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Message: <blockquote data-quote="talien" data-source="post: 8179162" data-attributes="member: 3285">We recently made braised beef from <a href="https://amzn.to/3qGXAXS" target="_blank">The Heroes' Feast cookbook</a>, which purports to translate fantasy dishes into real life recipes. Which brings up the question: what if your world's cattle aren't like Earth's?[ATTACH=full]131740[/ATTACH]<h3>Amphail Braised Beef</h3>This is our second attempt at a recipe from the <a href="https://amzn.to/3qGXAXS" target="_blank">Heroes Feast cookbook</a> and the difficulty level was significantly ramped up from the simpler <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/making-a-heroes-feast-travelers-stew.677645/" target="_blank">Traveler's Stew</a>. For one, there are several nuances to how the meat is cooked involving a certain amount of braising and saturating the meat with juices from the pears and onions. For another, it takes a lot longer to cook than you might expect; over four hours in fact. This is not a meal you decide to make on a whim.After crying my eyes out cutting the massive numbers of onions and peeling the pears, the rest of the meal went quickly. My daughter liked it but didn't ask for seconds. I on the other hand loved this dish most of all; I've only encountered pears as an ingredient in some French cuisine, but the mixture of pears, sparkling hard cider, and onions took the meal to another level entirely. We're only two meals into the Cookbook and this is far and away my favorite.One thing we didn't do was cook the meal for as long. It's primarily there to let the juices sink into the meat, but we had kids to feed who weren't going to wait that long, so we cranked the heat a bit and cooked the meat for a shorter period of time. It was still delicious, but if we had planned the entire cooking time out ahead of time (which would mean preparing the meal after lunch time for us) it might have been even juicier. This is not a fast meal or one that you whip together at the last minute for your players.[ATTACH=full]131741[/ATTACH]<h3>How Now Weird Cow?</h3>Cattle are a common staple of European society and thus are found in medieval dishes, but fantasy worlds that want to be different will often "reskin" their cows by making them look different. How different they really are can disrupt whether having a steak on the menu is feasible; if for example the cow-substitute's flesh isn't edible, it serves a very different purpose in your setting.For example, the Last Avatar cartoon series has hippo cows, omnivorous creatures that look like hippos but <a href="https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Hippo_cow" target="_blank">function as cows in the Avatar universe</a>:One distinction of note is that the hippo cow is an omnivore, like hippopotami, and therefore it's likely its meat might taste differently. It's also likely raised differently as a result because it has a wider diet.Consider <a href="https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Brahmin" target="_blank">Fallout's brahmin</a>, which are two-headed variants descended from Indian brahman cattle:Like the hippo cow, the brahmin are hardier and more versatile than their cow counterparts, which makes them a catch-all for beef resources in Fallout. Their ability to go without water for long also makes them viable in desert regions, which most assuredly affects the flavor of their meat.And then there's perhaps the most popular not-cow of them all, <a href="https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bantha" target="_blank">banthas in Star Wars</a>:Banthas are a stand-in for just about everything cattle are used for, including meat (bantha steaks). In the Forgotten Realms, <a href="https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Roth%C3%A9" target="_blank">rothe replace cattle</a> in the north and provide a food staple for sentient underground species, like Drow.But it's not just the meat that changes when you switch in cattle-analogues for your world.[ATTACH=full]131742[/ATTACH]<h3>Got Milk?</h3>Cows are also a source of milk. The aforementioned brahmin milk actually helps with radiation poisoning, making it not just tasty but nutritious in ways that are important to survivors of a post-apocalyptic world. Banthas produce the infamous blue milk of Star Wars. It's used just like Earth milk in everything from butter to yogurt to ice cream. But we never hear about the milk from hippo cows, and probably for good reason.Depending on how "hippo" a hippo cow is, it could have two kinds of milk, <a href="https://www.ati-holidays.com/why-hippos-milk-is-pink/" target="_blank">pink and orange</a>:As enterprising game masters flesh out their worlds, it's often a simple tweak to reskin an animal like a cow so it functions similarly to cattle but looks different enough to evoke a sense of the alien or fantastic. But if you do decide to change things up be mindful that the steak on  your dish might taste different .... or the milk in your mug might be pink!Your Turn: What replaced your cows in your fantasy world?</blockquote>

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