-cap wood has a fixed temperature of 32 °F due to a mysterious process. Containers made of it will have most of the same effects as ice, and are much more portable and long-lasting. They would be extremely valuable for export, especially to humans (elves have their ethical complaints about killing trees). Complete storage rooms of nether-cap boards might also be an option.
B. On larger scales, ice can be put in a room floored with grates to allow the chilled air to flow to the food stockpile below (some solid floors may be useful to contain melted water). Storing ice for smaller ice boxes (an ice house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_house_(building)), rather than a cold closet) would replace the food stockpile with more ice.
> Additional levels of cold storage should be possible, again using grates on intermediate z-levels to allow flow of chilled air. The bottom floor should be mostly solid, but a properly designed drain for the melted water can significantly improve performance and efficiency (details in “Evaporative Refrigerator,” part C).
> To restrict heat flow, the complete cold room should have a minimum surface area for its volume. In theory, this is a sphere, but in the case of an ice closet there is a benefit to a constant vertical footprint for flow of chilled air. This means a cylinder, although a cube will be easier to designate (the cylinder version should still have a height roughly equal to its diameter, although individual tiles in DF are apparently not cubes).
> The cold room will benefit from insulation. Rock and brick are built in thick walls with high thermal mass, which damps out highly variable temperatures, but this is not the same as restricting heat flow into a consistently cold area (or away from a consistently hot one). Straw is a common choice in real life, as is sawdust (although neither is implemented in DF), although both are susceptible to rot in damp conditions.
> For best results, the rooms should be accessed by a staircase going at least as high as the top ice level, to restrict the flow of chilled air out of the stockpile and into the hallway. Furniture ice boxes should likewise be accessed mainly from the top, but that is less visible to the player.
3. Evaporative refrigerator: “Humans sweat to cool off, and a porous container can leak to similar effect.”
Sometimes called a pot-in-pot refrigerator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot-in-pot_refrigerator), this device relies on evaporation to keep the contents cool. It only works in dry climates, where water can evaporate rapidly enough to have a worthwhile cooling effect (it requires a low wet bulb temperature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature) to work).
> Like the icebox, this device will not work in the current game, since heat of vaporization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization) is not modeled, or even mentioned in the raws (although apparently humidity is modeled, as part of the weather simulator).
> The pot-in-pot refrigerator uses two clay pots, with one placed inside the other. The inner pot contains the food (or occasionally other items) to be cooled, and can be (but is not always) glazed. The outer pot is not glazed. The space between the pots is filled with water, and often sand to keep the inner pot from floating.
> Since the outer pot is not glazed, water from the gap can trickle to its outer surface. Evaporating water at that location provides a cooling effect, and this draws heat from the contents. Since the coldest point is a layer of humidified air at the outer surface of the pot, the evaporative refrigerator cools the space it is in as an inherent aspect of its operation. This is not necessarily waste (the room is typically quite warm as well), but it does increase operating costs.
> The evaporative refrigerator consumes water for cooling, and this must be replenished periodically. If the inner pot is glazed, the water will not enter it, so the supply does not need to be drinkable (salt water will work).
> The cooling effect can be enhanced with active air flow, which can be provided by mechanical fans, or by workers.
B. Like the ice box, the evaporative refrigerator has a room cooling analogue. Water is typically delivered by a qanat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#Cooling) (a type of aqueduct) and a chimney draws warm air from the top of the building. This in turn draws air up from the air shaft of the qanat (which doubles as a water well), where air has been cooled by the water in the channel. This system is run entirely by buoyancy effects, solar power, and wind power, and does not need any mechanical assistance.
> Storing food near the building’s inlet for cooled air from the underground canal will provide a lower-maintenance option to replace the double pot refrigerator. This option can also supplement it: air flow is automatic, and, since the incoming air has already absorbed a significant amount of water vapor, water loss from the outer pot is slowed. Effectiveness is not decreased, since the lower limit to temperature is the wet bulb temperature in either case.
C. Ice can also be used as the cold point. For best results, engineering should direct the melted water to meet the input air first, so the air is already cold before it reaches the ice (a counter-current exchange process).
> As in the basic canal version, evaporation from the underground water supply cools the incoming air. In addition, freshly melted water is not much warmer than the ice, so simple heat transfer from the cold water provides additional cooling, and can cool the incoming air below its wet bulb temperature. Cooling the input air to just above the temperature of the ice minimizes distillation on the ice surface (condensing water would deposit its heat on the ice, melting some of it).
> Since melted water can cool incoming air below its wet bulb temperature, this version of the system does not need a dry input air stream. It will work in humid climates. The aqueduct is also less critical, although it does help by cooling the air to root cellar temperature, even before evaporative cooling gets involved. Selectively closing doors during the day and opening them at night for the cooler air from that time can also help, but is much more labor intensive to pull off.
> The dew point will usually be well above 32 °F, so some condensation from ambient humidity will occur on the cold water surface, and provide additional water, beyond the supply of melted ice.
> As with the ice box, nether cap wood is much more difficult to obtain than ice, but does not need to be replenished.
Drying Series
As a rule, dried goods are both lighter and smaller than they were moist. The catch is that moist food can provide a substantial amount of water in the overall diet, and if food is consumed dry then the removed water will need to be drunk directly. In other words, eating dry food seems likely to increase thirst.
> The math also works if eating moist food reduces thirst, while dry food does not, but making dry food increase thirst should reduce walking by prompting a need to drink shortly after eating; normal design will helpfully put drinks near the usual eating spots.
> Drying is an IMPROVEMENT reaction that significantly changes the properties of the improved item. Both the base item being improved and the exact improving reagent are significant, and should be tracked in the finished product. Compare dye and glaze, which also display both of these behaviors.
4. Sun drying: “Simply leave the food exposed to sun and wind to allow the moisture to be carried off.”
Obviously, this option will not be available in all climates, and even locations that do allow it won’t necessarily do so during all seasons. Making it work well will require a much more detailed display for temperature, humidity, and preferably histories and forecasts of both. DF does include some sort of weather simulator, so most of these data are in the game somewhere, but sun drying only works if they are accessible to the player in fortress mode.
> Usually applied to fruit. Probably workable, but certainly not ideal, for meat (including fish). Leaf vegetables usually need to be cut into very small pieces to dry correctly. I’m not sure about squashes or roots.
> Sun drying, unlike the other methods, does nothing in particular to keep the food dry. Packaging items preserved this way for export will be tricky: effective export requires that the source, the destination, and most of the route is not too disruptive of the process. That said, a suitably airtight container can minimize issues from the trip and the destination.
Sun drying is definitely a skilled trade. This could mean Thresher, Herbalist, Grower, or a new skill.
> Some foods need to be cut into small pieces to dry properly.
> Depending on how the food is spread for sun and wind, it might need to be rearranged periodically so everything gets dry.
> The overseer also needs to watch the weather, so the food can be brought inside if rain looks likely.
> Sun drying will probably need a specialized zone, and counts as a long-term unattended reaction. The hard part will be linking this zone to respect humidity, temperature, rain, and climate.
5. Smoking: “Dry the food over a fire. The coating of smoke helps too.”
The distinguishing feature of smoking is that compounds from the smoke collect as a layer on the surface of the smoked food. Many have antibiotic or antioxidant properties, but the smoke only collects on the surface of the food; it does not penetrate at all, and is generally not sufficient in practice.
> For best preservation results, smoking should be combined with some method of drying. Fortunately, the flame required for smoking quite easily produces enough dry heat to dry the food. Unlike sun drying, smoking can be done in any climate. It is usually done indoors (in a smokehouse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokehouse)) so rain is not as disruptive of the process as it is for sun drying.
> Smoking is usually done on meat and some organs. Some plant foods and even cheeses are also smoked for flavor; for example, chipotle is smoked jalapenos.
> The traditional smoking wood in Europe is apparently alder, although various fruit (apple, plum) and nut (oak, hickory) trees can also be used, and apparently impart flavors to the meat (similar to that of their respective growth food item). Charcoal is also an option. I have also read about herbs or spices being added to the pile of smoking wood to give their flavors to the item being smoked, although I suspect that rubbing them onto the food directly would give better results.
> Smoking will benefit strongly from implementation of scrap wood from carpentry, or twigs that are usable for fuel but not lumber. So will charcoal and ash production, but that is drifting too far off topic.
> There are three distinct styles of smoking: cold smoking, hot smoking, and roasting.
> Cold smoking is primarily done for flavor, generally on meat which has already been salt cured. It does not cook the meat (usual temperature 20-30 C; 68-86 F). Drying of the food is also less than hotter smoking methods. This technique is not suitable as a stand alone method of preservation, so I will ignore it for the rest of this article.
> Hot smoking is the process that I assume will be most common in Dwarf Fortress: food (usually meat) is cooked over a smoky fire (52-80 °C; 126-176 F). This will also dry it somewhat, although the finished product is usually somewhat moist in texture. The familiar jerky is usually salt cured and hot smoked.
> Smoke roasting employs even higher temperatures than hot smoking (above 176 °F), drying the food out more in the process.
Smoking could be run several different ways:
1. At the butcher shop, and using Butcher skill. In this case, the Fishery would probably have a similar reaction.
2. At a separate building (smokehouse) next to the butcher shop (compare the Tanner’s shop we have now), probably still using Butcher skill. I don’t know how this idea should interact with the Fishery.
3. At the Kitchen (compare the current “render fat” reaction). May use Cooking or Butcher skill.
6. Salt curing: “Add salt to draw water out of the food by osmosis.”
Ground salt is added to the food to both dry it out and ensure it stays dry. Almost exclusively applied to meat and fish. Salted meat is noted for its long shelf life, and thus a very useful trade good. The salt itself would also be valuable.
> Depending on the original moisture content of the food, the water drawn out by the salt may be sufficient to produce a liquid brine, which results in “brine pickling,” covered below. Most vegetables treated with dry salt are thus brine pickled, rather than salt cured. For programming simplicity, it would probably be best to lump these under brine pickling. If this needs to be distinguished, “salt pickling” might be the best phrase.
> Salt can be acquired either from mined rock salt (which will become an economic stone, probably powdered at the millstone) or concentrating salt from seawater (probably using brine as an intermediate product). In either case, salt will be an extremely valuable trade good.
> I stated at the beginning of the section that “eating dry food seems likely to increase thirst.” Salted food is especially bad about this, much more than other methods of drying, since the salt must be concentrated and disposed of by the kidneys. (As a side note, this is also why people are advised to not drink seawater: it is more concentrated than human kidneys can achieve, so additional water from somewhere else is required to dispose of the salt that came with the seawater.)
This one may not need a skill or building at all.
> Programming seems easier with one, so use the Butcher shop and skill (or Fishery and Fish Cleaner skill).
> In the unlikely event that plants get processed this way, use the existing Farmer workshop and Thresher skill.
7. Sugar curing: “Add sugar to draw water out of the food by osmosis.”
Usually applied to fruit, and the product is called “candied fruit” (not to be confused with jams and preserves, which I have placed in the pickling section). Meat can also be dried with sugar.
> The comment under salt curing about drawing out enough water for pickling has its analogue with sugar: the result is “syrup pickling,” or, if it needs to be distinguished, “sugar pickling.”
> On the other hand, sugar can be metabolized by most creatures, so sugar-cured foods will not have the secondary thirst effect that salted ones do. This may make them a viable export good. It will be especially valuable to merchants, soldiers, and other travelers which have limited carrying capacity to handle the higher drink requirements imposed by salted food.
> Unlike salt, sugar is a potential target for fermentation. That said, many of the fermentation products are preservatives in their own right (such as alcohol, acetic acid, and lactic acid). Fermentation of the sugar tends to imply some degree of fermentation in the preserved product.
> Dwarves seem to start world generation with sweet pods domesticated (or at least reliably have them domesticated very quickly), but sugar cane and sugar beets (the main sources of refined sugar on Earth) are not yet implemented in the game, nor is tapping maple trees for sap (another source of syrup and sugar, much more important in earlier centuries). Sugarcane has been a very important cash crop on Earth, and sweet pods may likewise become a valuable cash crop for the dwarves, especially for selling to the humans and elves, which will often lack their own sources of sugar (and the salt that sugar often replaces).
Implementation follows Salt curing.
Pickling Series
Food is stored under a “pickling liquid,” which slows or prevents spoiling and often provides an environment for the food to ferment somewhat, changing its flavor and texture. All pickled products will need to be stored in water-tight containers.
> The pickling series was items 8-14. I ran out of space in this post (limit 40,000 characters), and decided that the pickling series should be kept together.
> Several pickling liquids are possible, and each works best with a certain range of foods. I identified seven segments, and ten reactions. Details in a future post.
Others
15. Potted meat: Meat is cooked (boiled or similar), then a layer of molten fat is poured over it. The fat is a type that is solid at room temperature, and after it hardens it forms an airtight barrier.
The DF reaction to produce this product will need a container (probably a jug) that is fire-safe and water-tight, a stack of meat, and a glob of tallow (specifically tallow: oil will not work). It will also need to be done at a fire pit or similar, and the reaction should include fuel for this.
> This method of preservation relies on an airtight seal, and opening the container breaks that seal, so I believe that, at least in practical terms, potted meat will be [EDIBLE_COOKED] (which implies emptying the jug in fairly short order) but not [EDIBLE_RAW] (which often implies taking only some food and leaving the rest).
16. Sausage: Animal intestine is used as a casing for other food items. I assume that the standard sausage of DF will be cooked and smoked before storing, and thus have a relatively long shelf life.
Possible ingredients for the filling include meat, organ meats (except intestine and tripe), fat/tallow, blood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_sausage), and grain flours (either directly or as bread crumbs). This may be the primary method of preserving most organ meats. A single sausage recipe will usually involve several different ingredients.
> Most sausage recipes include spices such as salt, onion, peppers, or garlic, which both add flavor and act as preservatives.
> Some recipes use tripe, rather than intestine, for the casing.
For eggs, you can note that preservations technik exist, there are just not common in "west". For example in Asia, eggs are buried to let fermentation process do their trick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_egg
Note that all the ingredients are available in the early game and that it seems to be "easy" to implement.
In the same way, for plants you have only cite west common technik, Japan conserve a lot of leaf/floyer type in salt. Which work well.
We can also notice that dwarves have, in fact, technique to make glass can. (they master in glass making and metals so...)
In the same way, Fish can be conserve like "Garrum" (Roman like) or Nioc Mam (same thing, asia like) sauce. Which is the more common method to conserve fish.
A lot of this was in the pickling section that got cut for space. I did try to draw attention to its absence.
Pickling Series
(...)
The pickling series was items 8-14
This line was bold for a reason! On the other hand, I do admit to focusing mostly on the techniques I am familiar with, which means western Europe.
My notes also include a dairy products section, but I knew it wouldn’t fit even before I had to cut the pickling section.
2. Ice box: “Store the food in a box with ice at the top, which will keep it colder.”
Ice boxes (and ice closets) will not work in the current game, since latent heat of fusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion) is not modeled: water currently has a heat of fusion of zero, which is what allows ponds to freeze and melt instantaneously. If heat of fusion were mentioned in the raws, it should be very close to the melting point, making its absence easy to check.
> An ice box generally works well on the same categories of food as a root cellar. It is less dependent on climate.
> Depending on the ratio of ice to food, some of the food might freeze, which damages most plant-based foods but extends the shelf life of most meats and organs. Freezing plants in a way that will have them relatively fresh after they thaw is possible, but the methods used on Earth usually involve liquid nitrogen, so I assume that it is beyond the tech level of DF.
> In climates that feature periodic freezing, ice can be harvested locally and stored in an insulated ice closet for use during the summer. This is even easier in permanently frozen climates like glaciers. If liquid water is also available, it can be poured on snow to make denser ice.
> Ice can be a viable export good, provided that insulation (or sheer mass) is sufficient to keep a worthwhile amount of it frozen during the journey. For best results, an entire wagon should be dedicated to ice and insulation, and filled as completely as possible. Merchants carry ice in huge lots or not at all.
A. On smaller scales, an ice box would be a furniture item, taking up (probably) one tile. Since it is not designed to be moved (or at least should be moved only while empty), total capacity (food plus ice) should be at least as large as the largest mobile container in the game, which is a minecart (and this is several times the size of a barrel, so the cabinets will consolidate stockpile space even without ice). As a food container, an ice box should be able to be placed on a food stockpile, and may demand such placement.
> Quality of furniture ice boxes may affect how long a given block of ice lasts (better sealing of the container, better placement of insulation layers, etc.).
> Even when the box has ice, food inside still has a shelf life, due to problems like freezer burn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freezer_burn). Given how infrequently dwarves eat, I don’t know what the shelf life of even raw foods should be to make sense, let alone how much an ice box should extend it.
> Ice boxes only took off after the industrial revolution, but that was due to improved transportation making ice supplies more reliable, not because the concept is beyond DF technology. There is apparently evidence of ice houses (or at least written orders for them to be built) before 1000 BC.
> As an inherent aspect of operations, ice boxes provide a supply of freshly melted water. If the water source that the ice froze from was drinkable, the melted ice will be as well.
> Nether-cap wood has a fixed temperature of 32 °F due to a mysterious process. Containers made of it will have most of the same effects as ice, and are much more portable and long-lasting. They would be extremely valuable for export, especially to humans (elves have their ethical complaints about killing trees). Complete storage rooms of nether-cap boards might also be an option.
B. On larger scales, ice can be put in a room floored with grates to allow the chilled air to flow to the food stockpile below (some solid floors may be useful to contain melted water). Storing ice for smaller ice boxes (an ice house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_house_(building)), rather than a cold closet) would replace the food stockpile with more ice.
> Additional levels of cold storage should be possible, again using grates on intermediate z-levels to allow flow of chilled air. The bottom floor should be mostly solid, but a properly designed drain for the melted water can significantly improve performance and efficiency (details in “Evaporative Refrigerator,” part C).
> To restrict heat flow, the complete cold room should have a minimum surface area for its volume. In theory, this is a sphere, but in the case of an ice closet there is a benefit to a constant vertical footprint for flow of chilled air. This means a cylinder, although a cube will be easier to designate (the cylinder version should still have a height roughly equal to its diameter, although individual tiles in DF are apparently not cubes).
> The cold room will benefit from insulation. Rock and brick are built in thick walls with high thermal mass, which damps out highly variable temperatures, but this is not the same as restricting heat flow into a consistently cold area (or away from a consistently hot one). Straw is a common choice in real life, as is sawdust (although neither is implemented in DF), although both are susceptible to rot in damp conditions.
> For best results, the rooms should be accessed by a staircase going at least as high as the top ice level, to restrict the flow of chilled air out of the stockpile and into the hallway. Furniture ice boxes should likewise be accessed mainly from the top, but that is less visible to the player.
Keep in mind, the nethercap is a perfectly-efficient, zero-maintenance, wholly renewable green (anti-)energy source. Nethercap wood (even after processing) keeps everything nearby at ice-cold levels. (Literally 0 centigrade) It wouldn't be hard to mitigate the effect of a nethercap wood "freezer" by driving it as a stake into the ground to take advantage of the massive heat-absorbing capacity of layer stone, and as such raise the temperature of things you don't want actually frozen to mere "cold" levels like 5 centigrade. Even in giant refrigeration rooms, just having a few planks of nethercap wood lying around in a big, reasonably sealed room is all it takes to keep the whole cavern at near-freezing.
The mere existence of nethercap makes any more complicated system like this ice water system you describe a lot of coding for an already-obsolete system. Nethercaps appear in infinite supply in any game that has access to caverns (at least 2 of them unless you mod nethercaps to be shallower). There's really little reason to bother coding what it takes to make more complex systems when nethercaps are so obviously superior to any other solution, and will always be available to any player who digs deep enough (just like magma).
Two replies here:
1. Inferior =/= Obsolete: In worldgen, even most dwarves don’t dig deep enough to get nether-cap (which is why it doesn’t show up in caravan inventory or the embark screen), let alone humans. Even if the nether-cap version is obviously superior for fortress mode, the ice version should still be relevant to the cities that an adventurer wanders through. On a related note, people in the world would know about snow and ice, but I don’t see how they could know about nether-cap, so why would they think to dig for it?
2. Secondary freezing and melting effects: With heat of fusion properly modeled, ponds and rivers will freeze slowly and from the top, not instantaneously and all the way through. This means that frozen murky pools are no longer impromptu drowning traps, and avoids the adventure mode YASD of swimming to boost stats when the pool freezes without warning. The icebox can wait; I want realistic slow freezing and thawing so temperate climates are safe. Thinner ice also allows tricks like ice fishing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_fishing). With fishermen tracking the ice, even thin ice does not present nearly as much drowning hazard as instant complete melting does now.
1. Root cellars: “Store food away from the heat of the day. With a bit more work, it can even be kept away from the heat of the summer.”
Root cellars rely on the “thermal mass” of the surrounding soil (or occasionally rock) to control temperature swings. One z-level below ground is probably sufficient to absorb temperature swings over at least one day, protecting food stored in the room from the higher temperatures of mid-day and afternoon. Three or four z-levels will likely be sufficient to absorb seasonal variations: the room will be nearly constant at the yearly average temperature.
> Note that “the yearly average temperature” can still be high enough to be problematic in some climates. Tropical (Hot) and subtropical (Warm) climates don’t have a winter to provide a low swing. This leaves only daily temperature swings to work with. That can still be significant, and some molecules are specifically degraded by light, more than heat, but such root cellars are still not nearly as effective as those in colder climates.
> Dwarves mostly live underground, so storing food underground is natural for them. Normal dwarven food stockpiles inherently provide a root cellar effect, especially if located a respectable distance from the entrance and anything that requires a fire.
> The root cellar is mostly used for root vegetables (hence the name), fruits, and squashes (but not too close to each other: one bad apple spoils the whole barrel, and even a good apple causes problems for potatoes). Limited effectiveness (unless supplementing other preservation techniques) for meat, organs, and leaf vegetables. Usually redundant for grains and oil. I don’t know about tallow.
Oh, and I might as well mention this as well...
At least in the current game, all tiles marked "underground" have the same temperature. (IIRC, 7 centigrade.) It doesn't matter if you're 10 feet below the surface of arctic tundra or blasted desert, much less daily fluctuations of temperature, it's the same hard-coded temperature unless it's near magma or nethercap or something else that forces temperature changes. You can replace the idea of a "root cellar" with literally any underground storage area (which would, by extension, be any storage area not created by people explicitly doing aboveground "challenge" fortresses).
If you would want something different, it would take explicitly asking for a change in the game's mechanics. (Likewise, using nethercap wood to keep things cool only keeps things in the same tile at 0 centigrade, and that has no impact on the temperature even a single tile away.)
Huh. So that's why digging down to magma is such a massive undertaking on Earth but routine in DF.
I can wait for a change in that mechanic. Heat transfer is still tracked somewhere, so modifying the interface to display it in Look{k} mode should be a quick tweak. Since most of the underground is a single fixed temperature, exceptions are always significant. Meanwhile, allowing us to directly see the temperature outside is the start of a weather-based civilian alert (too hot or too cold for people to live long).
With those comments made, on to the pickling series:
Pickling Series
Food is stored under a “pickling liquid,” which slows or prevents spoiling and often provides an environment for the food to ferment somewhat, changing its flavor and texture. All pickled products will need to be stored in water-tight containers.
> Like drying, pickling is an IMPROVEMENT reaction that needs to track both the improved item and the reagent used to improve it.
> In biochemical terms (which is not the same as programming terms), pickling processes largely collapse into two broad categories: in “chemical pickling,” the active ingredient directly inhibits problematic microbes (possibly assisted by boiling and airtight containers). In fermentation pickling, the pickling liquid fosters microbes which leave the food in an edible state after they are done processing it.
> Pickling involves several distinct chemical processes, and there might need to be a list of REACTION_CLASS tokens to reflect this (both the processes that work well for this food item and the process that this liquid can provide). Each reaction token (except lye and maybe brine) has several options that should qualify. This hierarchy also applies to smoking and sugar curing, and possibly to salt curing as well (sea salt and rock salt in that case).
> Some processes produce a slurry or paste (jam and soy sauce, for example), but if the food remains relatively intact, so it can be removed from the container separately from the pickling liquid, it may be possible to re-use the pickling liquid. Sometimes this will require removing surplus water.
> Many pickling recipes also call for secondary spices or herbs as supplemental preservatives, or simply for flavor. Examples include ginger, garlic, cloves, and cinnamon (cucumbers are frequently pickled with brine as the main agent and dill as an additional spice).
> Some pickle recipes also call for more than one type of food (counted separately from spices) to ferment in the same container, so pickle recipes can approach the complexity of some stews.
> In general, most pickling reactions probably shouldn’t take much skill; exceptions will be mentioned as they come up. Adding secondary spices and preservatives may pull in Cooking skill.
8. Jam: “Fruit is preserved by sugar (or syrup) and partial drying.”
The drying is assisted by heat, so the product is also fully cooked and initially sterile (jam is a chemical pickling process). Jam is not actually unique in this trait: some other chemical pickling processes also call for heating to help the active ingredient in the pickling liquid reach the middle of the food more effectively.
> The reaction to make jam will be done at the Kitchen, and use Cooking skill.
> Jam is placed under the pickling category due to the storage conditions required by the finished product: the homemade jam recipe I am familiar with (using fruit from the cherry bushes we have in the yard) produces a liquid, and even the more rigid jellies are still soft enough to require a water-tight container for proper storage. The heat drying process requires the container to also be fire-safe, which means ceramic, metal, or glass.
> Jam is almost always made from fruit. Most fruits already have plenty of natural sugar (which reduces the amount that must be added), and are generally fairly high in acid (low pH, usually in the 4-5 range) as well, which also helps control microbes.
> In addition to fruit, some other vegetables can be preserved with similar techniques. Some types of mint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_jelly) can be processed this way.
> It is apparently possible to process meat into a jelly (called aspic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspic)), but I personally have very little knowledge of this dish.
9. Brine: Similar to salt curing, brine pickling draws water out of the food and any microbes that might rot it.
As mentioned above under “salt curing,” sometimes dry salt is added, and the water part of the pickling liquid is drawn from the moist food by osmosis. Cabbage (sauerkraut) is pickled by this method. For programming simplicity, it may be best to lump this under brine pickling.
> Meat can be brine pickled, as can most vegetables (root, squash, and some leaves; fruit is more commonly treated with syrup). Cucumbers are part of what I called “squashes” in the plant foods cluster above.
> Fermentation is much more significant during brine pickling than salt curing: the water content is much higher, so a much wider range of microbes can remain active.
> I have read about pickled eggs, which seem to also use brine.
10. Syrup: Syrup pickling draws water out of the food and any microbes that might rot it, similar to salt curing, sugar curing, and brine pickling.
Syrup pickling is mainly applied to foods that are already relatively sweet (fruits, and spices that usually accompany them). Meat might also be syrup pickled, although I suspect that sugar curing would be more common in that case. Some organs might be easier to preserve with syrup pickling than drying.
> “Syrup” currently includes dwarven syrup and honey. Likely future options are cane syrup (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarcane), beet syrup (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet), and maple syrup (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_syrup). Sugar extraction processes also produce a form of molasses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molasses), which may also be a possibility.
> As mentioned above under “salt curing” and “sugar curing,” sometimes dry sugar is added, with the water part of the pickling liquid drawn from the moist food by osmosis.
> As mentioned above under “sugar curing,” sugar is a potential target of fermentation, which will affect the flavor and texture of the finished product. Fermentation will be much more significant in syrup pickling than in sugar curing or brine pickling.
11. Alcohol: Alcohol is toxic to most microbes.
Alcohol is a chemical pickling agent. This means that the food to be preserved is placed in the barrel after alcohol fermentation is complete; distilled alcohol may give better results if it is available.
> Most things that can pickle with syrup should be able to pickle with alcohol (This is fruit, meat, and possibly some organs. Alcohol might have additional options, such as some squashes.
> I don’t know how much osmosis effect alcohol has, but certainly far less than salt or sugar. Its main preservative effect comes from the fact that it is much more toxic to microbes than to humans. That said, it is still somewhat toxic to humans. I’m not sure about dwarves; that depends on how close to human they are supposed to be.
> Fruit can also be placed in the barrel earlier, to ferment along with the alcoholic drink being produced. Obviously, this is a different reaction, and uses a different recipe.
> Some other items may also be able to use the “fermentation alcohol” reaction class (or ferment inside a beer). Soy sauce (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soy_sauce) and fish sauce (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_sauce) both ferment with yeast under brine or salt, and soy sauce adds grain to the fermenting mix as well.
> The alcohol chemical preservation probably doesn’t require much skill. The fermentation reaction does, but I don’t know which skill makes the most sense. Probably Brewer until a better idea comes up.
12. Vinegar: Vinegar is not implemented in the game yet, but in practical terms should be fairly easy to produce, both at the intended technology level and within the game’s code.
The active ingredient in vinegar is acetic acid, essentially partially oxidized alcohol. Vinegar literally means “wine sour” or “wine spoiled” (derived from French, a language that places adjectives after their nouns), so some production could even occur unintentionally. Like alcohol, vinegar is a chemical pickling agent.
> I’m not sure about specific anti-microbe properties like alcohol has, but it is an acid, and low pH inhibits most microbes.
> Most things that can take the chemical version of alcohol pickling should be able to use vinegar.
13. Lye: While the use of lye to preserve food is not common, it does work: the high pH inhibits microbes, similar to the low pH given by vinegar.
Lye pickling gives a rather distinctive flavor, and I understand that most items that use it should be rinsed with fresh water as part of the process of preparing them for consumption.
> Some of the fat naturally present in all fresh foods (the cell membrane, at the very minimum) will react with the lye to form soap, which does affect the texture and flavor of foods preserved by this method.
> Examples include lutefisk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutefisk) and century eggs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_egg).
> Somewhere in the vicinity of lye pickling is nixtamalization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization), a process usually applied to maize, and calling for lime (calcium hydroxide) in addition to (sometimes instead of) lye. This is part of the process of making maize flour cohesive enough to form a dough, and also unlocks certain nutrients.
14. Vegetable Oil: Certain oils do have anti-microbe properties (olive oil was mentioned in particular), and most exclude oxygen from the food to be preserved more effectively than a water-based solution would.
I assume that vegetable oil will usually be too limited in supply for regular use as a pickling liquid, although part of that may stem from seeds in DF not forming stacks, so any process using them (such as pressing some for oil) is very tedious for the player to designate.
> Most meats and organs should be able to be preserved in oil. Some degree of drying beforehand (over a fire or in the sun) may give somewhat better results. I don’t know how helpful (or critical) smoking and salt should be.
Summary: There are at least six pickling liquids, and at least 10 relevant reactions.
1. Brine (mix of chemical and fermentation)
2. Salt, with osmosis to make brine.
3. Syrup (mix of chemical and fermentation)
4. Sugar, with osmosis to make syrup
5. Jam uses both drying over heat and added sugar or syrup. This reaction calls for Cooking skill.
6. Alcohol as chemical pickling, preferably with distilled alcohol if it is available.
7. Alcohol from brewing simultaneously with an alcohol fermentation source. This calls for valid brewing ingredients, not for a finished alcoholic drink.
> It definitely requires skill, probably Brewer unless someone else has a better suggestion.
> Some processes use different cultures, and do not produce alcohol.
8. Vinegar (chemical pickling, similar to distilled alcohol).
9. Lye (chemical pickling, but reacts with the food more than the others do).
10 Vegetable oil (mostly chemical pickling)
[...]
So far as worldgen goes, I'm specifically questioning whether ice houses are period-appropriate, or whether they're anachronistic. Yes, there may be (much) more labor going into an aquaduct than one convoy of ice, but your aquaduct doesn't melt in a week, and they could build it over the course of years. Roman aquaducts still exist in places, and if they were putting those up on a daily basis, Europe would be floating away.
Ice boxes and ice houses, to the best of my knowledge, didn't really become anything beyond a novelty for kings until after the invention of trains, because it takes tremendous amounts of labor to get 7 tonnes of ice carved, then loaded onto a 7.5 tonne "wagon" and sent hundreds of kilometers away. And that's labor that needs to be supplied fairly continuously (at least, throughout the winter), which wouldn't have been terribly feasible to do on a large scale with serfs that generally didn't leave their hamlets in their whole lives, since they need to actually have a large farming community already in the area where you're harvesting ice. (I.E. a big lake.) Ice houses didn't really take off until after the industrial revolution freed up more labor and created better forms of transportation. (It also takes specific tools to cut tons of ice in a hurry. They made ice-cutting saws -steam-powered ones- for that job. That takes past-the-cutoff-date commonly produced Bessemer steel to make common steel tools that won't break carving 1-ton slabs of ice economically feasible.)
As far as it goes for players, I think it comes down to the value of eggs or vegetables versus milk or honey in the current implementation of the game. Eggs are easy, and can easily feed a whole fortress with minimal effort, and farmed crops are self-sustaining once set up, while milk requires constantly punching the button to milk the cows again and again every few game months, and beehives take forever to get up to the point where they provide even a tiny trickle of food. If nethercap is going to be easier to set up, I don't see many people spending more effort to set up an ice house that will require continuous maintenance.
Also on the same front is the fact that for anyone to even WANT to stuff their beef in the freezer, then jerky, pickles, and jam need to be made into somehow inferior foods. After all, if I can preserve my fruit near-indefinitely as candied fruits or jam, my vegetables as pickles, my grain as just flat-out grain, and my meat as jerky, and all foods are totally equal, why should I bother with an ice house in the first place? (Especially if those other options are built on existing workshops I'll already have, while the ice house requires snow/ice collection labors and storage facilities.)
That said, if it is possible using the same general sets of rules as we're already going to get, that's fine, but again, I think it's more of the sort of thing that should be an emergent gameplay consequence of better rules regarding thermodynamics than an actual explicit gameplay feature that the game will demand you do (to the point of having AI routines just to understand what an icehouse is and how to maintain it), in much the same way that pump stacks, dwarven perpetual motion devices, and minecart shotguns are just emergent gameplay consequences of the rules of the game, rather than the explicit way the game expects you to play.
Period appropriate: Three Wikipedia links: Ice house#History (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_house_(building)#History), Qanat#Ice_storage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#Ice_storage), and Yakhchal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l). I haven’t managed to follow the citations (I tried, but the links didn’t help), but if this is accurate then ice houses were built and used by Babylonia, Persia, China, and Rome. All of these are well before the cutoff date. All of these were also large empires with large labor pools, as I mentioned in passing earlier.
The yakhchal article also mentioned drawing water from the qanat in winter to freeze in prepared ponds or basins, located in the immediate vicinity of the “ice pit” (complete with a wall to block sunlight from reaching the ice pond, so ice freezes faster and deeper), then hauling it inside before the weather warms up. Hauling ice from “hundreds of kilometers away” is not necessary, if the region has a winter season that is cold enough for ice to be produced locally. The hauling can be done with wheelbarrows and buckets. I admit that the cutting may be a bigger issue, but dwarven mining with a pick is ridiculously fast, so this idea should hold at least until that problem gets a more realistic balance; we can re-evaluate at that point.
Toy for the wealthy: Storing ice when the ambient temperature is above its melting point is subject to the square cube law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law), which produces a powerful economy of scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale), and the minimum viable scale is very large. Leaving aside whether the above human civilizations actually did distribute the ice widely, dwarves seem to be much more egalitarian then humans (leaving aside your “Class Warfare” thread to make them less so). If dwarves pull it off at all, it will be a community building, not just reserved for nobles.
Meanwhile, a lot of DF players build silly projects just because they can (the wiki has three articles on the subject: Stupid dwarf trick (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Stupid_dwarf_trick), megaproject (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Megaproject), and playstyle challenge (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Playstyle_challenge)). A proper ice house probably counts as a stupid dwarf trick, but it does not really need to be anything more. People in real life got along fine with mostly drying and pickling, and DF can follow suit.
The hungry hungry hominids thread did mention in passing an expectation that at least some types of preserved food would have lower happiness/flavor boosts than fresh, and the cooling series would count as fresh for this purpose. The benefit is probably minor, but adding it is doable.
As for the resulting values:
- Dried food should lose value unless it's seasoned while drying. This is subsistence level food preservation for fortresses that either lack access to other additives for proper curing and pickling or for when times are tough.
- Other food preservation methods should have a chance to appreciate the ingredient's value somewhat. Smoked and cured meats along with candied fruits and vegetables could potentially be more valuable than the ingredients that produced them, for example.
- Cooking will always yield a much more valuable food item regardless.
Emergent gameplay: I already said that, at least for NPCs in adventure mode, the coding to keep an ice house supplied with ice should not be much different from the coding to keep a shop supplied with goods. The version where ice is harvested from lakes or mountains can borrow from code for temporary logging camps, and the version with special freezing ponds can borrow code from farming crops (there is a designated area analogous to a field, plus distinct phases analogous to planting and harvesting, and the process can only be done at certain times of the year). This shouldn’t be very hard.
Most players will get along quite happily without one. Some will build them to brag about the fact that they can, and the game’s diplomacy code might be able to use similar bragging (to other civs in the world). An ice house would be far from the only brag-worthy construction project in either case.
One convoy of ice: DF does not model erosion in fortress mode (just in world gen), but aqueducts in real life do need to be inspected and repaired periodically. Rivers are subject to erosion, and for many purposes an aqueduct is an artificial river. Some aqueducts have the opposite problem: deposits of silt or minerals from hard water.
I admit that the aqueduct has a much larger front to load, but I was trying to draw a parallel between maintenance on an aqueduct (the qanat type is especially noted for silt deposits that need to be cleared) and convoying ice.
If foods will become perishable, could we have temperature affect their shelf life? Seems like a great use for nether wart and glaciers and could be a window to an ice trade in the future (historically ice could be transported a fair distance in insulated containers), and you would want to store different things in different areas (you would put fruits, vegetables, and unpreserved meats underground where it's cold, while you'd put grains and salted meats outside in dry climates or on warm stone to keep them dry).
It’s been getting requested for a while, and I assume it’s planned. Note the date on this quote from the “Hungry Hungry Hominids” thread:
Drying should be able to be made faster by heat. We may need a more finely-grained concept of fuel (I don't mean [just] the charcoal/coke type of fuel) for this to make sense.
Temperature should play a part in food rotting, which would also imply that freezing food (i.e. storing it in a freezing environment, i.e. a stockpile in a chamber dug out of a glacier) would make it not rot (but you could have a risk of freezer burn if it's not stored in barrels)
To avoid bogging down the thread any more than I already have, on with the “food reactions” series:
Prepared Meals
Prepared meals would need a much more detailed interface to work properly. However, the majority of prepared meals can be collapsed into three main categories: Stews & related, Sandwiches, and Salads.
> Note that not all recipes are for meals. There are also intermediate products that are complex enough to require their own recipes. The main ones are Breads and Sauces. Adding secondary spices when pickling or making jerky (smoking or salt/sugar curing) would also pull in the recipe interface. Some types of cheese also qualify, and I’m not sure where trail mix should go.
> In all cases, the primary distinguishing feature of a recipe is that it makes most sense to design it with an in-game interface, rather than establish it beforehand in the raws or the game’s code.
> Detailed commentary on exactly how the recipe interface should run fits better in this other thread on re-working the reaction system (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=144512.0).
Stews and related
“Stew” is a set of ingredients boiled in a pot. All stews (and related dishes like porridge and pudding) are eaten in a bowl with a spoon. Most (but not all) are served hot. A stew requires a broth, and usually includes a thickener and several different solid ingredients (which come in several different sub-types). “Stews and related” can be savory or sweet.
> This article on prepared meals covers stews first because most of the ingredient categories also apply to other recipe types, or at least have some analogue. Analogues in other types of recipe will be mentioned as they come up.
> With the exception of broth, all of the other ingredient types are optional in a stew recipe, although at least one should be present.
1. Broth: The base of a stew is the liquid in which other ingredients are boiled.
> Water: Plain water is the most basic and obvious option. The other broth options can all be described as flavored water.
> Milk: Also straightforward. A related option is whey, a byproduct of cheese making (whey may be more common in practice). Certain types of cheese can also serve in this role, and possibly yogurt as well. Note that Judaism has a taboo against serving milk and meat in the same meal, which may be food for thought in DF entities and religions.
> Alcohol: Beer, wine, and mead. A related option is fresh fruit juice that has not been fermented into wine. Many modern soups use a base of tomato juice or concentrated tomato juice.
> Blood: If the animal produces edible meat, its blood would logically be edible as well. It would certainly be possible to collect blood at the butcher shop from the animal being butchered, requiring a water-tight container as the only additional tool. It might also be possible to collect some blood from living animals, similar to the way milk is collected currently (and, unlike milk, blood can be collected from male animals). Note that blood offends a food taboo in Judaism, even blood from animals which produce kosher meat, which may be food for thought in DF entities and religions.
> Most of the liquids listed in the Pickling section would probably work as the broth for a stew (lye is questionable, and oil requires different procedures).
> If a particular pickling recipe produces a distinct pickling liquid (the solid food does not disintegrate or dissolve into a homogeneous paste), the pickled item may provide both broth and a solid ingredient for the recipe.
Broth in other recipe types:
In many types of recipe, broth is replaced with sauce.
> Pickling liquid (see the pickling section (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=60681.msg7526698#msg7526698)) also occupies (a renamed version of) this slot.
> Breads need a liquid to suspend the flour, producing a dough or batter rather than a loose powder. Tentatively called “binder.”
2. Base: Most recipes have a primary solid “base” ingredient; the details are determined by the context of the exact recipe in question. I am assuming here that stews usually don’t have an equivalent, so they replace this slot with “Crust,” which is optional.
Some stews are prepared with a crust to contain steam and produce a more moist product.
> Certain recipes labeled as pies (such as Shepherd’s pie and pot pie) have some crust, but not enough to provide a handle. This article will sort such a pie as a stew.
> In the context of a stew, a solid base is an inversion of sorts from a sauce. The base is cooked separately from the main stew, and relatively plain. The stew is poured over the base before serving (or in the process of serving).
> Rice and mashed potatoes are common choices in this niche.
> Bread bowls (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_bowl) are also best described as a base.
In some ways, the liquid broth of a stew is actually closest to what a base means in other recipes: one is absolutely mandatory, a lot of the meal’s properties are determined by the choice, and more than one is extremely rare.
Bases in other recipe types:
> In bread, the base is almost always a flour. Additional flour types can also be added, and these occupy a modified version of the Thickener slot (except sugar, which is a spice, or possibly added in large enough quantities to qualify as a flavor vegetable). Some recipes even call for un-milled grain seeds.
> In pickling, the base is the main food being preserved, usually a meat, fruit, or squash. It sets the options for pickling liquid (broth), spices, and secondary preserved foods (usually restricted to the same category as the base: meat, fruit, or squash).
3. Thickener: Added to slow the broth to a more viscous gravy.
Almost always a starch of some sort; usually some variety of flour, although there are potential alternatives like potatoes and cassava.
> Oil seed press cake can be a thickener or a variant on the theme of noodles, depending on how it acts in the pot.
> Increasing amounts of thickener (relative to a given amount of broth) produce, in rough order: soup, gruel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruel), pudding, and porridge.
> Stew seems to be distinguished more by the ratio of solid ingredients to broth, which places it outside this spectrum.
In other recipes:
Sauce uses thickener just like stew. It does expand the options, particularly to certain cheeses and other dairy products.
> Some bread recipes call for more than one type of flour. In that case, one flour is designated as the “main” flour (occupies the “base” slot), and one or more additional flour types can be added in a version of the Thickener slot. This should use a different name; possibly “Filler”?
4. Meat: As a stew ingredient, this includes fish and most organs.
Most stew recipes that I am familiar with don’t include more than one species of meat, although that may just be my own limited reference pool.
In other recipes:
The meat category applies relatively intact to sandwiches, although different slicing patterns are favored.
5. Bulk Vegetables: A large portion of the calorie content of many stews is provided by vegetables of various sorts.
> Root vegetables are common. They include carrots, potatoes, turnips, and others.
> Leaf vegetables are not common in the stews I am familiar with, but cabbage and celery are called for by some recipes.
> Savory fruits include squashes, tomatoes, and others.
> It is fairly common to include more than one item from this category within the same stew. This also applies to beans and flavor vegetables.
In other recipes:
Bulk vegetables apply relatively intact to sandwiches and salads. Lettuce and other leaf vegetables are most common.
> Breads don’t really have a bulk vegetables category, but they do have a “mashed vegetable” or “paste vegetable” slot, which is relevant to banana bread and zucchini bread.
6. Flavor Vegetables: Some vegetable ingredients are primarily added for flavor. They are intermediate between bulk vegetables and spices.
> Onions (a root vegetable) are usually in this category.
> Peppers and probably some other savory fruits.
> Fruit added to gruel and porridge as a sweetener also meets this description. Bread also has this slot.
> Some plants are flavor vegetables in fresh form, but spices in dried form. Onion definitely meets this description, and my reading seems to indicate that garlic and ginger do as well.
In other recipes:
Some breads can accept dried fruit, similar to the gruel and porridge above.
> Salads can use a wide range of flavor vegetables (the list of options depends on the type of salad).
7. Beans and related: When beans are added to stews, they are usually in the form of whole (not milled) seeds.
> Grains can be used this way as well. Rice is most associated with this use, followed by wheat (known in this case as bulgur (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgur)).
> This list is not exhaustive, and I will not try to make it so.
In other recipes:
Some types of salad also use whole seeds (my family often sprinkles shelled sunflower seeds on lettuce salads at home).
> Some types of bread also call for whole seeds to be mixed into the dough. It may or may not match any of the flour types used in the bread.
> Some types of nuts are usually used in a chopped form (walnuts, pecans, etc.); they will be lumped here for lack of a better slot.
8. Noodles and related: Noodles and related items are covered in detail in the “Bread” section.
> Other recipe types usually don’t have an equivalent.
9. Spices and Herbs: These are added in very small quantities, not enough to increase the stack size of a prepared meal. They do, however, add flavor and sometimes color, which increases the value per unit.
> The difference between an herb and a spice is which part of the plant it came from: herbs are leaves, stems, or flowers; spices are other plant parts. This article generally lumps herbs within spices.
> Spices classically formed a major aspect of trade, due to high value by volume and weight, and long shelf life (particularly in dried form) to handle long journeys.
In other recipes:
Spices occupy a relatively consistent role, regardless of the type of recipe.
> Salt curing and sugar curing both have a slot for the desiccant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiccant), although both salt and sugar are spices in almost any other recipe.
> Some types of candy use sugar as the base (this includes caramel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caramel)), although I am not certain that these types are period appropriate. On the other hand, sweet pods mean that dwarves have much more ready access to sugar than most of Earth did during the intended tech period, so there is more opportunity for them to be invented.
10. Cheese: I am not personally familiar with any stew recipes that call for cheese, although that might just be my own small reference pool. However, cheese is used in other types of prepared meal (salads and sandwiches), and qualifies as its own category of solid ingredient.
This especially applies to relatively firm types of cheese.
> In contrast, curd cheese is more likely to be found as a thickener, or even a broth, in certain types of sauce.
In other recipes:
Many types of sandwich use sliced cheese.
> I’m not sure about cheese as such, but whey is related, and might be used in some types of bread as a combination binder and leavening.
11. Eggs: Eggs are liquid in the raw state (not counting the shell, which is usually discarded), but most bird eggs “set up” during cooking, and are relatively solid afterward. This gives them distinct culinary properties.
Eggs can be added to stews, although the one recipe I am familiar with is labeled a sauce.
> Using eggs in a stew may mean cracking them in directly, or they may be hard boiled and diced first. The latter gives results overlapping those of the Meat category.
In other recipes:
Eggs have a very wide range of uses. Even recipes that don’t really accept meat can still use eggs.
> Several types of bread use eggs. Pancakes are particularly noted for this.
> Egg salad might be considered a sauce, although it is used quite differently from the usual pattern.
12. Oil: Stews don’t usually call for oil, but a lot of other recipe types do, and it offers unique features and benefits. As I am using the term here, “oil” includes vegetable oils, tallow, and butter. Some recipes may accept only a subset of this.
> Stir fry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stir_frying) is related to stew (the finished meal has a lot of similarities), although many of the details are different. Oil replaces the broth, and there is less of it than there would be of a water-based broth.
> Deep frying (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_frying) is a different category, but also uses an oil, rather than a broth, as the primary liquid.
> Many recipes use a thin layer of oil (including butter and tallow) to prevent other components from sticking to the pan. Sometimes it is spread as a layer, sometimes it is actually mixed in. The recipe interface may make the distinction, but reactions don’t really have that kind of detail.
> Some types of bread product use oil (usually butter) as the primary binder, rather than water mixing with the flour.
A. Perpetual stew: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew) While this method of cooking is not familiar to modern players, it definitely deserves a mention, since it fits the time period that DF is intended to emulate; a discussion of foods in a medieval fantasy setting would not be complete without covering it.
In a perpetual stew, the pot is seldom emptied all the way. Instead, stew is removed as people need to be served, while broth and other ingredients are added to the partial pot as they become convenient.
> One important feature of a perpetual stew is the way flavors from previous “batches” linger in the pot. The number of refillings through which a particular flavor will persist depends on the strength of the particular flavor and how deeply the pot is emptied between refillings.
> The old song “Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old” probably refers to the perpetual stew method of cooking. That said, as long as the stew is boiled between adding new ingredients and serving the stew, there is little opportunity for either significant fermentation of the contents or food-borne illness: regular boiling of the stew keeps it relatively sterile.
> Breads and sauces are intermediate products, but complex enough to deserve recipes of their own. This might provide a starting point for coding the way flavors linger in a perpetual stew: the second batch could treat what is left of the first as something vaguely resembling a sauce. That said, I’m not sure how high this stack of sauces could go while maintaining sane behavior. There definitely will need to be some mechanic to allow ingredients to “fall off” the end of the stack.
Period appropriate:
[...]
Toy for the wealthy:
The point I'm trying to make is that the exclusivity of most of this to the wealthy for that same reason of economy of scale is why it shouldn't be an assumed part of every worldgen human civilization.
There were water clocks in atiquity, too, but they're only in the game as emergent gameplay because they're exceptional things that only a few people have ever done, and hence, they're unique selling points of individual player fortresses, rather than seeing giant pump-and-pressure-plate-based mechanical systems in every random fort or human town.
Keeping ice houses strictly in the realm of emergent gameplay from player actions is where I think ice houses should go. (Same with qanats, actually...)
I don’t think this debate will go any farther. I draw analogies with versatile systems that are required for other aspects that are much more critical, and figure that extending them to something like this should be fairly easy. You argue that they should be too expensive for NPCs to build. I don’t think either of us will be convinced at this point.
Qanats, on the other hand, are actually beyond the gameplay I can figure out. The distances involved usually require sending diggers off the map, and last I heard that feature was only partially implemented. Sending military squads to fetch artifacts is a good start, but not sufficient. For that matter, a regular aqueduct would also involve sending workers and supplies off the map (building materials for the aqueduct itself, and food for workers and guards) and given the way construction and mining currently work (this to say, very unrealistically) a qanat is actually easier to build.
There were circumstances in the real world that led to the development and use of both ice houses and qanats. Dwarf Fortress is detailed and realistic enough that these circumstances can arise in its worlds, and the proper responses should be available.
To avoid bogging down the thread any more than I already have,
I wouldn't worry about bogging the thread down. This thread is from years ago, and hasn't moved much since then, so it's not like it was going anywhere else for you to interrupt it, and you're bringing some vitality back to it.
Thanks. Good to know.
> Most of the liquids listed in the Pickling section would probably work as the broth for a stew (lye is questionable, and oil requires different procedures).
Remind me not to try your lye corn chowder if I ever come over to eat at your place. :P
I did say “most.” For that matter, even vinegar is usually more of a spice in the broth, rather than acting as broth itself. I’m not sure about alcoholic drinks either. I think I would mostly use whey once it is implemented and milking is properly automated.
Egg noodles
11. Eggs: Eggs are liquid in the raw state (not counting the shell, which is usually discarded), but most bird eggs “set up” during cooking, and are relatively solid afterward. This gives them distinct culinary properties.
Eggs can be added to stews, although the one recipe I am familiar with is labeled a sauce.
> Using eggs in a stew may mean cracking them in directly, or they may be hard boiled and diced first. The latter gives results overlapping those of the Meat category.
In other recipes:
Eggs have a very wide range of uses. Even recipes that don’t really accept meat can still use eggs.
> Several types of bread use eggs. Pancakes are particularly noted for this.
> Egg salad might be considered a sauce, although it is used quite differently from the usual pattern.
Two words: Egg noodles.
Egg drop soup, for example, is made with chicken broth brought to a boil, and then drizzling egg into the boiling soup so that they set into a solid as a train of thin noodles.
Plenty of Chinese soups involve eggs.
I was under the impression that egg noodles were mostly flour (relatively conventional dough). I seem to remember seeing “wide egg noodles” in dried form, which would have implied that.
> Now that I have the reminder, I have eaten egg drop soup once or twice. What I remember was a lot more homogeneous than the description I looked up said it should be.
Prepared Meals
Prepared meals would need a much more detailed interface to work properly. However, the majority of prepared meals can be collapsed into three main categories: Stews & related, Sandwiches, and Salads.
Well, the rest of this thread covers this in pretty heavy detail, and I participated in it back then, too, so...
I think that's a rather gross oversimplification, as unless you count a roasted game animal as a "stew & related", it's not covered, and I know there were plenty of times people just had a shank of mutton. Similarly, various forms of baked goods outside of (the somewhat anachronistic) sandwiches were very common foods. That's not even starting on any culture that ate rice as their starch... Is pickled vegetables, a slice of grilled fish, some miso soup, and some rice, all separated into different dishes (the classic Japanese breakfast) a sandwich? A stew? A salad? Even if you say the soup is a separate stew, and the pickles are a separate salad, the rice is what, a sandwich? And some simply grilled fish is a stew?
Likewise, I'm not sure you would really want to go into the details on this, as it may require a vast amount of micromanagement on the player's account if it did. I already don't ranch cows because they take up too much micromanagement needing to remember to milk them, and needing grazing pasture micromanagement, while just designating some land for farming and having the seeds to start growing is all I need to have an indefinite stream of food getting cooked. The system should be designed with an eye towards how it will impact the player.
I'd rather see something more like the "mead hall" setup I mentioned earlier in this thread, where players set up several workshops in the back room of their tavern that have some broad guideline for what sort of food they are meant to produce, and then set it out as options for the dwarves (or other tavern guests) to choose from. I'd also want to tie this in with ideas like flavor profiles (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=155850.msg6923542#msg6923542) (or alternately, nutrition systems), so that they work in conjunction to give players an idea of what to aim for. I.E. you have players set up a workshop serving a spicy dish, one serving a sweet dish, one serving a salty dish, etc. That way, you basically just set up however many workshops as it takes to satisfy the flavor categories, and just keep them stocked with ingredients to throw in their meals.
10. Cheese: I am not personally familiar with any stew recipes that call for cheese, although that might just be my own small reference pool.
Especially if you're throwing basically any sort of curry or roast with a sauce into the "stew" bin, there are tons of uses for cheese, mostly as a sauce. You might want to look up, for example, alfredo sauce (and a ton of French or Northern Italian cooking), or pretty much anything paneer is used for.
Also, yogurt is used in a lot of similar ways, including as a marinade, at least in India.
Many types of sandwich use sliced cheese.
Again, this is really anachronistic. Sliced deli meats and cheeses are a modern invention. The entire concept of a sandwich was invented in the 19th century. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Montagu,_4th_Earl_of_Sandwich#The_sandwich)
Historically, people ate pies. Chicken pot pie is a decent example of a "main meal" pie, it has some meat and some vegetables. Fruit pies existed back then too, of course.
Pies also make a lot more sense as a means of storage and serving to large numbers of people in a dining hall, as you can just set out a pie on a table, people take a slice, and the pie is replaced as it is consumed.
12. Oil: Stews don’t usually call for oil, but a lot of other recipe types do, and it offers unique features and benefits. As I am using the term here, “oil” includes vegetable oils, tallow, and butter. Some recipes may accept only a subset of this.
> Stir fry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stir_frying) is related to stew (the finished meal has a lot of similarities), although many of the details are different. Oil replaces the broth, and there is less of it than there would be of a water-based broth.
> Deep frying (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_frying) is a different category, but also uses an oil, rather than a broth, as the primary liquid.
> Many recipes use a thin layer of oil (including butter and tallow) to prevent other components from sticking to the pan. Sometimes it is spread as a layer, sometimes it is actually mixed in. The recipe interface may make the distinction, but reactions don’t really have that kind of detail.
> Some types of bread product use oil (usually butter) as the primary binder, rather than water mixing with the flour.
You can't have French cooking without tons of butter. Likewise, stir-fries and fried chicken are apparently "stew" now, so you're definitely using plenty of fat or oil for that.
Lots of related comments here.
Micromanagement nightmare: A more detailed code for prepared meals means inns and such in adventure mode need to also have access to those reactions. For the NPCs, world generation should produce at least a short list of recipes, potentially a lengthy one. Presenting players with the same list would give a useful starting point, and the names should be self-explanatory enough that players that don’t care about cooking enough to dive into that section of the interface don’t have to.
Multiple course meals: Grilled fish, pickled vegetables, rice, and a soup, all as separate dishes, would be a multiple course meal. That is entirely outside the setup I gave above. I ignored multiple course meals because I don’t see how to pull one off without tracking food in quantities less than one dwarf eats at a sitting. Fortunately, that idea has come up in the thread before.
I'm not actually suggesting dwarves should eat more food units in a single meal. I was suggesting to limit the supply of food in fortress mode by dividing all food sources by 10.
I envisioned it more in terms of cooks putting out prepared components for dwarves to assemble their own meals from (something along the lines of a modern salad bar or sandwich bar), but completely separate courses that dwarves take and consume simultaneously works too. Jiri Petrew’s idea of more complicated individual cooking would also require the same feature
As a bonus, tracking smaller quantities of food would give benefit to butchering smaller livestock, such as rabbits, that give less than one dwarf meal’s worth of meat.
It also shifts the dynamics when designing prepared meal recipes: smaller quantities become significant, especially for strongly flavored vegetables. I personally would probably use meat this way as well.
Roasted meat: Roasted meat was not covered in my list, since I never cook it that way, nor do I order steaks at restaurants (I’m not vegetarian, but a large chunk of just meat is not for me). This is presumably not the only category that I did not think of when I was writing things up.
> Writing the cooking and preservation interface, I would actually branch this function off smoking (I figure that the origin of smoking for preservation is the other way around). It forms its own category of prepared meal. The category also includes the grilled fish from the Japanese breakfast.
> Smoked meat is a preserved food, while roasted meat is a prepared food. Smoked meat is already edible as is, so going from there to roasted meat should be a relatively minor tweak, both in code and in “in universe” technique.
> The location shifts from the Butcher shop to the Kitchen (or maybe not), and there is more freedom to add spices and sauces, but not all players will bother to go into that detail. I personally would mostly avoid smoking in favor of sugar curing (given the way I play, sweet pod sugar is likely to be available in somewhat larger quantities than wood), but the option is there.
That just leaves the question of how to implement the rice. I am mostly familiar with rice as a base that something is poured over, similar to mashed potatoes. The description you gave seems to indicate serving it cooked but plain, roughly equivalent to porridge. Porridge is part of “stews and related,” so if this rice is presented similarly then I guess it follows suit.
Simplistic categories: Yes, the categories are intentionally simplistic, and they don’t cover everything. In all cases, the “and related” is there for a reason!
> A curry with a sauce would indeed be listed here as a stew, since some admittedly hasty research failed to identify any reason not to.
> Some curry recipes apparently boil off the water during cooking and are served relatively dry, which would be somewhat distinctive. Still, while it falls off the Thickener scale as originally presented (soup > gruel > pudding > porridge), it can be implemented by extending that scale. The rice from the “traditional Japanese breakfast” that you used for illustration also occupies this point of the scale.
> Stir fry is similarly branched off stew, rather than truly part of it: the cooked components are significantly different if both flavor and texture than their counterparts in a boiled stew. Cooking temperature and time are also different.
> Sandwiches also have this sort of hierarchical categorization system.
Anachronistic sandwiches:
Apparently I should have given an “and related” part to sandwiches. The defining features are using bread to contain the other ingredients (and the mess of eating it), and that the unit is eaten by hand. I lumped in both the burrito (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrito#History) and (some of) the pies you mentioned. At least precursors to the burrito seem to be within the intended time frame (although they were Native American, not European).
> Even if the invention of flat sandwiches did not actually occur until the 1800s, I don’t see any reason it couldn’t have occurred earlier, unless the habit of eating bread as slices from loaves is also unexpectedly recent. For that matter, pancakes sturdy enough to serve are also probably old enough. (I am told that some precursor to pancakes is the oldest recognizable form of bread.) Breads thick enough to provide both sides, but no more, also should be available, such as pita (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pita).
> Pies are a bit of a mixed bag. I understand that the cornish pasty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty) is eaten by hand, which qualifies it as part of “sandwiches and related.” On the other hand, the chicken pot pie I am familiar with requires a bowl (“sandwiches and related” don’t, by definition).
> The worst case scenario is allowing players to “invent” sandwiches in our forts, which is no more anachronistic than the various computers (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Computing) that players are already building, and I would argue it is a lot less.
More comments on perpetual stew:
A. Perpetual stew: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew) While this method of cooking is not familiar to modern players, it definitely deserves a mention, since it fits the time period that DF is intended to emulate; a discussion of foods in a medieval fantasy setting would not be complete without covering it.
This would definitely be period-appropriate, but it would be nightmarish to code. We're dealing with dwarves reacting to foods of different quantities dissolving into one another, plus we're dealing with various things that rot, and the rates at which they rot. Plus, if I have, say, a gallon of chicken soup, eat half that soup, fill it up with half a gallon of pea soup, eat half that chicken-pea soup, then fill in half a gallon of onion soup, then eat half that 1/4 chicken-1/4 pea-1/2 onion soup, then fill it with beef soup... at what point of dilution does the chicken soup stop counting as relevant, both for tracking purposes, and also for whether it triggers preferences for chicken because there was a drop of chicken soup in that everything soup? What if it's a chunky stew, how do you differentiate between eating the last chunk of beef from a chunky beef soup versus a pea versus the broth, itself? Do we need grain sizes for these things?
It would make far more sense mechanically to have a system where a kitchen is tied to two or more tureens or cauldrons of soup, and when one is emptied, they cook another batch to fill it up, while cycling the next batch of stew to the front. (Which would be more like what a modern buffet does.)
Yes, programming this would be a nightmare. I did try to give advice on how, but I definitely don’t expect to see it in the first pass of the cooking update, possibly not until version 1.0, if even then.
> Thinking over the idea more, I remembered something that might be relevant: bug 3116 (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=3116). A dwarf eating stew from the pot gets a random slice (random number from 1 to the total number of units of stew in the pot). The upgrade to track food in quantities smaller than a dwarf eats at a time would be handy (allowing multiple independent rolls), but is not a strict requirement for this idea. This sort of system would track ingredients for preference purposes.
Preservation reactions: Spicing
I recently corrected a section that accidentally got dropped from an earlier post:
4. Player interactions: (. . .)
(Edit)> There would not be a large number of existing reactions, either. It would be along the lines of
> There would not be a large number of new reactions, either. There would be some, but they would be along the lines of the existing broad wildcard reactions: “smoke meat,” for example, does not need to be more detailed than the current “brew plant,” “brew fruit,” and “mill plants” reactions. Even pickling is not much worse than glazing: there is an item to be glazed (or pickled), an item that becomes the glaze (or the pickling liquid), and fuel (pickling requires a water-tight container). More complicated pickling recipes (adding spices) are entirely optional, and only players that care about it need to bother.
> I estimate about a dozen new reactions (give or take a factor of two, depending on what gets lumped, what gets split, and which ideas don’t get implemented), spread across several different workshops. That number is large by the standards of current food processing, but the Carpenter and Mason shops both have long lists of items they can make, let alone the craftsdwarf’s shop and glass furnace. Interface complications from adding basic food preservation (not worrying about supplemental spices) would be, at worst, about even with current furniture production: there are a few reactions that are self-explanatory, and which almost everyone uses very frequently, plus a much longer list of more exotic options that are called for in certain circumstances.
The analogy of furniture has a lot of other interesting parallels. For example, both the Mason and the Carpenter have reactions to make chairs, tables, doors, and so forth: even if some of the products change names based on material, the two materials are still interchangeable for a lot of purposes. Similarly, both meat and fish have reactions for smoking, salting, and sugar drying (and sugar drying also applies to some plants, especially fruit). If the food preservation reactions are split across the Butcher shop, Fishery, Farmer’s shop, and possibly farther, then these sorts of duplicated reactions might push the number of new ones above the earlier high end estimate of two dozen.
Continuing the furniture analogy further, spices are equivalent to decorations (for furniture, this is things like encrusting with gems and shells). The basic product is perfectly usable without them, but the additions do increase its value, and the happiness of dwarves that use it.
> The first complication comes from the fact that furniture is made, then decorated. Spicing food does not have that separation of steps: preparing and spicing are done simultaneously, and the interface needs to reflect that. Fortunately, the recently added “job details” menu should be up to the task.
> I suspect that preservation reactions might replace the “minced” aspect of the current prepared meals, at least a large portion of the time.
The next complication comes from the recurring nature of recipes: given shelf life issues being added back in, the current “repeat task” order is not a good solution. It would be better to save the recipe to a separate list, from which it could be called up again later.
> This is distinct from, for example, making a bunch of statues of a given god to put in its temple: the demand for those statues spikes for the current project, and is not likely to happen again at anything like the same scale anytime soon. Even with an expectation of some future demand, individual statues have an indefinite shelf life, so a few extras during the project would be perfectly adequate.
> A prepared meal is a different story: the current setup makes each prepared meal big enough to feed a small fortress for a season or more (an example from the current game: with 25 quarry bush leaves, 25 dwarven syrup, and two more ingredients, a total stack size of 60 isn’t very hard, and is enough to feed a fortress of 30 for a full season, 20 for considerably more). The meal’s shelf life may be similar or inferior, so making a second one before the first is gone (or at least almost gone) is a bad idea. Meals are made infrequently, and demand is much flatter. If the exact same supplies are available (and, given that the first meal got made, they obviously were then and probably still are), it might be desirable to re-use the same recipe.
Since it’s come up, I might as well add my notes on the Sandwiches category.
Sandwiches and related
As the term is used here, all sandwiches can be eaten by hand; if it requires a knife, spoon or similar, (or a bowl, plate, or similar), it is part of a different category. Sandwiches feature a crust, typically bread, which is used to contain the other food items, protecting both fingers and tables from the mess.
> As a rule, sandwiches travel better than other types of prepared meals, which is relevant to soldiers, certain fortress workers (hunters, wood-cutters, and miners are among the more obvious examples), and merchants. This role of sandwiches may lead to them being regarded as a lower-status food. On the other hand, sandwiches may be an exception to Jiri Petrew’s declaration that prepared meals cannot be sold to caravans, even if the merchants will mostly buy them to eat on the road, rather than as a true trade good.
1. Flat sandwich: “The stereotypical sandwich: two slices of bread with the filling between them.”
I am calling this sub-type “flat sandwiches” for the favored shape of the fillings: flat but broad slices. The bread used to make the sandwich is also in this shape.
> Loaf breads may be the expected bread type, but certain types of pancake can be used as well. The variety of pita (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pita) I am familiar with acts as a single loaf that could provide both sides but no more (a stack of prepared bread would be multiple loaves).
> Common choices of fillings include meat, cheese, and leaf vegetables (especially lettuce and spinach which do not cook well).
> Much more than most other types of meal, flat and wrapped sandwiches can be prepared as a “sandwich bar” from which individuals select ingredients with which to assemble sandwiches themselves.
2. Wrap: “One large piece of bread, wrapped around the filling.”
The burrito (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrito) is among the more familiar examples. Crepes are also sometimes used this way. Sub sandwiches may be placed here or as flat sandwiches (or may simply be dropped as anachronistic).
> Like a flat sandwich, a wrap is easy to implement as a “sandwich bar.”
> While flat sandwiches can handle paste components (modern tuna or egg salad sandwiches, for example), wraps generally handle them more gracefully.
3. Pies and related: “Dough is wrapped around a filling, and then the unit is cooked.”
The flat sandwich and the wrap both typically call for the cook to cook all the ingredients (some may be left raw), then assemble the sandwich. In a pie, the filling is wrapped in bread dough, and then the unit is cooked. While the word “pie” usually implies a sweet dish, the broader category used here includes savory ones as well.
> The category used here includes only types where the crust provides a gripping surface, or that have a filling that is sturdy enough to hold together by itself after slicing. Not everything that has a crust has one of this type; many pies are sorted here as “stews and related,” as covered above in its section on crusts. Recipes within the “Pies and related” category may be labeled as pies, tarts, dumplings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpling), and more. I’m not entirely satisfied using pies as the word for the whole category.
> These items come in a fairly wide range of sizes. The category used here includes certain types of dumpling that range down to bite size. I will assume that individual pies larger than a single person’s meal are unusual, although the existing DF “stack” mechanic provides for a single cooking job that produces several such pies. It is possible to make large sliced tarts if the filling is sturdy enough. Tyes that are not sturdy enough are listed here as “stew with crust,” not a pie.
> While baking is the stereotype, the broader category used here also includes types that are steamed, boiled, deep fried, or cooked in other ways. This also applies to the other types of bread, with the possible exception of pancakes.
> The most well-known pies generally use specialized pastry dough, which has a flaky texture due to being held together by fat rather than gluten. However, the broader category used here also includes recipes that use kneaded and leavened bread dough. These include calzone, stromboli, and at least some types of the Chinese Jiaozi. I’m not sure about pizza.
Some recipes call for an additional outer wrapping around the dough, usually a large leaf. This outer wrapping is usually discarded, rather than eaten. Banana leaves are often used this way, and Mexican tamales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamale) call for the food to be wrapped in maize (corn) leaves, then cooked.
> Backing up a step, other types of sandwich can also use things other than bread as the main container.
4. Cakes: “Other ingredients are mixed into the bread, rather than wrapped with it.”
For my purposes here and now, the distinguishing feature of a cake (that causes me to categorize it as a sandwich, rather than a bread) is that it is a prepared meal in its own right. This contrasts with pancakes, loaf breads, and noodles, all of which are intermediate products intended for subsequent use in preparing a more complicated meal.
> This definition includes items like banana bread (modern recipes use baking powder, so not a good DF example) and raisin bread (modern examples use white flour, so DF versions will probably have only superficial resemblance).
> A cake is distinguished from the other sandwich types by the contrast that other types have distinct “crust” and “filling” sections. Other ingredients added to a cake are mixed more or less evenly throughout the bread (at least most of the time; the more stereotypical cakes often include frosting). This in turn restricts the choice of flavorings somewhat, since not all potential options can be distributed in this manner.