A tricky part of writing these recipes out is trying to capture how the recipe would be made at the time. You can’t just hop down to a Safeway or Whole Foods, and many common ingredients weren’t even invented until the mid to late 1800’s anyway. I try to base a lot of my methods on actual medieval recipes, which… are interesting anyway. Most don’t have precise measurements, temperatures, etc. In order to make these feasible to my audience, I’ve tried to come up with a language and conversion method to make it easy to recreate these in real life.
– Arella
YEAST:
I used to write my recipes using potato yeast, which is absolutely unusable by today’s standards, when active dry yeast is something common at most grocery stores. I’ve scrapped that. If Prianna makes a recipe in game, it uses the very old potato yeast, or one of the many pre-1800’s bread-rising methods available to her. As for the blog versions, I will always include not only yeast, but baking powder, baking soda, etc, as that will make it easier to recreate for my readers.
OVEN TEMPERATURES:
Along the same lines as above, I include accurate baking temperatures in my recipes. In Prianna’s in-game cooking, baking temperatures are nearly impossible to detect, and it’s the most difficult part to get right, and she simply refers to temperatures as “weak flame / strong flame / very strong flame” instead. I’ve done away with this in the blog posts, so my readers will never need to worry about incorrect temperatures in their own baking adventure.
MEAT REPLACEMENTS:
You can’t just find Displacer Beast steaks anywhere, after all. After researching the make-up of a creature, and trying to estimate what creature they’ll be closest to, I try and use it like a common Earth modern-day meat, something not too expensive or exotic if possible.
Some may argue that they aren’t perfect matches. Changing the animal after the recipe is made would render the recipe useless. While I always appreciate constructive feedback, for the sake of my hard work I’ve already invested so much time into, these will remain fixed once I’ve decided on them.
CHICKEN: Cockatrice (Easy), Giant Spider (Meat), Lightning Bird
TURKEY: Peryton
PORK: Behir, Berbalang
BEEF: Basilisk, Otyugh
MUTTON: Cave Badger
LAMB: Chimera (1/3)
ELK: Griffon, Dire Wolf
ALLIGATOR: Chimera (1/3), Cockatrice (Authentic), Wyvern
VENISON: (Chimera 1/3), Displacer Beast
FROG: Bullywug
CRAB: Giant Spider (Legs)
