#thanks again! you might also want to look up turkish/iranian food for more ideas

[boundlesshart]

While we're kind of on the subject in our thread, what's Almyran food like? peri wants to devour

I went down the rabbit hole of a goddamn lifetime. But also this was sustaining me during the last half of an exhausting week, so thank you for sending in your question.

Almyra references MENA culture (there’s a really good write up here that breaks down each and every reference, please give it a read bc it’s fuckin 👌🏽some good fuckin food), so I focused mainly on things that grow in that region and the food that came out of it. 

SO Almyra has a lot of variety in the way of geography–the ingame Traveler’s Journal mentions specifically that it is made up of fertile plains, deserts, and mountain ranges. Eastern Almyra has pine forests that are used to make the Almyran Pine Needle tea, and Almyra itself has two long coasts to the north and south. I’ll try to break Almyra down by region, but I don’t think I’m gonna talk about regional cuisine all that much.

Fertile prairies

Obviously fertile prairies would be very good at supporting a variety of crops, most importantly wheat and barley for breads (leavened and nonleavened) and couscous. Along with rice and olives, they’re all important staples in Almyran cuisine. Of course there’s also chickpeas, lentils, sesame, onions, eggplants, and even beets from Fódlan (sugarbeets and beetroot). Vast swaths of grassland support your basic farm animals–cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and chickens. Their cows don’t produce a lot of milk, but Almyrans already prefer the tang of goat’s milk and the richness of sheep’s milk to cow’s milk, so cows are generally used as draught animals until it’s time to put them on the dinner table.

Deserts/Arid places

With the help of irrigation and oases, Almyrans cultivate the desert to grow foods like dates, figs, and pistachios. Peach and pomegranate trees grow in the shade of date palms, and grains, green melons, and watermelons grow in the shade of those trees. Goats continue to provide milk and meat alongside camels (though when it comes down to which one an Almyran would rather eat, the goat is the first to go).

Mountain ranges

Almyrans grow a fair bit of food on terraced farms, some close to Fódlan’s Throat but most safely within their country’s borders. We’re still growing wheat, barley, and olives. Fruits like pears, figs, quince, and grapes grow well here, as wells as nuts such as almonds and pistachios. What’s grown at Fódlan’s Throat will likely be very close to what the farms in the Alliance grow on the other side, Mediterranean food in all but name.

On preparation

Almyra has a solid foundation for a variety of different foods. Olive oil can truss up a plate of greens or fry up meats and vegetables. Lentil stews, hummus and bread to spread it on, grilled meat, tahini and halva, yogurts and cheese especially. Yogurt drinks range from chilled ayran with sprigs of mint to sour kefir, salty and soft white cheeses with herbs or get smoked or are simply left alone for the diner to enjoy its natural taste.

Flavors are also varied. Almyra can support sugarcane, but they generally enjoy incorporating sweets flavors into their desserts through honey and syrups and molasses from fruits. They also incorporate spices into their food, but it’s rarely truly spicy.  For the most part, tastes in Almyra skew towards sour and bitter, so they’re fond of pickling and fermenting certain foods to give them that sour tang. Mastic, which comes from resin from the mastic tree, can be used as a spice and, when hardened, as a chewing gum that tastes similar to pine once you get past the bitterness. Pine needle tea, known for its earthy, citrusy flavor, is a very popular tea, one that’s gaining a following in Fódlan. Almyra also has its own coffee culture, and at this point I think it might be better to just point you in the direction of Google search results for “Turkish coffee”. They also have a kind of “coffee” called menengic coffee that comes from the fruit of the terebinth tree. This kind of coffee is very much an acquired taste–nutty, smoky, resinous, and very intense in flavor like other Almyran coffees and teas. Pairs very well with something sweet, and there’s no shame in adding sugar and honey to your coffee.

Extra things that I don’t know where to put so it gets to go here:

I looked at the food that Cyril and Claude like from the dining hall to try to get a picture of what Almyrans might have eaten, and what I found is that they actually share a lot of the same favorite foods (Sautéed Jerky, Pickled Rabbit Skewers, Sautéed Pheasant and Eggs, a bunch of meat basically), and where they split off is that Cyril’s favorite foods have more fish and vegetables (Vegetable Pasta Salad, Fish and Bean Soup, etc.). In the past, generally commoners didn’t eat as much meat as the nobility and used their animals for milk, so it tracks that Cyril would have a taste for veggies and river fish.

Claude’s favorite foods are all meat (he likes only two fish dishes iirc), but funnily enough he also loves everything with cheese (except for blue cheese, which is a disliked gift. Probably the smell).

Claude was in fact taught how to make coffee and tea the Turkish/Almyran way, but he’s woefully out of practice.

Fódlan-Almyran relations have thawed to the point that there are now legal avenues for Almyran goods to be brought to Fódlan. The Throat is still locked tight, but the king of Almyra is incentivizing merchants to take to the seas and sell their goods in the coastal ports in Derdriu, Edmund territory, Fraldarius territory, even as far down as Aegir territory. 

There was a demand for Almyran/eastern goods before trade between the two countries opened, leading to a black market for silks and spices. I’d like to bring up Seiros Tea, described as “A black tea common to the south of Almyra, it is fairly basic in its flavors. This is its common name in Fódlan.” Which led to a headcanon that Seiros tea and a certain kind of black tea in Almyra are the same exact kind of tea, just under a different name to avoid suspicion.