Kaldorei Cuisine

Darnassian cuisine is varied and diverse due to their spread across Kalimdor and the Great Sea. Despite their reverence of nature, or in fact because of it, Kaldorei are masters hunting wild game and fish.

## Common Ingredients

### Meat and Dairy

* The consumption is meat is recognized as a necessity for the armed forces, at a minimum. Grilled or roasted.
* Eggs. Mm.
* Sheeps milk, with honey, is given to babies.

### Fish

Fish and seafood have an extensive place in the traditional Kaldorei diet. With most of their holdings along the coasts of Kalimdor, saltwater fish have offered a steady and resilient supply of food for millennia. While the exact regional preparations and preferences vary, there are several dishes that are almost universal across their diet.

The rich, hearty salmon is a popular meal. Cooked in any number of ways (usually fried or grilled), these abundant fish form a significant part of the diet across the continent. Salmon is also preserved by smoking or curing for winter, often with rich herb rubs which impregnate the pale red meat with delicate and delicious flavours. Of all the fishes of the rivers and seas, the salmon is without doubt the favourite of the Kaldorei.

Second in popularity are a number of related dishes, all focusing around clams. Equally abundant and delicious, Kaldorei usually boil or stew clams and turn them into rich, hearty chowders and risottos with rice and other seafood. This trend includes other molluscs, such as the mussel and the freshwater clams of Winterspring. Particularly large clams are also grilled or roasted.

Though not a popular meal on their own, the importance of both salmon and clam dishes pales before the incredible importance of the stockfishes. These fish - usually smaller or less 'desirable' fish than the prized salmon - are extensively dried (usually unsalted) for storage, and form a mainstay of the diet in the form of stews and soups during winter. The stockfish (most commonly the inland whitefish) are an often overlooked source of protein and flavour for dishes, but hold great importance to the traditional Kaldorei diet, especially during less favourable years. Stockfish also form a significant tradegood, and since the end of the Third War have been exported throughout the world.

Inland fish are usually prepared by roasting or frying, but rarely hold the prestige of good salmon. The main exception to this is the Hyjal trout, a spirited and delicious species which grows to significant size and strength and can prove difficult to catch. These traits together make it a valued meal..

### Rice

Rice is the single greatest staple of the Kaldorei diet, with a preference for a domesticated dry-growing cultivar. While the yields of this strain are lower than the flooded cultivars, they can be grown in a much larger proportion of Kaldorei-held lands. Most Kaldorei rice is produced in the fertile lands of Ashenvale and the Hyjal Foothills, and increasingly, on Teldrassil.

Either cooked as-is or ground into flour to make a range of breads, cakes and noodles, rice can be found in almost every Kaldorei home and settlement. While maize holds a small presence in Southern Ashenvale, it has yet to supplant or even come close to rivalling Kaldorei Rice.

### Fruits and Vegetables

* Cabbages. Radishes. Sweet potatos.
* Pears, moonberries, oranges, pomegranates, peaches.
* Mushrooms of various sorts.
* Pine nuts. Beans!

## Regional Cuisines

### Darkshore

* Grouper.
* Crabs.
* Blackwood Furbolg trade?
* Mushrooms.
* Where there are deer, there is venison.
* Farstrider stew.

### Ashenvale

* Cornbread.
* Melons.
* Venison.

### Hyjal

* Trout.
* Blueroot vines?
* Juniper preparations.

### Teldrassil

* Spice bread, that perennial favourite.
* Pickled vegetables and kimchi.
* Octopi flock around the region. Baby specimens are consumed, sometimes living.
* Oily herrings flock as well, and are native only to the sea around Teldrassil. They're eaten smoked at minimum. *Extremely* popular.
* Delicious clams. Clams feature heavily in the world's cuisine.
* Whitefish are found in the inland lakes (presumably mainland transplants) and are dried for storage, probably used in soups.
* Almonds, consumed in the form of marzipan and no doubt other ways, e.g. almond pastes, roasted, meal biscuits and the like.
* Mushrooms from the forest (or perhaps growing on Teldrassil itself?)
* Capital cuisine has distinguishing features from Dolanaar's.
* Spider kabobs.
* Sweet potato. Darnassus has a nicely varied diet, from the look of it.

### Isles

* Roast moongrazers in all likelihood.
* Red snapper.

### Stonetalon

* Corn.
* Ram, deer and eagle.
* Spider meat.

## Drinking Culture

### Wine

The Elves stand alone among the peoples of Azeroth in their rejection of beer. Traditional Kaldorei cuisine has no recipes involving beer, and it is not traditionally drunk. Instead, wine is extremely popular and a very common beverage - both grape wines, usually red, and wines made of other fruits. Preferences skew heavily towards very sweet wines; so much so that many elf-wines are perceived as entirely too sweet to serve as anything but a dessert wine in Stormwind.

#### Flavoured Wines

The Kaldorei have a rich tradition of combining fine wines, both grape and fruit, with other flavouring agents. Spiced wine made with ginger, cinnamon, vanilla or even chili are all recorded in manifests and cookbooks dating back to the War of the Ancients. Similarly, floral infused wines sweetened with honey or nectar were a popular Highborne beverage and retain some status today.

## Rationales and Disclaimers

* Feralas and Silithus aren't included as they don't really have a distinct cuisine in the sense of the other provinces. While they do differ in diet, this isn't the place. A future article on military rations will cover them.
* Elves like their wine sweet or spicy. This is attested in the WoTA books with Azshara's fondness for 'rainbow flower wine' and the broader drinking of 'honey-nectar wine', a passage in Wolfheart, and their use of ginger in some batches for flavour. It could be worse - at least they don't drink wine all day because their aqueducts are lead-lined, like Dalaran's was.
* Harmony with nature in no way prevents the consumption of meat for the elves. It does seem to limit the extent of them raising cattle, however, though they must do so to some extent to have the milk to make cheese (unless they use moonsaber or Elf-milk, anyway).
* We actually know nothing about Stonetalon's cuisine. Everything there is a reasoned assumption based on geographical context and what can be found in the zone. Similarly, all we know for Moonglade is the festival dumplings, and we know roughly the same amount about Hyjal's cuisine. Darnassian food received less attention overall than that of Stormwind or the Dwarves.
* Holiday foodstuffs are included here and in the other articles to provide more detail, and because dishes that are 'holiday' fare also tend to appear in other forms throughout the year. If you have sweet potatos, why wouldn't you eat them whenever you can unless there are religious reasons?