EVANGELITE SLAVE CUISINE
(This article was actually a request from a long time ago. I don't even remember who requested it, but thank you for the idea!)
OVERVIEW
Slavery is the backbone of Evangeline Kingdom’s economy. Without all this unpaid labor, the entire kingdom would crumble, and a big chunk of the world’s food supply would go down with it. Evangelite slaves literally work themselves to death putting food on everyone’s tables but their own, as their masters are often cheap and refuse to feed them properly. These slaves have found crafty ways to supplement their nutrition themselves.
GRUEL
Colloquially known as “slave slop”, gruel is the staple food of Evangelite slaves, which is provided in rations by their masters. This dish is simply a cereal–such as oats or rice–boiled in milk. If the master is especially stingy, the milk is substituted for water. It’s typical for slaves to eat this for every meal. Slave owners choose gruel as their main staple because of its cheap price, but it is lacking in nutrition, so vegetables and chunks of meat may be added on occasion to perk up sickly-looking slaves.
Gruel is not willingly eaten by Evangelite citizens. It is considered exclusively a “slave food”. Only prisoners and those in extremely destitute conditions will resort to eating this bland dish.
BLOODBREAD
This grisly recipe originated in Kelvingyard, the largest slave market on Looming Gaia. Kelvingyard slaves are deliberately underfed so that they will compete for food, leaving only the fittest slaves to survive. This filters out the weak and undesirable slaves without any effort on behalf of staff, leaving them free to do other things. Desperation has driven these slaves to invent bloodbread.
First, a crude flour is formed from crushed weeds, dirt, insects, blood, and bonemeal. The blood and bones may come from vermin or are sometimes harvested from dead slaves before staff comes to collect their bodies. The flour is shaped into biscuits and left out in the sun to “bake”. They must be fiercely guarded from other slaves while they’re baking, so it’s not uncommon for them to be eaten raw.
COURTYARD SALAD
There are two types of slaves in Evangeline Kingdom: Field slaves and house slaves. Field slaves are those which exclusively work outside, and are responsible for chores like crop tending and yard maintenance. This always includes weed-pulling, so slaves pocket all the edible weeds they can throughout the day and make a salad out of them later. Their masters usually prohibit them from taking home crops, but occasionally they find substantial gifts from nature such as wild beetroots, blackberries, and sunchokes encroaching on the crop fields.
The name “courtyard salad” originated from field slaves who tended courtyards of Evangelite nobles. These massive expanses of grass and manicured hedges were a testament to the nobles’ wealth, but they required hours of maintenance each day to keep them looking neat. The slaves who tend these courtyards can reap a large bounty of weeds for themselves during peak growing seasons.
COURTYARD TEA
Courtyard tea was developed under the same conditions as courtyard salad; field slaves pulling weeds from their masters’ gardens and making meals of them. But they didn’t just eat them, they drank them as well. Some weeds, such as dandelion and mint, make healthy, flavorful teas. These teas can also offer health benefits, which is particularly useful to slaves because they receive substandard medical care or none at all.
Evangelite slaves have passed on their knowledge of medicinal herbs to each other for generations. They use mint tea for digestive ailments, willow tea for pain relief, and chamomile tea for soothing anxiety, but those are just a few of the many possible effects these brews can have.
CASTAWAY STEW
Some slave owners do not allow their slaves to eat their table scraps, instead preferring to compost them for their gardens or feed them to their pets. The most miserly of them prefer to keep all but the rotten scraps as leftovers for their own families. But the wealthier ones tend to be more generous with their leftovers and allow their slaves to eat them.
Sometimes these scraps are eaten as-is, but they can also be thrown into a stew to stretch them further. House slaves are responsible for cleaning kitchens, so they typically reap the most benefit. But occasionally they will share their bounty with field slaves, or field slaves will pilfer these scraps themselves from their master’s trash bins. Cooking it in a stew helps to hide unpleasant flavors of any scraps that have begun to rot.
CRUUSTI
Much like castaway stew, cruusti is made from the leftovers that slaves collect from their masters’ dinner tables. However, cruusti is not a stew, it is a bread made from random crumbs that have been swept off counters, as well as bread crusts that the master’s children refused to eat. Crumbs can also be scraped off of baking pans and utensils. Slaves gather these small scraps of dry bread over time, then when they have enough, they rehydrate them in water and make a crude dough. Sometimes they get lucky and a stray chocolate chip or nut makes its way into the mix.
BONE SCRAPS
Cereal-based gruel is not sufficient enough to feed heavyweight slaves such as centaurs and minotaurs long-term, so their diets are supplemented with so-called “bone scraps”. These are the discarded animal bones from butcheries or dinner tables. They are given to slaves raw and they are often eaten raw too, but if slaves have the means, they may boil or bury them to make them softer. The marrow inside is nutritious and the bones themselves become jelly-like with proper cooking. Satyrs, centaurs, and minotaurs have strong jaws that can crush up the bones as-is, but other peoples struggle with this.
BEETROOT SOUP
Beetroot soup is the most famous dish eaten by Evangelite slaves. You can read about it on the main Evangelite Cuisine article.
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