Paksworld

Adapting recipes for Paks’s world–which doesn’t have the same plants–requires some thought.   Bread is easy–Paks’s world grows several varieties of wheat and has mills for turning grain into flour.   They grow barley and rye and emmer and oats as well.   I can have any bread I want (well, not cornbread.)   Roasted and baked meats are easy.  Some vegetables are easy–they agreed to be part of that world.  Others…no.   I really, really wish I’d been able to import potatoes.  I eat a lot of potatoes.  But potatoes refused to fit in.  So did tomatoes.

So here’s the innkeeper, knowing that a caravan’s due in today, and they will want food.  And here am I, with a really good new lamb stew recipe…with potatoes and tomatoes  in it.   I’d really like someone in Paks’s world to have this dish–in many ways it fits in nicely except for those two ingredients.

Which are major.   I have, on occasion, used a turnip in place of a potato in a stew (not that successful, to my mind.)   Or a large white radish.  Again…it’s not a potato.  And tomatoes…ubiquitous in the cuisine I grew up with.  Tomatoes, peppers, onion, and garlic, what about them?   One possibility is just not naming what that wonderful ingredient is…dried tomato-equivalents might be imported to the north.

It’s not trying to fool the reader to call it a “bush red-fruit”….or something other than tomato…because it’s the word tomato that’s the problem.   It sounds too New Worldish, too Western Hemisphere.  I can’t hear tomato without being aware of its origin here, its use here.

The recipe mentioned in one of the comments of the previous post has been extended a bit.  A couple of tablespoons of capers, a big tablespoon of  veal reduced stock.   Other family members fell upon it with glee.

Paks, however, will never taste what I taste because I haven’t been able to shove potatoes across the line between the worlds, without stretching my own suspension of disbelief well beyond its elastic limit.   And I know she’d like this.   The innkeeper who got hold of its ingredients would have caravans stacked up at the door.

And. They. Refuse.

I’m going to go out to the kitchen and have myself a nice bowl of lamb and potato stew before I start the pies for tomorrow.