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Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it's too assertive to the naked eye. — Gordon Ramsay
Cooking is a philosophy; it's not a recipe. — Marco Pierre White
Cooking is all about people. Food is maybe the only universal thing that really has the power to bring everyone together. No matter what culture, everywhere around the world, people get together to eat. — Guy Fieri
"Bake at 350°F for 45 minutes."
Sounds simple, right? Sure, but try telling that to someone from the 15th century. Ovens with temperature control hadn't been invented. Heck... temperature hadn't been invented. Well, temperature didn't need to be invented, but thermometers did, not to mention a scale to measure the heat (in the above case, Fahrenheit, early 1700s). Go back even further, and the idea of telling time to the minute would have been science fiction, if science fiction had been a thing then.
How, then, did those unfortunate folks living in the benighted past ever manage to cook anything?
It gets worse, though. Almost all modern cooking instructions for meat include some line like "Cook until internal temperature reaches 165°F." Yeah, I imagine the pre-industrial consumers of delicious roast meats ended up with a good bit of food poisoning. That, or they had stronger stomachs. (With all due respect to people using more civilized temperature scales, I'm not going to convert F to C here, because it's irrelevant to the discussion.)
Well, clearly, they managed. But if you're writing fantasy set in a low-magic, pre-industrial world, it might pay to consider setting-appropriate cooking techniques. Short version of how they managed: trial, error, and experience. Long version: Look it up yourself; I'm not going to do all your work for you.
Modern fantasy, of course, wouldn't require this, though it might be fun to come up with some different cooking techniques that work in your setting. High-magic settings could hand-wave food out of thin air, or cook it instantly, or whatever; this may be cheating, but so is a lot of magic in fantasy. And future settings, well, I'm sure you've seen the replicators from Star Trek.
And there was a good bit of development in between "primitive humans holding meat over a fire" and "popping the frozen entrée into a microwave." Like everything else, cooking technology and techniques evolved over the centuries and millennia, and obviously also varied between cultures.
So, my suggestion if you set your fantasy in such a pre-industrial milieu: try to find out how food was cooked in the past. Or, you know, make everyone a raw vegetarian; that's one way to sidestep some research.
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Last time, in "Consequences" , I discussed thinking about the repercussions of the magic and/or technology you might invent for your stories.
S🤦♂️: I find the same is true for the overuse of any magic. If anyone can do magic, and it is so simple a 5 year old can master it, then it is hardly special and why isn't the world more prosperous or why hasn't it advanced in many ways? But, no, still a medieval setting with every third character able to cast a spell. And a world rife with dragons would be very different to a standard fantasy medieval-styled setting; everything would have to be so drastically different as to be unrecognisable. It's why the film 'Bright' didn't work - they just plonked a bunch of fantasy creatures into our world, said they'd been there for a while, and yet nothing else had changed. The world-building made absolutely no sense. Repercussions - think of them.
Yeah, one of the first things I ran into when I started DMing, lo these many years ago, was the near-uselessness of classic medieval walled cities in a setting where dragons and other flying creatures are common. Not to mention the battalion of levitating mages with fireball spells.
So that's it for me for now. See you next time! Until then,
DREAM ON!!!
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Fantasy: January 07, 2026 Issue [#13533]
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