Hungry like the wolf? (W20 Cookbook)

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Kinda like running a GURPS Rome game with actual roman cuisine at the table, or serving sushi for a samurai game, or noodles for your wuxia game, and so on.

I've done this for a WWII game, starting with food available in Stalingrad a few weeks before the battle started - if you had a really good scrounger. It was meat & tomato soup with paprika, bully beef and potato/carrot/onion salad. Pretty good, actually.

Originally Posted by zorg

Well, this makes me think about what to serve at our next SpacePunk game. It should really be faux soy substitute ersatz yeast, I guess... Sounds like Marmite soup.

The Paranoia XP sourcebook Stuff has a lot of imaginary foods and at least one practical recipe.

[The Colonel]

There is, naturally, at least one Song of Ice and Fire cookbook, and there used to be a Babylon 5 one as well...

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by RevBob

Bunyip—Damper Bread

That's a bit unfortunate.

[Gold & Appel Inc]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

That's a bit unfortunate.

Reason, for non-Australians? (Google-fu roll apparently failed; all I found was that indigenous Australians eat it, which... is the Bunyip tribe)

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

Reason, for non-Australians? (Google-fu roll apparently failed; all I found was that indigenous Australians eat it, which... is the Bunyip tribe)

Damper is soda bread made of wheat flour, both wheat flour and baking soda being European introductions to Australia. Aborigines' traditional breads — before they started getting given and sold and paid in white wheat flour — were unleavened, were made of a wide range and mixture of different seeds ground with water and baked in small balls, and made up only a small part of a varied diet that was generally low in carbohydrate.

So damper is culturally associated with the influence of European settlers, with living on the outskirts of settlers' stations, and with underpaid work and dependency on handouts. In short, with the things that led to the extinction of the "Bunyip" in WoD.

Furthermore, there is evidence that a diet rich in sugar and refined flour is not terribly healthy for anyone, and is especially bad for Australian Aborigines — perhaps because their ancestors are not the survivors of a significant selective pressure at the time of the invention of agriculture. Aborigines' health is disgraceful: their life expectancy is about ten years shorter than the Australian average. That is partly because of poor living conditions, partly because of alcohol, partly because of tobacco, and partly because of violence, but to a significant degree it is a result of obesity and diabetes, which in turn are a result of a bad diet with too much sugar and flour. Dr. Kerin O'Dea published the results of a very interesting study in which a number of overweight middle-aged Aboriginal women went bush for seven weeks and returned to a traditional diet, with marked improvements in their weight, insulin sensitivity, blood pressure, and triglycerides. Increased exercise probably helped somewhat, but replacing damper and sugar with traditional foods was doubtless key.

Damper is a cause and sign of the loss of Aborigines' way of life, and it makes them ill. I'd consider it more a symbol of the extermination of the Bunyip than a symbol of the Bunyip.

[Gold & Appel Inc]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

[snip relevant stuff for space] Damper is a cause and sign of the loss of Aborigines' way of life, and it makes them ill. I'd consider it more a symbol of the extermination of the Bunyip than a symbol of the Bunyip.

Interesting; thanks. What would you propose for a signature Bunyip food?

[Gold & Appel Inc]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

There is, naturally, at least one Song of Ice and Fire cookbook, and there used to be a Babylon 5 one as well...

I shall experience extraordinary disappointment should you ever say that I never gave you something nice that you enjoyed tremendously.

[William]

Damper bread sounds very similar (at least in cultural connotations) to frybread, which is basically wheat flour cooked in lard -- the two ingredients readily available to American Indians after being removed from their lands and made dependent on handouts of survival supplies from their white conquerors.

Because the making of frybread was associated with such turbulent, culture-changing times in Amerind history, it is considered to be a particularly Amerind* food -- and in a sense it is, since they came up with it to deal with what they had. It remains surprisingly popular. But the circumstances of that invention were so imposed, and the diet of modern Native Americans so threatened by the same factors you mentioned (obesity and alcoholism), that there is a small but substantial movement in Amerind communities to reject it. I've met a small group, led by academics, who are deliberately attempting to reconstruct the diet of Indian nations in the Great Lakes region for both of those reasons.

* I use the word deliberately; it is not associated with any particular First Nation's traditional food or cooking methods, but is a general imposition after white conquest.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

Interesting; thanks. What would you propose for a signature Bunyip food?

I would guess the pre-Damper bushbread mentioned in his post ... anything else is likely to be not very recipe like (IIRC kangaroo roasts and grills like anything else) or hard to get hold of, or with a very limited appeal.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

Interesting; thanks. What would you propose for a signature Bunyip food?

It's very tricky, since most of the foods that Aborigines ate are very poorly distributed outside Australia. About the only Australian food that is widely available is Macadamia nuts.

Umm. Pipis (a kind of bivalve clam). Sydney rock oysters. Mussels. Beach worms. Murray cod. Australian native trout. Mullet. Cobra (wood oyster). Various ocean fish. Balmain bugs and Moreton Bay bugs. Kangaroos, wallabies, pademelon, possums, koala, emu, goannas, snakes, turtles, crocodile etc. Australia wildfowl, especially waterfowl, and their eggs. Turtle, crocodile, lizard, and snake eggs. Witchetty grubs. Macadamias, bunya kernels, lilli-pillis, all of this stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tucker. Honey made by Australia native bees from Australian native plants' nectar. None of it is easy to get outside Australia except Macadamias, and close substitutes such as oysters au naturel and baked clams won't impress as very Australian.

As for cooking methods, with no metal and no ceramics there were no cooking vessels, which cuts out the more elaborate cooking methods. Things can be roasted on a flat rock beside a fire, or baked among the coals, or eaten raw.

If I were to present a meal of Aboriginal food I suppose I'd serve Sydney Rock oysters on the half-shell, pipis and Balmain bugs cooked on a barbecue, grilled fish seasoned with lemon myrtle, bush pepper, and finger limes, and grilled kangaroo steaks. With maybe roasted bunya kernels for the staple. And a side salad of bush tucker. No use putting that in a recipe book, though.