Traditional Gondsholmian Cuisine
Long before the rise of the Cobalt Protectorate, Wurth Harkin, Shank Moswen, Aika Fenmount, and the other founders were born and raised the then-tiny village of Gondsholm. The Protectorate subsequently came to span nearly the whole of Evermorn and, in time, even extended its reach beyond the Evermorn-Armoa Binary System, but the cultural influence of Gondsholm grew along with it through that place's association with the first generation of Protectorate citizens. One particularly widespread aspect of classic Gondsholmian culture is its cuisine, which, despite modernizations in food practices, has gone on to influence food throughout the Protectorate wherever humans may be found.
History
At the time of the founders' kidnapping at the hands of the Iron Talon Mining Concern, the people of Gondsholm had perfected pickling, fermentation, and salting as methods of preservation as a result of the settlement's cold, alpine climate and proximity to multiple large bodies of water. Root vegetables and tubers were common crops, as these could more easily resist harsh weather conditions. Juniper berries, currants, snowberries, and salmonberries could be foraged from the surrounding countryside. Every part of the local of spruce and pine cultivars could be utilized in cooking in some way or another; spruce beer, pine nuts, and pine needle tea entered the Gondsholmian diet as means of acquiring nutrients that were otherwise scarce in lean times. Venison, and especially fish, were important sources of protein.
Execution
Because Gondsholmian weather was harsh and somewhat unpredictable, pickling and fermentation practices were important for helping to preserve surplus foodstuffs for consumption during the icy winter months. Though there have since been huge advances in food preservation, such as pasteurization, chemical preservatives, radiation exposure, and bioengineered crops, the Gondsholmian practice of turning everything into some sort of pickle or alcohol never really faded away. A plate of wine-pickled windskipper, a pickled root vegetable medley, a bit of dense bread smeared with berry preserves, and a glass of brandy or tonic water is a common traditional luncheon; for many Evermornans, an entire meal that comes out of a vessel full of brine is considered far more acceptable than the same meal that comes out of a can, even if the latter is the hallmark of modern manufacturing methods.
Components and tools
Cooks looking to emulate the Gondsholmian culinary style typically seek out large glass jars, pectin, brewer's yeast, sugar, salt, and seasoned brine mixtures as precursors to pickles and preserves of all sorts; Gondsholmian-style meal preparation often begins months in advance. This style of cooking also involves boiling lots of water, whether as a first sterilization step or in the preparations of extracts, so large cooking pots are also important utensils.
Observance
Different cultures within the Protectorate sphere of influence have widely varying opinions of traditional Gondsholmian cuisine. Because of Gondsholm's relatively large cultural influence within the Protectorate, many also conflate Gondsholmian cuisine with the food culture of the Protectorate as a whole.
Lepidosians of all ethnicities tend to regard Gondsholmian food as painfully sour and brackish. Northern Lepidosian Cuisine tends to rely more on hot spices and dessication as a means of preservation, meaning that most Northern Lepidosians aren't prepared for the level of acidity that Evermornans enjoy. One critic from Steel Mill Corners remarked dryly: "They (the Evermornans) wasted all of this water just to make something that tastes like it wants to steal all the water from your body as soon as it touches your tongue." Spacers with the League of Lepidosian City-States auxiliaries to the Cobalt Knights tend to have a more even-handed view of the cuisine because of frequent cross-cultural contact.
Hespartans tend to share a similar attitude to their Lepidosian counterparts when it comes fo Gondsholmian food, sometimes claiming that Evermornan dishes 'taste like a chemistry set.' They also remark about the bitter notes that sometimes creep in as a result of incautious cooks throwing in too many pine products or cooking certain roots for too long. The salted meats, however, do sometimes earn the approval of Hespartan critics, as Hespartan culture has a long tradition of both hunting and carniculture.
Among the other human-adjacent cultures, Feldeans and Xymerians have the highest opinions of of Gondsholmian cuisine. Feldeans also come from a world with extensive ocean cover and, though it has long been too polluted to support widescale subsistence fishing, are said to especially enjoy wine-pickled windskipper. Some Feldeans find Evermornan dishes to not be as rich as they would prefer owing to the overall higher oil content in Feldean farmed fish stocks.
Xymerians, on the other hand, have been forced to live on limited supples across their culture as a result of the natural disaster that saw their world pushed to the outer limit of their home star system's habitable band. To the limited extent that Xymerians have had the chance to try Gondsholmian cuisine with the recent fall of the Iron Talon in Alpha Xymeria at the hands of the White-Star Union, Xymerian critics note that the food is 'clever' and constitute 'top-quality rations.' Karst is a prime destination for a Cobalt Knight expedition to evaluate the feasibility of re-terraforming projects to reverse the decline in global temperatures and crop yieds, but, in the short term, caches of Evermornan seed crops and information on how to replicate Gondsholmian preservation techniques are being sent as an initial care package from the Protectorete to a prospective periphery state.
In all contexts, spacers tend to enjoy Gondsholmian food more than their surface-borne counterparts. Intense flavors are much more important to the enjoyment of food in micro-gravity, where the stuffiness that comes with increased blood flow to the head can make tasting more subtle or aromatic flavors difficult. Fermented beverages, however, need to be rendered flat before consumption because belching is also much more difficult in micro-gravity due to the lack of a directional buoyant force in the stomach. Different state actors within the Protectorate also have varying policies about the consumption of alcohol aboard spacecraft; the Protectorate itself stipulates that an operator is 100% liable for any actions (including capitol offenses) they undertake under the influence and places limits on the permissable blood alcohol content starting from eight hours before important operations, but does not per se ban the controlled indulgence in intoxicants by a ship's crew.
For spacers and others living in closed habitats apart from large, natural biospheres (i.e asteroid colonists), an important thing to consider when preparing preserved foods of all sorts is that it temporarily removes food from the closed artificial ecosystem. To return to the closed ecological life support system (CELSS) cycle, food has to either consumed by people (and later excreted for use as fertilizer for algae or other plant life) or directly recycled through the use of waste digesters. For this reason, some smaller spaceborne populations impose restrictions on the size of private stocks of preserved food. In these cases, Gondsholmian staples can sometimes be emulated through the application of some technological creativity, such as using vacuum equipment to force-permeate a food item with vinegar and 'flash-pickle' it. Those who like to use the jars of preserves as an element of tjhe 'homestead chic' aesthetic might have to settle for lightweight replicas.
In The Fortress of Salt
Enzo Salt is very much a fan of traditional Gondsholmian cuisine. Midori Milan hates the stuff, finding it 'fishy' and 'brackish,' but tries to bear with it because she knows Enzo, her husband later in the course of the journey to Ibren aboard the ESCI Revelation, loves the stuff and wants to share his culture with their children. Enzo, for his part, lets Midori know that his actual favorite food is Stone River Curry because of its intense chili heat; he is an Evermornan, yes, but he is also a consummate spacer.
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Excellent food tradition now I want some fried pickles. But you did a great job detailing why and the reasons for pickling and the great cuisines that they have