Inspiration from Unexpected Sources
Now serving chocolate factories facts…
Greetings from Germany! As of the writing of this article I am sitting in my host family’s kitchen with a lovely view out the window of a very neat and tidy lawn edged in pollinator spaces, sipping a hot tea, and soaking up the vibes. My European adventure began a week ago, and thus far it has been varying degrees of relaxing, touristic, linguistically hilarious, and a source of thoughts and ideas.
The least of which being: for someone writing a cozy culinary adventure I have not spent any time developing the “culinary” part of that descriptor.
The oversight is embarrassing. And it isn’t like I wouldn’t have gotten there eventually. Everything in its own time as they say. Perhaps the epiphany merely came with such inertia as to cause this mild feeling of disorientation. It was a quick recovery, and now I find myself brimming with new areas of worldbuilding to uncover. But like…silly me. Let me explain.
There is Geschicte and there is Geschicte
In German, the word for story and the word for history are the same. Geschicte. Which does make quite a bit of sense. It was the story of chocolate and its history that helped me see my oversight.
My host mother and I took a day trip from Düsseldorf to Cologne on Sunday. We took the train (which I still find insanely exciting, my host sister continues to laugh at me for my child-like wonder every time I get to experience good public transit), and arrived in Cologne just a short time later. If you have never made this trek, as you walk out of the train station you are immediately presented with the Dom. Jaw-dropping literally describes me in that moment. Gothic architecture is something to marvel at. This massive cathedral, the likes of which we have nothing comparable in the US, rises into the sky with all its flying buttresses, spires, and stained glass windows as a testament of what human hands and minds are capable.
Part of the awe arose from the fact that the Dom was built over the course of 600 years! Without a single nail or screw. Just careful stone-shaping and mortar. For someone that has spent many hours dwelling on the nature of time, and living in a country a mere 250 years old, for people to have been able to complete this kind of project over the course of tens of generations seems nearly impossible. Not impossible in the sense of utter ignorant disbelief, but the genuinely impressed kind.
A little later in the day, we would finish our visit by actually going inside the cathedral, which was a whole other round of jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring wonder, but that is not the core of what I want to discuss in this moment. Back to food.
Comparison is the Thief of Joy, but the Patron of Insight
After picking my jaw up off of the floor we strolled along the Rhein toward the Lindt Chocolate Museum. Neither of us was quite sure what to expect. For me, I did have the data point in my mind of Hershey’s Chocolate World. I’ve been there easily a dozen times throughout my life. (P.s. as an adult I find Hershey’s chocolate deplorable. They use an enzyme for its preservation that is also found in vomit. You do the math.) That facility is in small part informational, large part glitz and bravado. Lindt’s museum was not like that.
It begins as you might expect, talking about where chocolate comes from, the biological facts, and then it immediately takes a different path. Whole walls of information are devoted to highlighting the chocolate industry’s negative effects on laborers, their working conditions, the low pay they receive for the severity of the work. Others on the effects on the environment and the interactions of climate change. I’m not sure how else to describe it other than actually informative. Not going to lie, it’s a bit depressing. But it also provides information that genuinely aught to be included in one’s understanding of one of the world’s favorite treats.
After getting a big dose of conflicting feels, you move onto an area that shows the processing equipment, which feels much more familiar to what I’ve seen at Hershey’s Chocolate World. An important distinction is that they have chocolatiers actively making chocolate, which you may sample right then and there as it comes out of the machine.
The second floor continues this with more workers crafting more artisan-type chocolates. Hollow molds, bon-bons, make-your-own chocolate bars. With some displays of chocolate molds and tools from the past. I’m going to call myself out here, that the whole time I was consuming this information (and a bit of chocolate), I couldn’t stop comparing this experience to that with which I was familiar. And like so many other situations, it painted Hershey’s version in the gaudy hues of attention-grabbing capitalism.
Regardless, the next section was my favorite. A half flight of stairs up and you get to the deeper history of chocolate. I’m talking explanations of archeological sites, maps of which Central and South American cultures were using chocolate and when, how it was handled, revered, treated, how it was absorbed into European culture, the role it played in socioeconomics, actual equipment from those earlier times of how it was made, traded, and used.
It was a bit coincidental that just the day before I had been talking to someone about how amazing the Age of Empire series was, and that while the campaigns were certainly grounded in history, they were not perfectly factual. Fast forward to being at the museum standing in front of this big map of the New World and seeing the actual time lines and regions where the various peoples of Central America existed. I previously thought the Olmecs, the Mayans, and the Aztecs lived all at the same time like neighboring countries. My bad. That isn’t how it was at all. The Aztecs specifically were the last, and a comparatively short lived kingdom. Age of Empires presented this information…inaccurately.
Revelation and Imagination
It was specifically as I was standing in front of this map that it hit me like a lightning bolt. What was the history of the foods of Zeer? What ingredients had been used since time immemorial? Which edible components were traded like common chaff or precious gold? What were the primary preparation techniques of ogre culture? Elf culture? Hobgoblin culture? I didn’t know. It was as if I had opened up to a glaringly empty section of a book who’s pages had previously been stuck together. As I mentioned at the beginning of this writing I felt embarrassed. It’s not like me to drop the ball so hard when it comes to worldbuilding details. Yes, okay, it isn’t like there is anyone looking over my shoulder or holding my toes over a fire to write any of this. But for the sake of the craft I’m shocked I hadn’t been more aware.
Sure, plenty of books are written without any specific thought to the food and culture around food. I’m sure I’ve read tons of stuff where nothing was consumed. Perfectly fine. But I find the cozy genre specifically is often full of the kinds of mundane descriptions and info dumps that make those narratives feel especially lived in. Layer on top of that a specific focus on food and, as the author, you are 100% going to need to know what is going on with the ingredients, the names of dishes, from whence they hail, the rituals and habits around those foods, when people are eating, how much they are eating, how they think about their food, etc.
Once the initial shock wore off, by brain sprung into action and started generating…stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. Which is good, because I’m going to need lots, and lots, and lots of stuff. I will say, that I’m doing my best to contain my exuberance to designing the most fundamental parts of ogre food culture, as well as the bits that will specifically be included in Project You Lick. But as I always say “nothing exists in a vacuum.” When you start pulling on one thread you inevitably end up pulling on several and before you know it you have a whole fistful of yarn.
The most relevant example that I have come up with so far has to do with tea ceremony. Ogres are cold blooded. They do not produce their own body heat which makes them more susceptible to external temperatures. If I were a species that was developing sapience, and one of my biggest hurdles was having the energy to move around and actively developing as a people. Can’t really solve this situation by eating more, because digestion requires energy to be present to make happen. So ogres, like our cold-blooded relatives here on Earth, must spend time regulating their body temperature using external sources. In equatorial regions this isn’t such a big deal, with nighttime and daytime temperatures varying less. But the further you get from the equator the more and more this is going to be vital.
I had already previously established that morning sunning culture would be a thing. Every house, lodge, establishment would have spaces designed to catch sunlight and warmth. Cooler regions might even see fire integrated as part of this. (But I like to imagine the races of Zeer being more attuned to nature than modern humans, so I may reserve fire heating as a less common practice.) But what about on days that are perpetually overcast? Or what if it is beneficial to get the body moving sooner than it would take to sun oneself to the right temperature?
Introducing: tea ceremony. Here is an excellent solution for increasing the rate at which the body can be warmed up to get about the day. I can absolutely see this being the equivalent of “family breakfast.” Where ogres eat whole meals less often on account of slower digestion, perhaps they imbibe warm liquids to help them heat up, and chilled liquids to help them cool down (around midday).
From there, new questions arise. What is the base of the tea? Do different regions use a different base? Are their additive side ingredients? Do they use a sweetener? Or a sourer? What are those organisms like? How do they fit into the local ecology? How are they harvested? Are they wild or domesticated? The questions pile up very, very very quickly.
It’s Getting Hot in Here
I know that I am on vacation and am “supposed” to be relaxing. But I’m too excited. This feels awesome. And right. And I absolutely want to carve out time to make these new “discoveries.” This whole line of inquiry has come just shortly after having made the decision that an “Encyclopedia Zeer” is basically a must. Not sure when that will happen, but knowing that it is a format I want to pursue adds another nuance to the potential for the deeper creative architecture of Zeer’s food cultures.
The new road map has been established. It hasn’t been completely revealed. In fact I’ve only just barely begun to unfold it (and I just realized this is sort of a throwback analogy to when we still used paper maps). There is another week in Germany in front of me, and then two weeks in Italy. And already I’ve made this huge stride in the right direction with my worldbuilding. I will do my best to slow simmer this particular ingredient, continue enjoying my trip, and being open to what else might spring up.