Rancid Oils, Rotting Grain, and Magically Making Bread

[mishalak]

I made bread yesterday and I learned some things that have enormous implications for the average fantasy world that appear to be forgotten by most writers. That lovely loaf of whole wheat bread that speaks of rustic simplicity. Ah for the bygone age when flour went off in a month or two. My mother keeps her whole-wheat flour in the freezer. This is because whole wheat means that the oils in the germ are still in the flour and will go off relatively quickly. It keeps for less than a month at normal temperate zone room temperatures. So first off that person in the rustic house baking the bread is going to need to either grind the wheat into flour as needed or else visit the miller quite often.

Secondly even though grain is much more stable, it won't keep forever particularly if it gets wet. Being a seed being wet is a signal to sprout and if in a sack with thousands of other seeds nothing much more will happen, but the previously impervious seed casing has been pierced and so quite rapidly the usual thing happens with mold and bacteria. Even a very little bit of moisture can set the process off in part of the stored grain leading to a rapid breakdown of the winter's supply of food.

Also if you're making bread you're going to encounter the rancidity problem yet again since making bread takes some amount of oil. So that's either vegetable oils like olive oil or animal fats like butter. And they have the same breakdown problem when exposed to air. Modern additions make them more stable, though butter itself will keep for weeks at room temperature when kept away from light and air.

Then if you want bread that isn't flat and hard you'll need some sort of yeast. They aren't hard to find or develop, though before modern standardized stuff kept in the fridge it did cause bread to fail mysteriously at times when all the right steps that should have caused a nice colonization by the right stuff to happen didn't.

So if I was a magic using cook in the age before electricity and refrigeration before I start enchanting my breads to find true love I'm first going to make a jar that keeps out oxygen (though I probably won't call it that) or prevents it from reacting with the oils so my flour and butter don't go bad before I get to use them. Second I'm going to get some sort of yeast keeper so I can always have a reliable starter. And after that I want a oven that goes to the right temperature for proofing the bread (the rising and punching down parts) and then the right one for baking even if it is fueled by wood. Finally I'll be really happy when I get a magic spoon that does the mixing for me as mixing up bread dough is hard work.

Comments

[crazysoph.livejournal.com]

Oooh, yes, yes!

And what would your magic user do with/against ergot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot)?

We had magic users in our games who made creative applications of resurrection spells, for the preservation of items like a large animal carcass, when party food supplies had run low during a campaign.

Hee!

Crazy(and standing in her own kitchen, punching down the dough...)Soph

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Well... ergot is a mold. Trouble is that it happens in the field. Hurm. Well that's got to be the farmer's problem. Oh I guess I'll put on my farmer's hat when using magic next.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It gets more complicated, though, because magic probably has limits and people aren't likely to imagine everything they can do.

Frex, for whatever reason, weather spells are common, but I've never heard of a spell to encourage really good hybrid grains to happen.

Just in terms of bread, you get different outcomes depending on whether it's most feasible to simulate technology (bread keeps longer or is easier to make), just have "bread appears" spells, or enable people to need a lot less food.

On the "it looks like modernity, but by magic" front, how about a fantasy world where people get rich enough to start mistrusting magic and want food with no preservation spells?

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Oh well everyone doesn't have to imagine what magic might do, just that one person who comes up with a spell or amulet. He has to be the inventor type that has a problem or sees something cool happen and decides to see if it can be made to work with some amount of regularity. And then the procedure for doing the spell gets passed around and next thing you know...

Yeah it totally depends upon if a person can just do a "bread appears" thing. At that point getting components for whatever makes the spell go off become the thing people will cultivate rather than wheat.

And I totally see room for a bunch of purists who are rich enough by magic to get all religious about not using magic in their food.

For my own purposes I'd start from the premise that putting together a new spell is very hard. Rather like grafting a tree or creating a hybrid that works better than the old one. Spells in this example are very simple magic sprits that do something useful without too much variation from time to time. That makes a number of physical effects easy to replicate, like metal objects that never corrode (spirits that live in objects are usually happy to maintain them to some degree) and objects that replicate themselves when given the right materials to work with (because spirits like most living things want to make more of themselves). Though before the sorcerous revolution it wouldn't be totally clear to people what was going on there.

But all that is for my own ideas rather than based upon standard EFP fantasy magic. Given the common ways magic is portrayed in modern fantasies what do you think would be the common cooking spells/objects?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I don't have a good enough model of what standard fantasy magic looks like, nor do I know what you think it is. My impression is that there are usually small spells that most people know, but that they don't have a theoretical basis for.

Offhand, spells to light fires/keep them going, spells to keep crockery from breaking--in general, spells to make things more reliable--frex, the bread rises nicely every time. Spells to purify or heat water would be very handy.

People put a lot of effort into impractical things: spells to increase alcohol content or give food bright colors/light/motion.

Considering the number of love spells, I'm surprised that there aren't spell to make food taste better. There was something of the sort in Lieber's "Bazaar of the Bizarre".

Bujold mentioned that she researched Renaissance magic for _The Spirit Ring_, but found it was too cookbookish for modern readers, so she added conservation laws.

Your magic has some interesting implications--if a sword is being maintained by a spirit, it will actively resist changes unless an agreement can be reached or the spirit is evicted. Do spirits communicate with each other?

A replication spirit will probably grab suitable materials if available, whether you want it to or not.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I just have a big (and vague) set of impressions of magic from a lot of fantasy books. Usually it seems to be a special inborn talent that either uses internal reservoirs of magical power or the powers of the universe (much like the force). With lots of ancient swords that glow in the presence of danger, never rust, and so on. Mostly it is the military side of magic that shows up in these books: death spells, earthquakes, lightning bolts, and all the other showy things.

I once came across a reproduction of actual medieval spells, it was very cook book like. In my mind I'd classify that sort of magic as alchemy. I should have bought it, but I didn't.

Spirits sometimes do communicate with each other. And spirits can inhabit people as well. Sometimes people are sort of merged beings with the person's mind either communicating with the spirit a lot or not having a clear division between the two, and then the person can talk directly with spirits capable of that. Though a great many spirits would be no more capable of speech than a coral and others might only make simple warning or friendly 'noises'. Particularly ones that just do one thing like maintain a piece of steel. They can be modified, forced out, or destroyed, but mostly that's harder than getting a spirit into something in the first place. And usually to get a spirit out you need to use another stronger spirit...

People with spirits living in them can do either one type of magic or a range of things if the spirit is under that person's control. Or it might flow the other way and a person is changed by and forced to do certain things by the spirit, as in vampires.

[thette.livejournal.com]

You don't need oil or butter to make bread. Proper sourdough bread with long rising times has that kind of taste and structure in itself.

I make bread with raisin yeast (made from raisins, water, honey and sugar). It's a process that takes four to five days, and the only ingredients are raisin yeast, flour, water, salt and some commersial yeast.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but if I left it out in my example I couldn't get back to rancid oil again. I suppose I could have stuck it in at the end when I wanted something to go with the bread...

[aylinn.livejournal.com]

yep. that's why Kory & I are tweaking the C&S system subversively. :)

There were some spells in 3rd ed. that we put back into 4th ed. Things that preserved food & added to its Nutritional Unit count. It only works on plant materials though. C&S hasn't got an "animal" method of magick. Yet. ;)

I also deconstructed the published plant magic method into "basic magick" spell pieces that could be used to root, train, sprout & nourish single plants as well as the mass ones that were in the original rules. Handy for espaliering those fruit trees, dontcha know?

C&S' basic magick also has warm/cool spells that allow you to increase or decrease an ambient temperature. toss that into an enchanted oven. or icebox.

We also added some weather & time spells that allow a mage to "calibrate" himself to detect changes & suchlike. As long as he doesn't get his skull kiboshed & go unconcious that is. then he has to recalibrate.

but anyway...

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Sounds pretty cool. So how common are Mages in C&S? I mean will every big time farmer have these spells and what does that mean for parties of raiders adventurers needing to get things from the isolated farmstead?

[aylinn.livejournal.com]

how common magic is depends upon the campaign.

basic factors are:
1) historic, heroic or super-heroic (basically how "cinematic")
2) low mana, normal mana or high mana.

Magic is a skill that anyone can learn if they take the time. it's "expensive" to learn if you don't take it as a vocation. But any mage could create an item that is usable by anyone else.

There's also clerical magic. religious people can do miracles. I should know. I wrote the framework for it.

http://mysticstation.com/download/The_Gift_of_Faith.pdf
explains the basic faith system.

C&S allows for downtime experience. my guess is that most people would not have access to magic in a historic campaign due to not having enough experience and access to knowledge to learn the spells.

Change those factors and it's quite possible to change that. In our "Living World of Alquennas" Campaign, magic is fairly common. The Duchy ruled over by a former PC of mine is quite productive. and is known as a sanctuary for refugees & healing. But because it's ALSO known as a major training ground of mages & clergy, not many people are tempted to attack it.

*wry grin* plus the fact that the Duchess was once part of a group that was colloquially called the "Inn-burners" and was responsible for destroying one of those inns (She's got this thing against undead.)

That might have something to do with it. ;)

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Funny, I was thinking of something similar for priests in my alternate earth using spirit magic. The congregation coming together feeds the spirit of the church (as in an actual spirit living in that place) which can do things interpreted by people as miracles from god like getting rid of pesky ghosts, making crosses, bibles, or other blessed objects glow to drive off vampires, and sometimes healing the sick or deflecting disaster. The vast majority of priests think it is god working as well and just do the rituals as taught never thinking it is part of ritual magic controlling a suite of spirits including one that lives in him (his clerical investiture, the thing that the hierarchy is trying to drive out when he gets excommunicated and defrocked).