Chapter 5 extra #4
on February 20, 2020
at 18:49
I have actually thought a fair amount about what foods people would eat, just not a ton about desserts.
Haven’t made much progress on the pencils since tuesday. I’ve been feeling pretty sick.
Maybe honey as a more commonly used sweetner? Beekeeping was a pretty common practice everywhere so I could definitely see a cinnamon roll that used honey instead of cane sugar. The cinnamon though might be more difficult and requiring trade / imperialism leading to the same problem as lack of sugar cane.
Now I’m curious about a cinnamon roll made with honey, lowkey might try baking that!
We had a small discussion about this on the discord. I do think honey would be more common/accessible, so probably something similar to a baklava would be a more common dessert. It would depend somewhat on the species of bee, with regards to how much honey they produce and how easy they are to work with.
And yeah that’s kind of the issue with any earth specific food. It’s kind of a process of working out if the plant/animal it comes from even exists in this world to begin with, and then where does it live, and do the people in a given culture have the means to access it.
That’s cool to know- I didn’t know that people’s [taste buds?] have to get used to sweet foods, otherwise the sweet foods are too sweet or intense to them.
[Using USA terms for J + J, since I’m from the USA]- I suppose you could make jams + jellies with honey, if you wanted to do so.
For more ideas on jams + Jellies, see the wikipedia [tm] article, named- fruit preserves.
Historically, before growing sugar cane in distant, warmer countries, Europeans made sugar from sugar beet. It is a grueling work of grinding the beets to a fine pulp, boiling the juices out, separating the pulp from the still hot juice, then reducing the juice into a thick syrup, which could be used as sweetener directly (which is still available today, since all that is easily done by machines. When I grew up we used it as a spread on bread) or purified and crystallized into sugar. The amount of work required made it expensive, and even with automation it is still not as efficient as sugar cane. (It shall not go unsaid, that harvesting and processing sugar cane before industrialization was hard work as well, which was a driving force for the slave trade.) Still, even in medieval times, peasants would get a taste of sugar-sweetened goods at festivals a couple times a year (I’d say once every quarter, for Spring Festival/Easter, Midsummer, Harvest Festival and Christmas/Midwinter). This would also be the occasion to taste exotic spices such as cinnamon. Also, there was honey, which would have been a bit cheaper than beet sugar or syrup.
For those who struggled to eat at all, it would have been out of reach, of course.