Cauldron Classic Recipes

Being a list of foods I've cooked and eaten (and that tasted good!) that work well in gonzo fantasy taverns, inns, bars, restaurants, and other places.

Roll d100:

1. Pan-fried garlic and avocado prawns,
2. Hand-picked mud-flat clam sauce and pasta,
3. White-wine and barnacle stew,
4. Fresh limpets with amber beer,
5. Garlic and parsley garnished snails,
6. Giant land-snail strips cooked and fried with olive oil,
7. Dandelion salad with squid tentacles,
8. Turkey-heart curry,
9. Spit-roasted chicken hearts,
10. Cooked beef heart,
11. Grilled marrow-bones and fresh butterzopf,
12. Rabbit livers with bell peppers and sweet potato,
13. Beef-lung soup,
14. Cheese and garlic soup,
15. Bone-and-vegetable stew,
16. Fish-bone-and-head stew (prepare the bones in a little muslin net, or you'll have to fish them out),
17. Fried dandelion with strips of raw beefsteak,
18. Stir-fried brains with the flesh of the unborn chicken (eggs),
19. Calf liver steaks in red-wine sauce with peppers and onions,
20. Blood-sausage and cream,
21. Blood-sausage and mint,
22. Blood-sausage and rice and barley and chunks of pork fat,
23. Fried and sliced pig snouts to go with your ale, sirrah,
24. Car-engine grilled mixed sausages and vegetables (the carbeque),
25. Chunk of beef baked under hot stones,
26. Raw oysters freshly hammered off the rocks with vodka,
27. Fish cheek selection,
28. Tripe with tomato sauce and spices,
29. Pickled tripe with garlic and peppers,
30. Selection of sliced tongues with onions and pepper,
31. Crocodile meat jerky,
32. Sun-dried anchovies with peppers and nuts,
33. Chicken liver soup,
34. Baked bear's paw with blueberry sauce and a fine chianti,
35. Whole lamb eaten off a spit over a charcoal pit,
36. Grilled pig's ears,
37. Blood and corn soup,
38. Ovaries of sea urchin with toast,
39. Honey-marinated fillet of marble trout,
40. Deep-fried fish ovaries,
41. Baked cormorant with last-meal (greyling) gullet filling,
42. Deep-fried bull's-balls (rocky mountain oysters),
43. Frog's legs grilled action-figure style,
44. Grilled liver and onions, liberally peppered,
45. Deep-fried fish bites,
46. Pickled sardine spines,
47. Raw herring partially digested by its own gastric enzymes (hollandse nieuwe),
48. Grilled cheese-and-potato lump (frika),
49. Suckling pig on a spit glazed with fresh lager,
50. Strips of horse-meat lightly grilled with garlic and peppers,
51. Dormouse ghoulash,
52. Water-rat stew (nutria),
53. Monitor lizard on a stick,
54. Melon-and-turkey stir-fry,
55. Duck breast fried in its own fat,
56. Raw strips of sea-bream with olive oil and fresh parsley,
57. Scallop gratin with garlic, butter and parmesan,
58. Terrine of deer and pheasant with pistachios and olives,
59. African cape buffalo fillet ghoulash,
60. Dried tuna strips,
61. Diced octopus burger,
62. Camel burger in a bun,
63. Wild-boar sausages with a sideboard of cheeses and strong red wine,
64. Grilled blood-and-rye sausages with a side of sparkling golden beer,
65. Grilled chitterlings on a little stick,
66. Minced left-over-meat mixed stew,
67. Grilled sturgeon steaks,
68. Fried trout skins,
69. Sour vegetable stir fry seasoned with giant ants,
70. Fried earthworms with scrambled eggs,
71. Jellied pork trotters,
72. Grilled wild mushrooms dipped in melted cheese (fondue),
73. Ostrich steaks in garlic and mustard sauce,
74. White sausages with sweet mustard and pretzels,
75. Boiled smoked pork stomach sausage (boudin),
76. Fish-cakes gratin baked in cheese and tomato sauce (quenelle),
77. Cold beef-and-onion salad,
78. Pumpkin strudel,
79. Grilled camembert-style cheese stuffed with garlic,
80. Bread and mushroom curry,
81. Fresh pheasant tripe paté with olives, grilled peppers and rosemary crackers,
82. Steamed artichoke flower hearts with vinegar-pickled anchovies,
83. Catfish stuffed with roof rabbit, stewed in a red-pepper tschorba,
84. 
    

Ok, I have to go cook now. If you want a more detailed recipe of one of these, let me know.

Edit 15th June 2014: Added a few more.

Heavy Metal Pan

With cooking as with gaming, knowing your tools and your moves is vital. Thus, the pan.

What is a pan? It's basically the more evolved version of the hot rockTM. What it does is simple - heat is transferred to the base and then, if the pan is nice and thick and well made, evenly distributed to the underside of whatever is inside the pan. A crappy pan will sear your food in a ring, where the heat is highest and leave the rest untouched. In many way a pan is like a sword - a cheap one will make you think you can do things with it, but you will be deluding yourself.

So, assuming you have a decent pan, you are now in possession of one of the most versatile cooking tools known to man since he was a caveman. Or a cavewoman. Combined with a lid, there's few things you can't do with a pan (and most of those things involve either a pot or an oven).

The next thing to get to know is your heat source. Gas is great, because it can be easily and quickly adjusted. Hot plates are ... finnicky. They'll take more work to use well and require more attention, but they can work. Induction rings, well, you need a special pan for those as well, don't you?

The thing is, each pan is slightly different so you have to practice with your pan and your heat source to truly master this versatile tool. There are just a few things to keep in mind when caring for your pan:

1. don't overheat it when it's empty as this may warp it. Which is bad.
2. when it's hot, don't cool it suddenly with cold water as this may warp it. Which is bad.
3. use wooden utensils (or plastic, if you're pathetic) so you don't damage the surface.
4. if your pan is non-stick or teflon for the love of Carcinogens don't scratch the surface with metal implements, knives or abrasive cleaning tools.
5. also, don't cut stuff in a pan - even if you're not hurting the pan, you're hurting the knife and being silly.

When I started cooking, around the time I went to university and suddenly had to feed myself, I knew how to do one thing well: an egg. Now, granted, there's not much that can go wrong with an egg, but trust me - I've seen things go wrong.

As far as I am concerned, there are two main ways to use a pan:

1. at low heat to slowly simmer the contents, be they vegetables, fruits or the flesh of formerly ambulatory creatures. This also works fine for eggs, to be honest. This is easy, all it takes is patience - the lower you keep the heat, the less attention you have to pay and the longer it takes. At the lowest heat settings a lot of cooking becomes a fire-and-forget affair - toss food in, ignore it for 15 minutes, stir, ignore, stir, ignore, serve. As far as meat: anything that is rounded, like chicken legs, pork in general (because you really want pork thoroughly cooked), bratwurst and so forth.
2. at high heat to quickly sear the juicy flesh of formerly ambulatory creatures. This is where the pan shines, and I don't mean because of the glistening droplets of fat that will fly all over the place. A good pan is all you need to prepare most steaks, fish fillets and duck breasts. It takes some practice and when you're starting out, just remember: if you don't cook something for long enough, you can always put it back in for some more bracing thermal treatment. Charcoal, on the other hand, does not become juicy again. As a rule of thumb, slices of meat that are about a thumb's width thick (from 1,5 to 3 cm, let's say) will need around 2 minutes on one side, flip, two minutes on the other side.

However, the pan is perhaps not a tool that works very well with gaming. Unless you have a massive pan and the equivalent of a barbecue gaming session, you simply won't be able to produce enough finger food fast enough in moth situations. An exception would probably be ribs and chicken wings, but those are barbecue bits, after all. If you don't mind equipping your players with forks and small plates, though, then the pan should definitely be on your menu.

For gaming the pan has two big pluses, in my book:

1. the lovely smells that set everyone salivating.
2. greasy finger food will quickly make for veteran character sheets, which give +10% xp per session. If the character sheet actually becomes transparent in places, the character may be eligible for a +15% xp bonus.

Ode to the Oven

The classic "thermally insulated chamber", as Wikipedia puts it, is one of your best friends when it comes to cooking large quantities of food quickly. If you plan on providing large quantities of good home cooking when gaming, the oven is the way to go. Apparently, the oldest found to date are over 30,000 years old, though for actual cooking, a newer model may be very useful - but for serious cooking, avoid the microwave oven.

From Wikipedia: Oven

Roasting, grilling, baking, heating - all can be accomplished with your trusty regular oven. In my experience the microwave is capable of heating and turning salmon stakes into horrid, smelling, oozing lumps of quivering yuck. Yes, I tried - experiment is sometimes the mother of invention. Now, to make the oven work well, there is just one trick to remember: pre-heat your oven to the temperature you will be using. Beyond that, most dishes just require that proto-food is inserted, left alone and magically transmuted by the oven into delectable dining.

Cook Cantrip - The Frozen Pizza
Duration: 5 minute ritual prep + 10-15 minute baking at 180°C to 200°C
The simplest use of an oven in gaming, to my mind, is for heating and baking store-bought pizzas. Through trial-and-error we realized that the absolutely cheapest pizzas are often absolute garbage, while the most expensive ones just have more dubious-looking frozen goodies appended. A fine compromise is to take a good-quality margherita (just dough, tomatoes and cheese) then add herbs (e.g. oregano, peppers), more cheese (mozzarella, gorgonzola, brie), and more meat (smoked ham, cooked ham, thinly sliced salami), before popping the little taste-bud-tingler in the oven.

Cook lvl 2-4 - The Home-made Pizza
Duration: ~1 hour at least, potentially a multi-day ritual
A slightly more complex, potentially much tastier and definitely much messier dish is the home-made pizza. The dough is simple enough, just flour, water, salt and yeast. Or at least, it sounds easier - the fact is, to make good dough takes time, practice and a willingness to get your hands dirty. It can be fun, but it's definitely not the easiest thing to do. After that, some fresh pelati or tomato concentrate, cheeses, herbs and meats complete the pizza. If you really love pizza, you can delve deep into this lore: suffice to say, while I like making pizzas, this may be too long for most gamers.

Cook Familiar - The Pizza Slave
Something we used to regularly do at our D&D games was transform one player each session (usually a cross between the most reliable and latest player) into the pizza slave, responsible for looking at his watch and putting frozen pizza after frozen pizza into the oven and delivering baked, yummy goodness to the table at regular, 30 minute intervals. I think all gamers would agree that the pizza slave deserves at least a small xp bonus for his troubles. It's a good idea to equip the pizza slave with a large wooden platter & knife (not necessarily so large), so that serving and slicing the pizzas is easy enough.

Cook lvl 3 - Roast Duck Breast and Potatoes
Duration: 10 minute prep + 35-45 minutes of baking at 200°C
Not so typical and slightly harder to game around, since it is so delicious and requires plates. This is a dish that exemplifies why I love ovens. Take a good baking tray with moderately high sides and splash a bit of olive oil on the bottom. Then, wash and cut potatoes into small bits of around half an inch thick and cover the bottom of the tray with them. Sprinkle salt and herbs (thyme, oregano, rosemary, whateversie) on top. Then take the duck breast (aim for about 150-200g per hungry gamer), if you like, score the skin a bit, take some mustard and smear the whole thing with it, pop it on top of the potatoes, skin side up, and chuck the whole thing into the oven.
Seriously, just writing this cooking spell up is making me sad that I don't know where to find some duck. :S

Beyond the basics of the oven, it's an easy and fun game of tossing things in, ignoring them for a while and then seeing what happened. One thing to watch out for is, in my experience, potatoes, since they take a really long time to bake thoroughly. However, even this problem can be avoided, if you cut them up finely enough.

Right, time for breakfast.

Two Kinds of Cooking

When cooking there are two main ways to reach the desired result: an edible, and possibly delicious, meal. There is the familiar method, beloved of publishers, where the cook follows a detailed recipe, step-by-step, with everything weighed, measured and timed. Then there is another method, where the cook knows how different ingredients and techniques work and improvises and invents his way to a meal.

For publishers and to transfer information the former method is certainly more attractive. With detailed recipes there is a familiar format to follow and the opportunity to continually produce new recipes. This is not surprising, since the number of potential new recipes is practically infinite.

However, for actually cooking, I think the second method is far better, faster and more fun. When a cook understands the tools and ingredients at his disposal, each meal can be an improv session. Admittedly, now and again, my meals don't turn out that great. My skills aren't perfect, after all! But meals also sometimes go completely wrong, despite following a recipe to the letter.

In table-top role-playing games I notice the exact same thing applies. Most of the production of materials is concerned with detailed recipes: campaign settings, adventures, spell lists, bestiaries, classes, rules. Even the format of a monster stat block in most variants of D&D resembles a cookbook's recipe!

And yet, I dungeon-master games the same way I cook: by understanding the tools and ingredients I have to work with and improvising from there. I also use game books the same way I use cookbooks: to get ideas that I can then try out in my own way in my own time.

I think I am not alone in this, and I would like to see more game materials and more cookbooks that focused on skills, ingredients and techniques, rather than on fixed recipes.

So, I am going to try to write the way I think is useful and gather links I find entertaining right here.

On this blog.

Slowly, and over time.