Portable Food (Wraps) for the Maintainers Guild

[soniclight]

(Information ported from previous thread)
Here's what we have so far for the Guild of Maintainers wraps:

• something small, convenient, portable, and nutritious.
  
• Pita or Tortilla (Pita goes stale too fast, tortillas would be best option)
  
• contents would have to be nutritious, easy to digest, but at the same time pretty tasty....involving cedar plank salmon filling, along with some sort of cilantro sauce and then some sort of vegetables
  
• Age-themed food wraps? (Climate, content, etc.)
  
• And while we know the D'ni imported grain, we've got no evidence for corn...use whole wheat tortillas and not maize ones.
  

The wraps would be taken when the Maintainers went on expeditions into the Ages. Since they'd be gone for a time, they would need something to carry along to eat.

[soniclight]

find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=258196
Here's a simple wrap recipe I managed to find.
Obviously, some of the meats will have to be substituted, but this is a basic feel for it (yeah, I know, wraps are pretty cut-and-dry, but hey, I'm finding some tasty ideas )

[Printehr]

Hmm... some of my thoughts on contents:

-We know the D'ni had fruit and vegetable Ages, as well as livestock Ages and fish (if not from the lake in the Cavern, then from other Ages). Therefore, the possibilities are endless.
-To narrow things down some, let's try and limit our recipes to things we've seen. However, as we'd be hard pressed to find recipes coming just from the MOUL Ages alone, I think we'll need to take for granted that the D'ni had access to certain ingredients.
-The first challenge, then, is to decide what ingredients we'll take for granted. Since they had livestock Ages, its safe to say they had poultry, and equivalents to ham and beef. Things become more difficult when we decide on vegetables. Lettuce seems pretty likely, but when we get into things like tomatoes and onions... tomatoes are only native to South and Central America, the rest of the world went thousands of years without them, only getting a hold of them after the European colonization of the Americas. So the D'ni might not have had them either.

So what are your thoughts on vegetables the D'ni would have had that could be applied to the wraps?

And seeing mustard and mayonnaise called for in that recipe really intrigues me... what sort of condiments would the D'ni have used? Surely not ketchup! I'm definitely going to have to think about this. ;D

[soniclight]

Gonna take some time on that. I have another final to fill my vision with pain and sorrow.

I'll get back to you with some thoughts later! ;D

[Printehr]

Ugh, good luck with that, I'm done with mine... I do not envy you. ;D

[soniclight]

Okay, So with regards to the vegetables:
We have mushrooms right off the bat. They'd need some filler and I've always had the opinion lettuce (or at least the iceberg kind) is a plague upon this planet, so I think it's safe to say that a cousin of some sort is a given.

I have to say though that , given the application of this recipe, they ingredients would have to be filling so I intend to lean away from the idea of having a lot of vegetables and lean towards a meatier wrap.
With that in mind, the vegetable challenge becomes a little less of a problem. They would obviously need something that was part of a balanced breakfast, so they might have used something like potatoes or other starchier products rather than lettuce that really doesn't have too much nutritional value.

Does that make sense? Or did I go into an unintelligible rant?

[jfcwilson]

I always throught they had a sort of launch box, with, like, a small chor baka, some strips of meat(I imagined some type of bacon), and a vegetable.

[soniclight]

I always thought about a lunch box, but the contents is the problem.

The idea of the wrap would be to incorporate the meat and vegetable components to alleviate the clutter of multiple, uncombined items.

As for the chor bakh in the lunch box .....well, I think they might not want to live of them alone, hehe.

I hadn't thought of bacon in the wrap though. That would prevent ease of rolling up the wrap (i.e. long, pre-made strip vs. chunks of, say, chicken)

[Printehr]

Strips of meat, or even sandwich-meat style thing slices, would be more likely than chunks. I'm not sure I can see the D'ni eating bacon, but they probably had an equivalent, so for a Surface recreation it'd work just fine.

I like your idea about how the wrap would probably be more meaty, Soniclight... assuming they use slices or thin strips of meat and lettuce, that leaves us three questions:

1. What kind of meat? Bacon could work for a surface recreation, but if we're going to be real authentic, we'd need to think about what the D'ni livestock would be like. Probably they had the equivalents of cattle and pigs, so ham or bacon, and thin-sliced beef? If we want our surface recreation to be a little less familiar we could browse a site like exoticmeats.com/ to see what other animals the D'ni might have had available to them. We know that they had grazing Ages for domesticated animals, and they probably had Ages used as game-preserves for hunting, so I can see them having eaten animals similar to buffalo, deer, antelope, even kangaroo! Acquiring these on the Surface in a wrap-friendly form might be more difficult then we're willing to put up with, so it's probably safe to stick with ham, bacon and beef- but it's something to think about. Thin-sliced chicken and turkey are probably safe too, though the D'ni almost certainly had more interesting poultry- I'm thinking pheasant or quail, for some reason.

2. What other ingredients? Mushrooms seem like an obvious choice. But what about cheese? We don't have any evidence of the D'ni having a dairy industry, and there are Surface cuisines that shun dairy products, like Chinese food, for example, so I'm hesitant to include it for certain. The D'ni almost certainly encountered Ages whose indigenous populations ate cheese, but its unknown if they would have adopted it into their own recipes. After all, on the Surface, most of the human population is lactose intolerant- only a minority descended from northern Europeans can digest dairy after achieving adulthood. If they did have cheese, they could have any one of a thousand varieties. They might not have necessarily used milk from cows, either- on the Surface, goat's milk cheese and sheep's milk cheese are popular in other parts of the world. I would hesitantly advocate using as ancient a recipe for cheese as possible, such as feta, or something even older, if we could find one. It's a big maybe, though, and any dairy products in the final recipe should be optional. Also, are their any other possible vegetables that are pretty likely to have been eaten by the D'ni?

3. What condiments would the D'ni have used? I'm not certain about mayonnaise or mustard, but ketchup seems unlikely. I'll have to do more research on sauces before we can make up our minds. I can see them having had vinaigrettes, though, so perhaps a flavored vinaigrette could be used in place of mayonnaise in the wrap recipe?

[soniclight]

We could always look at Salmon too. The local market has vacuum sealed packaged of cooked and seasoned salmon. Mmmm, bagels and cream cheese and salmon......Hm? Sorry, just got really hungry all of a sudden.

Anywho, I think the buffalo and deer aspect sounds good too. They always have buffalo and bison on sale (at the same market) and both are fairly tasty. They are usually spendy too unless there is a spectacular sale. That's something to keep in mind.

The cheese brings up a good point (and puts a damper on my mushroom soup craving from the soup thread) as humans didn't consume dairy for a long time due to, you know, being horribly allergic to it. And since we only have a vague cattle reference then we could easily assume that dairy was absent. That won't stop us, as you mentioned, from having optional cheese and dairy products in our recipes (because Feta cheese and goat cheese rock) because sometimes you need a little extra boost in filler or flavor.

A friend from work said that most condiments seem out of the question: ketchup for the lack of tomatoes, BBQ for the same reason, and mayonnaise has dairy I think. Mustard seems plausible, at least in dried spice form, they might not have had the French's Yellow Mustard handy. And vinegar as a seasoning would be one of the best solutions, but probably sparingly as it would make breads rather soggy when using too much.
I would think that dried spices would have been the most logical condiments given the circumstances. And since there is such a large variety we could easily make some nicely spiced foods for consumption.

[Printehr]

Hmm... mustard sounds plausible to me, too. Considering that the condiment you and I think of when we hear the word "mustard" is a paste made of ground mustard seeds and vinegar (sometimes with added ingredients; the "yellow mustard" on hot-dogs is yellow because it's infused with tumeric, and other mustards contain extra herbs and spices), I think that they not only had mustard but maybe similar condiments as well. Wikipedia says homemade mustard can easily be made by grinding mustard seeds and mixing in vinegar shortly before use, but that they don't keep well. So instead of always using just pure dried spices (which I'm sure they did to some extant, just as we do whenever we sprinkle something we're about to eat with pepper), the D'ni might have made pastes from them as well, some of which may have contained mustard seeds, but not necessarily most. This bears further investigation, methinks.

[teana]

Most ancient cuisines have an oil based spread of some kind for breads. Olive oil is used in the Mediterranean and purified butter (ghee) is used parts of Asia. Both of these keep well in all sorts of weather conditions and do not spoil when added to unrefrigerated foods.

[Printehr]

A spread is exactly what I was picturing. I would think the D'ni would have had a variety of oils, just like we do... the only question is... which ones? I'm reluctant to say olive oil, because then we're stating that the D'ni had access to olives when there's no real proof of that... same goes for sesame or grapeseed oil and the like.

I suppose we could just use olive oil or another particular variety for a base in a recipe, with the understanding that the D'ni would have used their own native varieties of oil. What are your guys' thoughts?

(Oh, and welcome to the forums, Teana! ;D)

[teana]

Thank you