[META & TRANSLATION] Lycian Cuisine [FE]
Mar. 9th, 2013 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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suwafoughtenfieldWhile going through my old bookmarks, I found a FE7 fansite maintained by two people, one of whom draws fanart and another who writes what we'd call meta. The site hasn't been properly updated in almost two years, but while looking through it, I found something I'd failed to notice before--a big post detailing the owners' adventure in reproducing their idea of a meal you'd find in Pherae! I decided to try my hand at translating it.
The text by the owner of the site who does the most writing, Kawagishi. The cover art is by Mizuyama. The site itself is here: be warned that it's almost all Hector/Eliwood and if you click links blindly you might find something NSFW.
Anyway! Without further ado:
While playing FE7, we found ourselves talking a lot about daily life in Lycia a lot. And the more we did, the more we wanted to try enacting it. Today, we decided to do just that--more specifically:
A Day of Pheraean Cuisine: A Morning-to-Evening Cooking Adventure!
(I referenced all the in-game information I could to do this, mostly from support conversations.)
First, the ingredients. It's a little hard to see, but most of it's root vegetables. The things in the pan are potatoes I peeled before I took the picture, and next to it is meat. I didn't want to make the meat from scratch, so I got it pre-cooked. They're not in the picture, but there's fruit as well. These are all cell phone pictures, so they're small and low-quality, but I didn't have much time to prepare for this, so please bear with me.
Even in terms of the rest of Lycia, Pherae always seemed kind of rural to me, and in comparison to Lycia's neighboring Etruria and even Ostia, I think the food would be simpler and heartier.
→ Going from there, you could use German food as a basis.
→ In a medieval setting, they'd set out a lot of food, and the host would cut and serve it, right?
→ So we're going to need to make this big!Or make it look like it's big.
Let's start with the meat. I didn't put anything in the picture to give you a comparison. but it's... really big... I'm not sure if we can use all this.
Eisbein takes a really long time to cook, so I dropped it in the pressure cooker. It's times like these that I start to lose faith in my cooking abilities.
For German food, you've got to have sausage, potatoes, and beer! So we cooked some sausage too.
And... it's done!!
...Is this really German style? (This is the point where I stop to reflect on how different from my idea it ended up being.)
There were more steps in the process, but it was mostly just us messing around, so I didn't take pictures. It's hard to get the results all into one image, so we split it up, though I got one shot with my DS in the middle (even though their A support doesn't have anything to do with what I was cooking). Now I'll go through and explain the dishes one by one. Some places might be a bit of a stretch.
Bottom: Herbed bread and cheese
Middle left: Barrel ale
Top: Potatoes and sausage
The bread was referenced in Rebecca and Dart's B support, and in Chapter 5, Sain names the ale as something Lycia's famous for. [TN: While Sain specifically references meat and ale in the Japanese version, the English version only mentions "a feast of Lycia's finest foods."] Since I couldn't find any herbed bread, I put some rosemary in the potatoes instead. The potatoes and sausage weren't actually mentioned in-game but I figured it couldn't hurt. I wanted to use mead instead, but there was no way to make it work with the new alcohol tax.
Some kind of beef stew
This wasn't specifically referenced in the game, though maybe you could call this the meat from Rebecca and Raven's B support. I wanted to put it on a plate and photograph it that way, but we didn't have one big enough. But since it's a stew I think it works better in a pot anyway.
Top: Grilled chicken with mushroom and tomato sauté
Bottom: Grilled meat with honey sauce
The top was inspired by Rebecca and Dart's B support, and the bottom is another of the things Sain mentioned as a Lycian food. Mizuyama really likes mushrooms so she just stuck them in there. We didn't know if the grilled meat was supposed to be like a shish kebab or roast beef or what, so we just went with chicken. In retrospect, the colors are a little bright, so it might have been better to use a gravy sauce instead.
Ale, butter, and Hector and Eliwood. I always try to include them if I get the chance.
Top: It's hard to see, but there's dried and fresh fruit there
Bottom right: Boar meat dumplings
Bottom left: Baked sweets
The dried fruits are from Rebecca and Dart's B support again, and the boar meat dumplings were in Lowen and Marcus's A support. [TN: Not a big change, but in the English version, the dried fruit is fresh fruit.] I got the idea for the baked goods from Nino and Rebecca's supports, as well as Merlinus' supports with Marcus and Vaida. The only dried fruits I had were persimmons, so the rest are fresh.
The text by the owner of the site who does the most writing, Kawagishi. The cover art is by Mizuyama. The site itself is here: be warned that it's almost all Hector/Eliwood and if you click links blindly you might find something NSFW.
Anyway! Without further ado:
While playing FE7, we found ourselves talking a lot about daily life in Lycia a lot. And the more we did, the more we wanted to try enacting it. Today, we decided to do just that--more specifically:
A Day of Pheraean Cuisine: A Morning-to-Evening Cooking Adventure!
(I referenced all the in-game information I could to do this, mostly from support conversations.)
First, the ingredients. It's a little hard to see, but most of it's root vegetables. The things in the pan are potatoes I peeled before I took the picture, and next to it is meat. I didn't want to make the meat from scratch, so I got it pre-cooked. They're not in the picture, but there's fruit as well. These are all cell phone pictures, so they're small and low-quality, but I didn't have much time to prepare for this, so please bear with me.
Even in terms of the rest of Lycia, Pherae always seemed kind of rural to me, and in comparison to Lycia's neighboring Etruria and even Ostia, I think the food would be simpler and heartier.
→ Going from there, you could use German food as a basis.
→ In a medieval setting, they'd set out a lot of food, and the host would cut and serve it, right?
→ So we're going to need to make this big!
Let's start with the meat. I didn't put anything in the picture to give you a comparison. but it's... really big... I'm not sure if we can use all this.
Eisbein takes a really long time to cook, so I dropped it in the pressure cooker. It's times like these that I start to lose faith in my cooking abilities.
For German food, you've got to have sausage, potatoes, and beer! So we cooked some sausage too.
And... it's done!!
...Is this really German style? (This is the point where I stop to reflect on how different from my idea it ended up being.)
There were more steps in the process, but it was mostly just us messing around, so I didn't take pictures. It's hard to get the results all into one image, so we split it up, though I got one shot with my DS in the middle (even though their A support doesn't have anything to do with what I was cooking). Now I'll go through and explain the dishes one by one. Some places might be a bit of a stretch.
Bottom: Herbed bread and cheese
Middle left: Barrel ale
Top: Potatoes and sausage
The bread was referenced in Rebecca and Dart's B support, and in Chapter 5, Sain names the ale as something Lycia's famous for. [TN: While Sain specifically references meat and ale in the Japanese version, the English version only mentions "a feast of Lycia's finest foods."] Since I couldn't find any herbed bread, I put some rosemary in the potatoes instead. The potatoes and sausage weren't actually mentioned in-game but I figured it couldn't hurt. I wanted to use mead instead, but there was no way to make it work with the new alcohol tax.
Some kind of beef stew
This wasn't specifically referenced in the game, though maybe you could call this the meat from Rebecca and Raven's B support. I wanted to put it on a plate and photograph it that way, but we didn't have one big enough. But since it's a stew I think it works better in a pot anyway.
Top: Grilled chicken with mushroom and tomato sauté
Bottom: Grilled meat with honey sauce
The top was inspired by Rebecca and Dart's B support, and the bottom is another of the things Sain mentioned as a Lycian food. Mizuyama really likes mushrooms so she just stuck them in there. We didn't know if the grilled meat was supposed to be like a shish kebab or roast beef or what, so we just went with chicken. In retrospect, the colors are a little bright, so it might have been better to use a gravy sauce instead.
Ale, butter, and Hector and Eliwood. I always try to include them if I get the chance.
Top: It's hard to see, but there's dried and fresh fruit there
Bottom right: Boar meat dumplings
Bottom left: Baked sweets
The dried fruits are from Rebecca and Dart's B support again, and the boar meat dumplings were in Lowen and Marcus's A support. [TN: Not a big change, but in the English version, the dried fruit is fresh fruit.] I got the idea for the baked goods from Nino and Rebecca's supports, as well as Merlinus' supports with Marcus and Vaida. The only dried fruits I had were persimmons, so the rest are fresh.
