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Avernum cook book? Anyone have recipes?


Chip

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Has anyone here tried to make any authentic Avernum food? Do you have any recipes to share? I'd be interested in trying to reproduce some of the food described in the Avernum games. Anyone here made beer or bread from mushrooms? Best way to obtain mushroom flour? Will alligator do for "giant lizard" or do I need to get a Komodo dragon or something?

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i've had crocodile stir-fried with ginger and garlic before. probably not the way avernites would make it but it wasn't bad. a bit like a mild-flavoured white fish, but with a chewier texture. i've heard it compared to calamari, which is not too far off the mark. if you wanted something more avernumy i guess you could pretty much follow the recipe for a chicken and mushroom dish and substitute crocodile for the chicken and it'd work okay. it's super lean though so be careful about how you cook it, overcooking will turn lean meats into shoe leather

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For main courses one would have to go with mushrooms, algae, beef, herbs, moss, fish, roe, eggs, and the other ingredients that Lilith described above.

 

For tea or coffee one would have to go with lichens and leaves. About 70 years ago, during times of great shortages, people used grinded tree-bark, rye, barley, turnips, dandelion roots and a small amount of coffee to mix a powder that served as a substitute for coffee.

 

Concerning the mushroom bread, it's a bit tricky. The thing about the bread is that you need the dough to be sticky, which is something that the mushrooms as a flour doesn't possess. It's doable, but your mushroom breads would be more like flat rolls or pancakes. To get the whole mushroom flour to stick together, you'd need to knead eggs and stick that to the mushroom-flour. (You'd get mushroom flour by drying them and then grinding them to a fine flour.) Adding salt and yeast would be necessary, as well as having something that includes sugars for the yeast to use as a catalyst.

 

The fact that the Exile caverns have luminescent fungi might imply that there could be photosynthetic algae, as well, which use sugars and light to metabolize energy for themselves. Hence, using algae or something similar that uses monosaccharides as a component for the mushroom dough should work. You could also grind some cleansed tree-bark (pine- and spruce-trees; also make sure the tree doesn't get damaged when you pry some off!) and add it to the mix. The tree-bark was used, just like the surrogates for coffee (read above) during the times of shortages, and could act just like any fungal tree's bark in Avernum.

 

As for the alcohol brewed from mushrooms, I did some reseach. The mushrooms of Earth seem to have very small contents of fat, carbohydrates and mono-, di-, and oligosaccharides, which means that there is no sugars for the yeast to turn into alcohol, hence making the fermenting process otiose. In this sense, the best surrogate we can come up with is to just drink really bad (or if you're feeling fancy: good) tasting alcohol and pretend that it's made from mushrooms... :p

 

In short; the mushroom bread.

 

 

- Dry mushrooms.

- Grind mushrooms into flour.

- Knead eggs.

- Knead the eggs and the flour together.

- Add salt.

- Add yeast.

- Add algae (or something that includes sugars).

- Let it ripen/rise

- Put it in the oven.

- Hope that the whole thing wasn't in vain.

- Pray that it's edible.

- Taste it.

- Blame Zaego for bad recipe.

 

 

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I do not remember seeing anything but lizards and cows, so eggs would have to be really rare. Some of the altered mushrooms would have to have some additional properties to account for the amount of bread shown in the game. Just like the mushrooms would have to be quite altered to produce alcohol. Sugar is rare enough to be a quest item in the first two games and only found places with direct contact with the surface.

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Anytime, mate.

 

As for what to be used in place of our eggs, I feel like Avernite giant lizards might lay eggs large enough to be enough for large quantities of dough. While you'd need, say, 4 chicken eggs for one bread-pancake, you could easily do 4 bread-pancakes with just 1 giant lizard egg (just as an example, I don't know the exact figures). If the lizard eggs would behave in a similar manner as to those of chickens', I could imagine that a single lizard egg could stay fresh for a month if preserved in a cold and dry place. Also, it's a good question, the one you asked if it's possible to bake with their eggs at all. Maybe the eggs should have to be really fresh?

 

EDIT: No, wait, nevermind.

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Thanks, appreciate the thoughtful answer. What do you think they use in place of chicken eggs? Lizards, at least on Earth, don't lay eggs frequently enough to serve as that kind of staple food, and I have no idea whether you can bake with their eggs anyway.

 

Did the Vahnatai domesticate lizards? In that case, they might have selected for ones that produced more eggs.

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Yes, the Vahnatai did domesticate giant lizards.

 

There was a Vahnatai farming town to the east of the Vahnatai Lands that are accessibe during Avernum 2. I think there were lizards in a pen-house there, but I can't be sure. Oh and yes, the Vahnatai greeter near Formello on the small island had a pet lizard, too.

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Also, maybe it was much more reasonable to send something big through the portal, if and when the Empire officials decided to throw down something, instead of seeing all kinds of trouble of transporting the animals to the portal, going through the bureaucracy (which Empire seems *really* fond of) just for the sake of little chickens.

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Annd avernum had fruit trees. Im sure instead of mushroom ale. You guys could use any kind of hardy fruit thing. Also the trees, absynth is made out of wormwood. Traditional south indian toddy is made out of palm tree sap. There is beer made of cassava. I bet photosynthetic algae could be fermented. Well. I think, never tried it myself. You wpuld be amazed at the ammount of things people can ferment. I have drinked once a beverage called nipipa which is basically fermented rice water. There is also for maize.By the way, avernum inspired diet would end up with mallnutrition and gout

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The pears are a retcon. The second trilogy introduced those more surface-like food items, and A:EFTP and A2:CS used them as well, but they were never in the older games, where the wine was explicitly made from mushrooms. I believe one Almarian wine item (in Exile II?) was actually named "Fungus Chardonnay."

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Mushroom merlot. Now isnt that something. Late harvest almarian. Why not go all the way to Almarula! On any case, the is this russian tea thing called roughly tea fungus. That just sounds wrong in english. Anyway it's the closest thing i know to mushroom champagne. Its bubbly. But its sweet so i assume sugar is used. Please dont try that at home. Like i only drank it one time where it would be just rude to refuse. But im sure you can get an infection if you do it wrong. No really. But what would it be called. Champagne is an area in france. It cant be just called almaria since its already taken.

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