Cephiran Foods

[dinosaurjam]

So I know there's the cheese-fruit thread, but this is (hopefully not redundant) to discuss Cephiran food in general. I've never seen the bit in the materials collection with the fruits/etc. in it, sadly. Waaaaaay back in the day (we're talking 2001) I wrote a lengthy fanfic called Standing on the Sky. It's pretty awful in terms of the writing, plot structure, etc., and I'd really like to rewrite it someday and do it, you know, better. But one of my favorite parts of writing it was that I came up with a bunch of different foods that people in Cephiro ate. (I also came up with names for various native animals and plants of Cephiro, but the food was the most fun.)

Granted, none of these are canon, obviously. And when I eventually rewrite SotS, I'd love to work in things like cheese-fruit instead. But these were some of the things I came up with (breaking the CARS CARS CARS theme of names, I just tried to give them names that sounded Cephiro-y to me; not very consistently, I'm afraid, but whatever):

kymarle: Fish, commonly eaten for breakfast or lunch, often accompanying with a specific sauce.
pyfol: A water bird, commonly eaten in general. Similar in turkey's dark meat as far as taste/texture goes.
amal: A round, baseball-sized fruit, with slightly fuzzy dark purple skin. The inside is pale blue and similar in consistency to a ripe pear. Slightly tart flavor; mostly used in fruit spreads and sauces.
daudrite: A dark orange segmented fruit with a thick, tough green and white skin. The sweet fruit is eaten in segments or crushed for spreads and preserves, and the bitter-tasting skin is ground up and sprinkled on foods set outdoors to keep the bugs away. The fruit's flavor is mild and juicy, similar to pineapple but not quite as acidic.
pirilome: A sour yellow fruit with a rough black peel covered in small, dull spines. The juice and the shredded peel are used in cooking.
themin: A small, pale yellow berry with a mild flavor. Themins are used in fruit spreads and as a side dish in meals or a light snack.
yeral: A pale pink, small fruit with a thin red skin. Yerals are popular in pastries because of their slight sugary taste.
maudre: A fist-sized, dark brown loaf of bread covered in a sticky fruit spread made of themins, daudrites, amals, and several herbs. Maudre is eaten at every meal.
hyredem paste: A thick paste made from the ground up stalks of hyredem, a kind of bluish-green grass. Hyredem paste is normally put on bread or biscuits.

So does anyone else like to think about things Cephirans eat? Any thoughts on food culture (is eating a highly communal thing? Is it a meat-heavy diet, or a grain-heavy diet, or a largely vegetarian diet? etc.)?

[Akira]

woooow what a great imagination xD perhaps looking into cars names would help in the future if you plan to keep with this, most of the names on the serie are car names xD

[suzanami]

Yes I've always loved these.  The idea of maybe just renaming them is good.  Because then you don't have to make up all new stuff but then it fits in with the cheese-fruit.

[suzanami]

Now I'm thinking that I've always considered the diet to be generally meat-and-grain based.  Fruit is a snack or dessert usually, though it's more common to eat it in the palace?  (It just sounds right okay.)  I haven't explored vegetables much except for my potato-thing-that-tastes-more-like-carrots.  I think there's a lot of bread happening in Cephiro.

There's obviously pastries we've seen, but I like the idea of sweet breads most, kind of like pan dulce or even the sweet breads in Japan, more than something heavier like, I dunno, tira misu.  I can see Umi enjoying things like that, or honey to flavor something more than sugars.  Though I wonder if they have sugar there...  I doubt it?  So they use a honey or something kinda similar to sugar?  (Oh maybe after things settle down they can import it from Chizeta or something, since I've apparently headcanonned that Chizeta also has a coffee equivalent.)

[dinosaurjam]

Ooh, I like that. But yeah, I imagine there being a lot of grains (mostly in bread form, whether savory or sweet), meats, root vegetables, and fruit. How much other vegetables are eaten is maybe more of a class thing? Like less wealthy people who grow/farm their own food eat a wider variety of vegetables like leafy greens because they have fewer options, whereas the more upperclass can be pickier, and root vegetables are considered "better" foods. (Obviously there's probably not a huge issue with hunger in Cephiro because Land of Peace and all that, but there's obviously some class differences.)

I also agree that they don't eat many sweets, just fruit and lighter sweet breads.