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Author Topic: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread  (Read 33555 times)

sockless

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #120 on: January 31, 2011, 03:13:48 am »

Another thing: Pots, saucepans and other implements should be required for cooking, at least in Adventure mode.

It may make things more complex to need a pot (or whatever) in Fortress mode, but it's worth thinking about as a method of making it more difficult to prepare stews and roasts.

But you can cook over an open fire. And who goes adventuring with a giant pot? Tools shouldn't be compulsory for cooking, but they should make better food.
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vadia

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #121 on: January 31, 2011, 06:09:18 am »

Another thing: Pots, saucepans and other implements should be required for cooking, at least in Adventure mode.

It may make things more complex to need a pot (or whatever) in Fortress mode, but it's worth thinking about as a method of making it more difficult to prepare stews and roasts.

But you can cook over an open fire. And who goes adventuring with a giant pot? Tools shouldn't be compulsory for cooking, but they should make better food.
Many people went exploring with little pots.
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Mazonas

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #122 on: January 31, 2011, 11:50:20 am »

Quote
Blood - Dwarves should be able to use blood as an ingredient when cooking. Very dwarfy!

Blood sausage!  Black pudding is a delicious and essential way to use up blood.  If we're having this though, we should have two other things;

Butchering should involve hanging the kill, firstly to drain the blood and secondly to allow meat to mature - certain meats, especially game, are much more palatable if they are hung for a few days.

Religious diets.  Dwarves that follow certain Gods should refuse to eat food contaminated with things that are the dwarfy equivalent of non-kosher or non-halal.  So a religious dwarf may refuse to eat blood sausage if their god does not allow blood consumption.  Another may insist on consuming blood for their God.  How far they are willing to go (ie, to starvation and death) should depend on strength of faith.  A fairly religious dwarf who eats a forbidden food rather than starve should get a negative mood because of it.

Quote
Storage and Preservation...

Yes, yes and yes!  In medieval times, if you weren't able to find some way to extend the shelf life of food you starved.  Smoking meat, drying vegetables, storing in oil or fat, salting... these are all simple, basic preservation techniques that we have used since before we even had a recorded history.  In that vein...

SUBSISTENCE FOODS
A dwarven caravan that embarks and runs out of food should not risk starvation unless it eats vermin, but should have to work harder.  Humans used to consume things like acorns; unpalatable and technically inedible, but if you roast the acorns, crush them, pour the crush acorn pulp into a cloth bag and let it sit in a current of water such as a stream for a day or two until the tannin is washed out, you can then mix it with a little honey, or water, or milk and heat it to make a sort of acorn porridge/mash.

Although... preserved foods are not fuel-less.  Making jam, chutney or canning and preserving food requires cooking.  You don't know how bad vinegar is until you're forced out of the house while a pot of onion and chilli chutney on the hob fills the house with eye-stinging vinegar steam.

Quote
Communal Cooking - Hot meals prepared by cooks to be ready-to-eat at a communal serving area. When a dwarf gets hungry, they come to the dining hall and take a serving of "the meal of the day". Players could keep this area stocked with meals using the Make Hot Meal option. The meal queue would be reduced by dwarves taking meals from it and spoilage. When the economy kicks in, this could expand to the Tavern concept.

We will need dwarves to either make meals much slower to prevent overcooking and wastage, or make dorfs use "leftovers" to make a low-quality but nutritious meal such as bubble and squeak.  In fact, dorfs should automatically prefer to include meal leftovers in cooking if there are any before using fresh ingredients.  So bubble and squeak, soups made from leftover roasts, curries made from cold meats, bread and butter pudding, bread soups...

It might actually be easier to have, instead of a kitchen workshop, more of a canteen.  Dorf cooks serve up dishes to order and remain in the canteen workshop continuously, leaving only at need.  A badly managed fortress could cause bad moods when there are no dorfs set to cook currently at work in the canteen, resulting in dorfs either going hungry or making a makeshift meal (ir, making a quick sandwich and grabbing a plate of cold leftovers instead od getting a fresh dinner).  Fortress could have an option for "all dorfs cook" or "only chefs cook", so that people who like to make less workhouse style fortresses can still have options for them.

Dorf Families.  Dorf families should eat together - go to the canteen at the same time and, where food hall layout and crowding allows, should sit adjacent to each other to eat.  Unless Toady brings in some sort of schooling option, in which case all dorf childen should be taken to the canteen at the same time by whatever dorf adult is in charge of them to eat together.
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harborpirate

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #123 on: February 01, 2011, 01:25:19 pm »

I see that the idea of dwarves cooking themselves has come up a couple more times. I'll expand the firepit idea to include the simplest possible type of kitchen: the hearth. Fortress mode players could choose to build one in every dwarven quarters and turn cooking on for all of them to let them cook their own meals.
Small beer has come up a couple of times and definitely needs to be fit into the op. I thinking it will go best in the mixed drinks part of the thread since drink mixing with beer would be how we could fit less intoxicating drinks like grog and such. Is small beer a brew with less original alcohol content or is it watered down after brewing? (on my phone so less easy to look these thing up at the moment.)
I'll update the main thread soon with a bunch of these updates, including that religious prohibitions should extend to drinks as well.
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noob

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #124 on: February 02, 2011, 03:04:34 am »

magma ovens that could possibly burn food. (the magma heats up the oven, not the dwarf throws mushrooms into the magma)
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #125 on: April 28, 2011, 12:53:52 pm »

Alright, this was something from another thread, but there's no reason not to revive this thread to talk about this...

The problem I have with this thread isn't so much what is being discussed, but the format of the megathread, itself. 

AngleWyrm went to the trouble of including links to all the threads that came before.  This is something that should be done in each of the examples in the first post.  The point is that you need to preserve the argument for (and against) the suggestions, not just a quick blurb on what you have boiled the suggestions themselves down to. 

The suggestions themselves are almost meaningless without their arguments.  They only have meaning when they are part of a cohesive argument for their function, and when they are capable of answering the arguments against them.

Simply listing "this was suggested once, somewhere" isn't really doing anything but telling people that someone, somewhere thought that was a good idea - you need to link to where, exactly, the argument for and against it took place, so that those arguments are actually readable.  Otherwise, you're just recreating the problem of posting without searching - you raise a topic, while ignoring the arguments and discussion that came before.
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JohnnyDigs

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #126 on: April 28, 2011, 08:53:53 pm »

I don't know if this was suggested yet, but seeing as how milk is in the game you should be able to make it into booze too.

The mongols are able to do this:
http://www.mongolfood.info/en/recipes/mongol-arkhi.html
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harborpirate

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #127 on: April 28, 2011, 10:20:18 pm »

Alright, this was something from another thread, but there's no reason not to revive this thread to talk about this...

The problem I have with this thread isn't so much what is being discussed, but the format of the megathread, itself. 

AngleWyrm went to the trouble of including links to all the threads that came before.  This is something that should be done in each of the examples in the first post.  The point is that you need to preserve the argument for (and against) the suggestions, not just a quick blurb on what you have boiled the suggestions themselves down to. 

The suggestions themselves are almost meaningless without their arguments.  They only have meaning when they are part of a cohesive argument for their function, and when they are capable of answering the arguments against them.

Simply listing "this was suggested once, somewhere" isn't really doing anything but telling people that someone, somewhere thought that was a good idea - you need to link to where, exactly, the argument for and against it took place, so that those arguments are actually readable.  Otherwise, you're just recreating the problem of posting without searching - you raise a topic, while ignoring the arguments and discussion that came before.

Many (perhaps even the majority) of the suggestions that are listed at this point actually originated in this thread.

Other than whether brewing should require water or not, I haven't seen any significant opposition to any of the suggestions that have been added to the list.

Ultimately, like yourself, I've had to make decisions on what items I feel fit the overall feel of DF and which options fit the best together. I still don't really like the idea of dwarves cooking for themselves very much, but it came up so often that I found a way to make it work. And honestly the result is probably better for it.

Anglewyrm's response containing previous cooking threads was (and is) extremely useful and I still feel like a fool for chastising him/her on it. As for linking, most of those threads are nebulous, and arguments include multiple features at once. If you want to do the legwork of figuring out exactly where the arguments for various features took place, be my guest, but I don't have the time.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #128 on: April 28, 2011, 10:27:26 pm »

Many (perhaps even the majority) of the suggestions that are listed at this point actually originated in this thread.

Even if it was from "within the thread", try to link to the post where the suggestion originates.  The whole purpose of a Megathread is to organize the data for the convenience of the reader, so putting links to all the salient points of discussion for the reader in one single page is the best way to centralize the argument.

Jiri Petru did this in his Interface with Sparkles thread, and it organizes all the suggestions by type, and gives a link to where in the thread you should read about each one. 
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thunktone

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #129 on: June 06, 2011, 01:32:39 pm »

Glad I found this thread as I was about to repost a bunch of stuff from it. I still wound up with a wall of text after reading through the ideas here so I've broken it down with spoiler tags. There aren't any real spoilers here though, just a couple of bits that might spoil your appetite  :P.

Distilling

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Cooking with blood and intestines (Skip this if you're squeamish)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Dwarfy spices

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Meat preservation and pickling (not for the squeamish)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Trade in salt

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Egg preservation

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Centre of a family home

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Seasonality

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Cheesy by-products

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Smoking

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Barrels

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Malt

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Small Beer

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Leavening

Spoiler (click to show/hide)


Around 100 they kept wine in clay jars and it became like wine concentrate so everybody mixed water with wine.

Not everybody. The Romans noted the "barbarity" of the Gauls who drank their wine undiluted and in large quantities. Also drinks get concentrated in wooden barrels too. In Scotland they say the missing liquid from whiskey maturation has been "lost to the fairies", or something like that.
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clockwork

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #130 on: June 06, 2011, 06:35:08 pm »

Excuse me if it's already been said, but, a lot of this ties in with farming, I mean, if you even wanted something like, "The harvest for cave wheat this season was terrible" you'd need something along the lines of nutritional tracking.That's just my 2 cents. A lot of the ideas are great though, I commend you for your good effort on organizing them.

« Last Edit: June 06, 2011, 06:40:58 pm by clockwork »
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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #131 on: June 07, 2011, 07:12:06 am »

Food poisining should be a posibiltiy(treatble by vomiting or medical dwarfs) maybe on eating raw meat, or food near/past it's experation date(dwarves eating spoiled food cus it's either that or vermin)
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harborpirate

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #132 on: June 07, 2011, 11:12:26 pm »

Glad I found this thread as I was about to repost a bunch of stuff from it. I still wound up with a wall of text after reading through the ideas here so I've broken it down with spoiler tags. There aren't any real spoilers here though, just a couple of bits that might spoil your appetite  :P.

Thanks for taking the time to find the thread!

I've updated the main page with notes on the Salt Trade (a huge oversight), and I'm sure I'll be grabbing a bunch more items from your post as well.
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jwest23

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #133 on: July 26, 2011, 05:17:29 pm »

Since fermentation is mentioned in the first post, one of those little things that bug me is that we have Dwarven Ale and Dwarven Beer.  Dwarven Beer bugs me, because ale is a beer.  "Dwarven Lager" would have probably been a better choice.  Most beers fall into one of these two major categories, ales and lagers.

A greatly oversimplified view of these categories is that lagers are typically fermented in colder temperatures and ales in warmer temperatures.  So, if fermentation is to be added I'd like to see where the fermentation is done be a part of the style of beer.  When the fermentation is done underground away from magma, for example, it might end up a lager.  When the fermentation is done underground on a magma-heated floor, it might end up an ale.

Again, this is very much a simplified view of the differences between ales and lagers.  You could get into different strains of yeast or how those strains are sourced, for example, and how they affect the outcome.  This might be a nice middle ground, though, for slightly more realism without unabashed beer-geekery.
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Fidna

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Re: Cooking and Brewing Diversity: the Food and Drink Megathread
« Reply #134 on: July 26, 2011, 06:37:42 pm »

I'm pretty sure whiskey is post 1400

Whiskey is older. The first direct mention of whiskey (as aqua vitae, which was generically applied to many distilled drinks, and whiskey itself is from a Gaelic transliteration of the Latin aqua vitae) is from 1405, when an Irish chief drank himself to death on it, but the first definable production is earlier, with monastery stills having been found to have been distilling barley beer. It was probably used for medicine initially. However, initially whiskey was not aged for a particular period. It was drank shortly after it was done and wasn't watered down. As such, whiskey made in the earlier fashion wasn't quite what people might anticipate now, but it was the first whiskey, and it would be within period. It's important to keep in mind distilling techniques originally spread as a technique for making medicines though.
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