The Library Ghost

    The first bread I'll tackle will be Braided Bread, one of the simplest recipes in Skyrim with only Sack of Flour and Salt Pile as ingredients.  Water and yeast are implied, and the quantities are up to me; I'll be basing my recipes on King Arthur's Hot Buttered Pretzels recipe—it's actually very simple and versatile, with the final shape of the dough irrelevant to the ingredients.     When baking bread, I usually use a packet of dry yeast that needs to be activated with lukewarm water and a teaspoon or so of sugar.  For these recipes (and other Skyrim dough recipes), I use a teaspoon of honey instead of cane sugar, unless otherwise specified.  It's very easy to work with, though anyone with access to sourdough starter or active (wet) yeast should feel free to make substitutions. Activated yeast in a glass bowl, about ten minutes in.      The recipe wants two and a half (2.5) cups of flour to one (1) cup of water, a teasp...

    The first recipe I tried for this series of posts is Grilled Chicken.  The ingredients are Salt Pile (so, large-grained table salt) and Chicken Breast (self-explanatory).  I borrowed from a friend one of those salt grinders that some people buy—you know, the kind that has to be turned upside-down when grinding—and I think that was about the right size of salt grain for the dish.  The chicken breasts were normal uncooked chicken breasts, though they were all farm-raised.  The packaging said things like "natural" and "organic," but those aren't protected terms, and can mean anything from "Chicken wire isn't natural" to "Technically all carbon-based lifeforms are organic." You can just about see the giant grains of salt on this raw piece of chicken.     I started by grinding the sea salt onto a piece of raw chicken; you can use cutlets or whole breasts, but breasts will take longer and should be cooked on lower heat.  I made severa...

    When looking at alcoholic beverages, TES: Skyrim seems at first to provide a fair variety of options.  It has mead, wine, ale, and a number of fantasy liquors.  However, the basic ingredients are quite limited, and not much in-universe information is given about the different drinks (flavor, etc.) to help distinguish them.     Since the only cereal grown in the province of Skyrim appears to be Wheat , we can assume that the ales are a kind of wheat beer , rather than the more common barley beers.  Because they are labeled "ale" rather than "beer," we can also assume that these beverages are made with gruit , rather than hops .  While it isn't terribly difficult to find wheat beer for sale, it is much harder to find ale or "gruit beer," and nearly impossible to find a beverage that is both.  I certainly don't intend to brew my own ale or beer, but I might cook with some, or offer samples to friends.  So what to do?  ...

    One of the most common food items in TES: Skyrim is raw or cooked meat.  Usually, slain animals will drop meat of the appropriate kind (beef from cows, etc.) which can be taking to a cooking pot or cooking spit and combined with a Salt Pile, turning it into a cooked food item.  Cooked meat restores more Health points—or, in Survival Mode , more Hunger points—than raw meat, and weighs less, as well.  In Survival Mode, there is also a chance of catching diseases from eating raw meat.  So, in Skyrim , cooked meat is objectively better for the player to carry around.     Raw meat items (and their cooked equivalents) include the following: Boar Meat from bristlebacks; combines with Salt Pile to make Cooked Boar Meat Chicken Breast from chickens; combines with Salt Pile to make Grilled Chicken Breast Clam Meat from clams; no cooked equivalent Crab Meat from mudcrabs; no cooked equivalent Horker Meat from horkers; combines with Salt Pile ...

    Cooking and baking in Skyrim ought to involve a number of herbs; and we do see some uses for Garlic (7 recipes), Lavender (2 recipes), and Moon Sugar (2 recipes).  But there are several other ingredients in Skyrim, mainly used in alchemy, that are clearly based on real-world plants and fungi, and they don't see any use at all. A bulb of garlic, for warding off vampires unwanted suitors .     With recipes as-written, that's fine, but I do plan to make plausible improvements to at least some of the recipes.  Jazbay Grapes and Juniper Berries are used in baked goods, so why not other ingredients?  Are there any other herbs that could plausibly be used?      Well, Skyrim doesn't let the player cook with any of the mushrooms... most of which have primary poisoning effects.  (One of the exceptions is Fly Amanita , based on the real-world fly agaric , which just goes to show you that a primary beneficial effect is ...

     Flour, in TES: Skyrim , is found as the food item Sack of Flour, which weighs half a pound (including the sack?).  Each Sack of Flour is made from three Wheat ingredients at a grain mill.  Each Wheat is composed of about half a dozen stalks of grain.  Therefore, there should be about 18 stalks of grain in one Sack of Flour.      This is not enough flour.  For anything.      Fortunately, I feel confident enough in my own baking skills to ignore pretty much everything about the ratios suggested in Skyrim 's baking mini-game.  So let's skip the amounts and get straight to the sources: if all flour in Skyrim is wheat flour, what kind of wheat should we be using?     Northern Europe continued to use older wheat varieties like einkorn well past the Middle Ages, but it's hard to find those wheats these days.  All-purpose whole-grain flour, preferably unbleached, should be good enough for our purpos...

     The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a fantasy video game in the mode of a first-person shooter.  Mainly, your character shouts at things and picks flowers while wandering the countryside—or maybe that's just been my experience.  The point is, Skyrim is ostensibly about fighting a dragon-god with your own god-dragon powers (or possibly about brokering peace between white nationalists and racist elves), but the developers saw fit to include numerous mini-games, like picking locks or brewing potions , which don't interact with the combat system at all.  You can, in fact, completely ignore the plot and just focus on improving your skills in the mini-games.      One mini-game that is especially interesting to me is the cooking or baking mini-game.  Although TES: Skyrim has skills (i.e. non-weapon proficiencies), there is no relevant skill for making food.  You can't improve your ability to throw things in a pot and produce cooked v...

    I've been pondering the nature of holy symbols in Dungeons & Dragons and similar fantasy tabletop RPGs.  They're instantly recognizable, with strong lines and bright colors, and can be hugely fun to sprinkle throughout a dungeon as clues or emblazon on a character's shield to show their allegiance.  Yet, there seems to be a distinct lack of real-world analogs for D&D-style holy symbols.  How did that happen?      Although D&D was created by a deeply Christian man, E. Gary Gygax seems to have neglected the real-world use of holy symbols in his own religion, much less outside of Christianity.  Let's look at how the cross is used as a Christian symbol.     The cross or crucifix is, essentially, the ancient Roman equivalent of the gallows.  As the instrument of Jesus' suffering* and death*, it is the quintessential Christian symbol.  It can appear with or without Jesus (or other hanged martyrs), and w...