Travaran's Culinary Atlas of Drua Shye

A comprehensive cookbook that takes its readers along the shores, through the forests, and across the mountain ranges of the island nation Drua Shye. It was first brought to Ivendarea by Kitu refugees and immediately garnered a large community of Nyr cooking enthusiasts favouring Travaran's work as the best work on Jali cuisine ever written.

Purpose

"Travaran's Culinary Atlas of Drua Shye" was written as an attempt to collect as many authentically Drua Shyean recipes favored by locals and made with the respective regions' ingredients as possible. Travaran, as an enthusiastic hobby cook himself, wanted to broaden his horizon and therefore went on an extensive journey through the whole nation, let many interviews particularly with members of elder generations, and wrote down a little over 300 recipes.
Organized by regions and food type - main course, soup, dessert, spice mixture, and so on - the book might not give a complete overview of all of Drua Shye's cooking traditions, but particularly for beginners and those wishing to experiment and bring variety onto their dining tables it is one of the best recipe collections to start with.
While Travaran originally went on his journey truly only to collect recipes and learn more about the diversity of his home-nation's cuisine, he quickly realized that his planned book would to some become much more than "just" a cooking guide. He captured bits and pieces of Jali culture and history that he also included in the form of diary entries and interviews sprinkled between recipes. Speaking to members of ethnic minorities such as the Kitu and also including their recipes and opinions later made the book so highly controversial and actually dangerous to the nationalist-authoritarian government that ideally wanted a completely homogeneous society. It showed that despite their differences all ethnic groups of Drua Shye could be united to something as simple as their daily struggles and their cooking traditions, instead of antagonizing them based on their religious and other believes.
This strong effect the book had is a reason why nowadays it is actually more commonly found abroad compared to Drua Shye, as the dictatorship had most of the copies still in the country destroyed. Even now, with peace slowly returning to the island nation, it is still a rare find there - and even more so commonly seen in its meanwhile 14th edition in Ivendarean libraries and bookshops.

Type

Manual, Culinary

Medium

Paper

Location

Drua Shye

Authors

• Travaran