» Sat Mar 02, 2013 3:35 pm The Victuals of Empire
A Study
by Felix Perdido
Promulgated under the auspices of the Imperial Nibenese Horticultural Society, by authority of the Chair, Viscontessa Blankenmarch.
The property of the incomparable Viscontessa Alessia Iiro-Exactiones, Lady Blankenmarch.
Glory to the Divines and the Ancestors! As I write in this, the fourteenth year from the ascension of our glorious Son of Alessia, Emperor Invincible of Tamriel, Mirror of the Divines, Fated Chronarch and Seal of the Chrysalids*, His Prophetic Majesty Titus Mede the Second, peace reigns across the Empire.
The City, marble-clad and thronged by all Tamriel, mounts the banks of life-giving Niben. White-Gold Tower, awesome and imperious, blooms eternal betwixt the gentle waters of Rumare. The Emperor reigns invincible from his throne, and Dawn's Beauty yields its ample bounty. The fields of Nibenay are tilled and fruitful, undisturbed by war and nourished by the blood of Old Mary. The meadows of Colovia multiply their herds, safe from enemies. The graqes of the hills have ripened, and it is a fine vintage.
All the riches of Nirn flow up the Niben in tribute to the Emperor and his City's patron, golden Benevolence: clad in Ancestor Silk adorned with river flowers, jewels in white gold and black Moon's Blood strewn 'cross her briast, her crown a star of Atmoran ivory shot with glass and varliance, her hair bound with the alluring feathers of Elsweyr and Valenwood, her feet clothed in the subtle leathers of Morrowind and shod underfoot with Thalmor tears.
Forgive me Beauty, I have neglected you! Your sister's aura has not blinded me, Most Sacred Lotus, flowers that are tiny gods falling in your wake. The City has its goddess, but you remain my own. Nightly I see you born from the river, the Thousand Flowers, ancient godlings, come crowding Lake Rumare to join, terrible and resplendent, from petal-swords and stamen-stars, and crown the King as you did in ancient times. I beg you, allow me to write, to sing, and to taste the fruit of the vine, and I will worship you in the fitting way.
Due honours granted, we may proceed to the matter without unseemly haste. I have before me a carafe of Colovia's finest, a pot of ash-devilled kwama eggs, fresh melons from the hills, and some cuts from a hock of cured imga. My spirits and my body are fortified for the terrible struggle ahead. It is my intention, dear reader, to discuss with you an unpopular topic: the gruesome history of Tamriel's food. I do so in search of an answer to the riddle whispered me by teasing Beauty: if we are what we eat, and we eat what we make, do we make ourselves? The subject is sometimes dark, and frequently dry. I recommend you get a drink.
Miles, you old goat, I won the bet. I trust my masterpiece will be sporoformed directly, as per our agreement. Let's see what your friends at the Imperial Jestergraphical Society, those Mora-gratifiers who couldn't chart their collective way through an open door, make of this, then, the clueless, censorious ticks-in-silks, eh? And it has to be word for word. Remember your oath!
Part the First: Cyrod
Prehistory
The Ayleids, it is said, first introduced agriculture to the Niben. This is doubtless a lie, or a half-truth, of a kind with the gifts of gold, spices and land made to Topal by speechless beast-peoples. In it, as in the legend of the Pilot, we discern the designs of the Altmeri, who rendered Nedic and beast peoples speechless before their supposed grandeur. Whatever the customs of the primitive Nedes, they are lost to us, crushed by Elven hubris.
The cultivation of rice, whether introduced by the Elves or a native practice, was already important in Ayleid times. Interestingly, unlike the later Cydodiils, who tilled only the lowlands, the Ayleids sometimes created settlements in inland, forested regions, fertilising the jungle soil with a ritual ichor formed using starlight and blood sacrifice.
The Cyro-Nedic slaves toiled in the fields for a bowl of rice gruel or some fried grasshoppers, while their Ayleid masters seized for themselves the bounty of the fruitful Niben. The mer thus relieved of the need to work engaged in endeavours such as concept-pruning and the collection of varliance, not to mention the martial arts and the disciplining of slaves. Thus, the Ayleids as we know them: subtle, vain, skilled in magic and war, and ostentatiously cruel.
Ayleid court cuisine was, according to the few accounts that exist, of a kind with its progenitors: strongly but carefully spiced, incorporating exotic ingredients such as the birds and monkeys that once lived in Cyrodiil's forests, and frequently laced with dangerous entheogens. It is not clear whether the Ayleid truly used humans as food; this accusation is first made by Alessian sources. I suspect they did: since the mer did not regard the poor Nede as a person, there would be no question of cannibalism.
Alessia and the Order
Ah, but Alessia! Benevolence Manifest! How poor old Morihat must have trembled before you! Even the Jagged Diamond, fell and asynchronous in Beauty's crimson-plumed helm, born of Mercy's void and trailing lilies of blood, knelt in awe of you. Here, with your arrival and the slaughter of elves, history breaches its squamous caul.
Alessian cuisine bore similarities with that of the Ayleids, but possessed a different spirit: generous, robust, strongly spiced, but not without artifice. Recipes such as Nine Meats (Mostly Wolf) Stew and the famous Black Bull Rice, cooked in pepper and the ink of the philosopher cephalopod, attest to a peasantry experiencing a new prosperity. The human population, with the blessings of Benevolence, continued to expand during the reign of the Slave Queen, no doubt because of an improved diet. The First Empire also saw the introduction of cheese, by all accounts Skyrim's first and only culinary invention.
Alas, this happy state could not last. An emergent class of warrior magi were keen to seize power for themselves, just as the fertile shores of the Niben were proving so small for the lusty Nibenese. Meanwhile, Colovia was increasingly the provenance of fractious marcher lords. The result was twofold: elaborate court cuisine, and general poverty. While the poor Nibenese peasant must content herself with a return to rice gruel, the courts of the sorceror-lords dined on rare but unwholesome delicacies such as the infamous Topal Bay Dreugh Stuffed with Boar Stuffed with Monkeys Stuffed with Frogs Stuffed with Ancestor Grubs Stuffed with Ichor.
The rebellion which lead to the establishment of the Alessian Order abolished such sybaritic festivities, but did little to help with overpopulation. Notwithstanding the assertions of certain credulous scholars of the Imperial Geographical Society, the alleged vegetarianism of the Alessians can have had little effect on the numbers of the Nibenese or the formation of the merchant class: meat was already little eaten due to its scarcity. Far more likely is that the abolishment of landed wealth and debt by the Order's reforms forced those with money to move it into other areas, with trade along the gentle Niben, under the auspices of a regime that vigorously and enthusiastically enforced its laws and territory, being the obvious avenue.
In fact, the finickiness of the Alessian gourmand was as likely a feature of an expanded world as the new religion. Under the Alessians, foreign cuisines were introduced to Cyrodiil for the first time: Elsweyr's face-numbing curries; the Precious Fig and its Many Uses (Some of Them Culinary) from Hammerfell; and Marshmerrow Mash and Pickled Kwama Eggs in Jelly from the exotic East. Only the Twenty-Seven Approved Sauces and Eleven Correct Victuals of Summurset were considered too bland, tedious and blasphemous for the palate of the adventurous Marukhati.
Indeed, the Alessian Order presided over a blossoming of the culinary art. Chefs of talent and moral fibre were promoted from the common people by the Culinary Directorate to codify and propagate the Order's Wholesome, Just and Pious Cuisine, replacing the indolent courts of the magi as the arbiters of the table. Several famous Nibenese dishes, such as Moonsugar Congee (sadly unknown since it was outlawed by the dour Septims), Fire-Salted Whitebait, and Fried Marshmerrow Cakes, date from this period.
One can only imagine those heady days of dancing prophets and tattooed merchants, the fruitful Niben crowded with the banners of dragon-fishers and floating bankers. The guard prowled in armour of crimson cloth and paper decorated with water flowers, their nostrils pierced, their minds scanning with the preternatural sight of the ancestors whose moth-wing-eyes they bore tattooed on their necks and faces. Braziers filled with intoxicating incense burned throughout the city, sweet febrile fingers falling upon the people from towering temple arcades: merchants sealing contracts with the wine-oath; scholars dreaming in sacred trances; Colovian bumpkins festooned with bows and blades standing dumb before the void-spewing dragon fountains of Her Temple. Farewell, Righteous Empire! Will Tamriel ever know your like again?
From Reman to the Septims
Alas, foreign wickedness and domestic treachery saw the jewel of Lake Canolus ruined, its forest of banners made ash, its stones black and shattered. Mercy, how you wept! Beauty, how you turned your face away! It is said that the Grand Marukhite ate one last meal of gruel with her holy brothers and sisters before she lead them in their last sortie and her body burst into a swarm of ruby moths. We may take this as evidence of the wholesome properties attributed to rice gruel by generations of Nibenese.
The famed Akaviri had only a limited impact on Cyrodiilic cuisine. The Cyrodiils were initially aghast at the invaders' penchant for raw flesh, and generally carried on eating congee or Peppered Mudcrab Stew. Akavir did add one thing to the fare of the Cyrodiils, however: the Discipline of Butchery, whose knives and cuts are still used in the Ascadian Isles today.
Culinary art under the Remans was influenced by increased contact with Daggerfall. Noble banquets of fattened hogs, bread loaves and cheeses in the Breton style, seasoned with novelties like beet-sugar and parsley, are recorded at great length by contemporary sources. Indeed, the baleful influence of Direnni cuisine- at once bland and overly complex- was felt increasingly throughout the Second Empire.
Direnni cooking was first introduced during the reign of Reman I after the Fortress-Academy of the Chef's Guild in Bhoriane was razed during one of High Rock's interminable internecine wars. With its cultic altars destroyed in the sack of the city, the guild split into rival factions, one of which was subsequently all but wiped out by the Morag Tong during a demarcation dispute. The emperor then provided this faction's exiled Chef-Pontiff of Sanguine, Agreywyr Ysciele, with a position and a new altar at the Imperial court. Ysciele is credited with, among other things, the introduction of the party favourite Panther River Death Urchin, served live in the shell with brandy and lemon, its deadly venom-spines and three wishes intact.
Of the dark years of the interregnum we know little. Strife lead to underpopulation, which made Cyrodiil weak, but conversely prepared the ground for a new kind of Cyrodiilic peasant. Armed and ever vigilant against enemies, the Wolf of the Plains, half Nibenese rice planter and half Nordic veteran, would soon arrive. The relative abundance of land and the decline of trade, not to mention the influence of Skyrim, would mean a hearty but dull diet of mutton, bread and cheese.
An associated and equally vital part of the Septim recovery was the change of the land itself. After the fall of the Ayleids, the jungles of Ald Cyrod had never been suitable for more than slash-and-burn agriculture: the Nibenese had crowded the river's banks and even the river itself, but left the hills to savage tribes of Minotaurs, Khajiit and Kothringo-Nedics, who subsisted on yam gardens and game. Moreover, by the time of the Akaviri invasion, the overcrowded basin was again indebted to a magus aristocracy, this time a mercantile one. The loss of the jungle and its replacement with fields and open forest, through which sheep and pigs could be run, was thus a gift from Benevolence. As to the direct cause of its disappearance, changing Atmoran winds and overpopulation among the Minotaurs, who were famously belligerent under the Septims, seem more likely explanations than the fiat of some hoarse rough diamond.
Most importantly, the disappearance of the jungle saw the spread of the vine from western Colovia to other parts of Cyrodiil. Precious vintage! Beauty's gift, blood of Cyrod! The fruit wines and rice ale of Ald Cyrod could never compare to you, Lotus' Nectar! I shall now quaff this honey'd goblet I have before me in your honour, and then perhaps another.
The Septim dynasty was built by its Red Legions, but they did not survive it. Accounts of the so-called 'Oblivion Crisis' give the impression of a virtual wasteland, the dark soil of fecund Niben left untilled. The Imperial Legion was unable to raise any troops from Cyrodiil for its own defence, and Martin's Champion was forced to beg the magistrates for the use of their personal retinues.
It is not difficult to understand how this sorry state of affairs came about. The administration of Tiber Septim had been delegated to new officials known as 'counts', the ancestors of our conti. These officials were originally magistrates who could be appointed and removed at will by the Emperor, unlike the lords of today, but by the apotheosis of Martin Septim they seem to have assumed hereditary rule over their domains. Moreover, the counts, given a free hand by the upstart Jagar Tharn and the ineffectual Uriel Septim VII, seem to have had little interest in encouraging agriculture or protecting their charges, instead preferring to invest in trade and soak their dependants. Meanwhile, decade upon decade of conscription to fight in glorious but bloody wars in faraway lands had ruined the Nibenese peasantry, who, contrary to the ignorant assertions of certain illiterate Nords and Colovian sheep-botherers, have always stood shoulder to shoulder in black steel and crimson horsehair, grimly bearing the heaviest burden of Empire. An excess of Colovian cavalry and archers is no use without Nibenese infantry, as the battles of the recent war have shown. But I digress.
The austere cuisine of those dark times, such as Crooked Finger Stew, made from stale bread, garlic and the meat of goblins, rats and clannfear, was soon to be supplanted- thank merciful and fecund Benevolence, water of the Niben! Praise be to sultry Beauty, lotus-strewn and shining!- by the pleasant victuals of the Mede Empire. Upon his assumption of the throne and the defeat of the false pretenders, our Emperor made a grant to the Imperial Culinary School for the purpose of once again recording and defining Imperial court cuisine, and outlawed the depraved fare forced on our people by the Thalmor and the privations of war, about which I will say no more.
Today our nobility, resplendent in silk and brocade and ever ready to serve His Prophetic Majesty with their swords and spells, dine on Roast Meat Basted with Wine, Orange and Fennel and Spiced Mudcrab-in-the-Shell. The lower orders, fairly taxed and protected by the Son of Alessia in the manner of the First Empire, enjoy hearty dishes such as Nibenese Lentil Soup, Bloodgrass and Mutton Fricassée, and Wild Fruit and Slaughterfish Stew. There is peace: let us hope that the people multiply, and that Titus the Second, may he reign forever, may continue to guard against the errors of the Septims, the cruelty of the Isle and the arrogance of the magnate Councillors. Mercy, preserve our Emperor! Beauty, let us drink and know peace!
*Felix knows full well that these epithets are forbidden by the Concordat and will never be put into print.
Well, that was trying. Part Two moves to Morrowind. I think I shall need some rest and a stiff drink before I subject myself to Master Perdido's unreconstructed views on Dunmer women, so the memospore transcription will have to wait until later.
-Miles Curio
