The Eyrsh Table

chapter one: the appetite of eyr

There are cities one recognizes by the eye and others by the nose. Eyr announces itself by the tongue.

It is a city of sour milk, sharp vinegar, smoked fish, bright cider, salted eel, bruised herbs, floral wine, fermenting beer, and onions kept in jars until they have acquired firm force of character. Its cookery is often described as strong. This is not quite right. A blow may be strong, and there are certainly Eyrsh dishes that strike the mouth with something of the same intention, but the object of Eyrsh seasoning is not assault. It is awakening.

The Eyrsh do not like a sleeping dish.

Food must possess a certain liveliness. It should arrive at the table with some tension still in it: the clean bite of vinegar, the little prick of fermentation, the warmth of garlic, the meadowy sourness of curd, the marine depth of fish liquor, or the dark, round promise of wine reduced in butter. A dish may be mild, but it must not be vacant. The Eyrsh will never forgive a food which has nothing to say.

This appetite is often misunderstood by visitors. A stranger tastes pickled onions at breakfast, vinegar on greens at noon, and soured cream at dinner, then concludes that the Eyrsh merely like sour things. This is rather like hearing the bells of Eyr and concluding that the city likes noise. Sourness is present everywhere because it performs several duties at once. It refreshes the mouth, sharpens the appetite, cuts fat, preserves the harvest, and reminds the diner that the food is alive.

Vinegar is the first condiment of Eyr, and very often the last. It awakens breakfast, steadies lunch, saves dinner, and is sometimes employed against cookery which deserves no rescue. Nearly every table keeps a bottle or crock of it near the salt. The poorest may have only plain cider vinegar; prosperous houses possess several sorts, distinguished by fruit, age, strength, and whatever the owner is prepared to claim was once kept in the barrel. One may encounter pear vinegar, beer vinegar, red-wine vinegar, herb vinegar, vinegar steeped with berries, vinegar blackened with malt, and the thick, nearly sweet vinegars served by people who crack black pepper at the table in order that their guests may witness the expense personally.

A good vinegar should be sharp without being thin. It should enliven the food without erasing it. This sounds obvious, but a surprising number of cooks believe that if a spoonful is admirable, a cupful constitutes genius.

Soured milk performs the gentler half of the same work. Curd, cefir, and soured cream are everywhere, produced from buffalo, goat, or wear milk according to district, season, price, and household habit. The Eyrsh table has never met a sharp thing it could not soften with curd, nor a rich thing it could not revive with vinegar. This is the central marriage of the cuisine.

Consider the Eyrsh breakfast, which is simple enough to escape the attention of many writers and complete enough to contain the whole city. Thick slices of tomato are laid with cat’s cheese, basil or mint, and dark vinegar. Beside them sit an egg and pickled onions dressed with cefir. The tomato is fresh in its season and fermented or pickled outside it, which means the breakfast changes markedly without changing its name. The cheese is mild and milky; the vinegar dark and pointed; the onion brisk; the cefir softens the onion; the herb lifts everything above the plate. Nothing there is difficult. Nothing there is accidental.

The deep savours

Acid alone does not make an appetite. Without depth beneath it, sourness grows shrill, and an entire meal can begin to feel like an unruly argument. The true foundation of Eyrsh cookery lies below the vinegar, in what are commonly called the deep savours.

These are the fish liquors, pulse pastes, fermented bean sauces, seaweed brines, smoked salt mixtures, and mushroom catsups which give body to a dish without necessarily declaring themselves. They are not always tasted as separate ingredients. More often one notices their absence. A briw without its savour may possess cumin, wine, butter, and garlic and still seem inexplicably hollow, like a handsome room from which all the furniture has been removed.

Fish liquor is the great family of these seasonings, and only someone entirely without curiosity speaks of it as though it were one thing. There is yearen, made from the inward parts of fish; malts, made with malt cakes; brime from shellfish; fishbriw reduced to a paste; and several cheaper liquids which pass under whatever name the seller thinks least discouraging. They differ in strength, aroma, salt, sweetness, clarity, and respectability.

It is no more reasonable to substitute one fish liquor for another than to substitute one aunt for another at a wedding merely because both are relations. Yearen has force and a dark, almost bodily depth. Brime is brighter and more openly marine. Malts can possess a warm, grainy richness when well made and the odor of a wet warehouse when not. Fishbriw is used sparingly by prudent cooks and lavishly by cooks who enjoy watching the prudent suffer.

Alongside these stands toarsh, a salted ferment of pulse, and cracked amaranth, dark, thick, and pungent. Every household seems to possess a crock of it, though no two households possess the same age or consistency. There is also catsup, which means mushroom catsup; anyone requesting “catsup” and expecting tomato has been inadequately prepared for Eyr.

These savours provide the shadow in which the brighter flavors become visible. They are why a plate of greens can sustain interest, why a humble bean purée has length, why a fish soup continues to unfold after the first sour impression has passed. They make Eyrsh food rich without always making it heavy.

They also explain the Eyrsh affection for fermentation. A people raised on wild beer do not regard an unruly ferment as a defect merely because it refuses to taste the same twice. The best Eyrsh beers possess a lively tartness, fruit, grass, damp grain, and occasionally a note which the brewer enthusiastically calls rustic. Consistency has its virtues, but those virtues have seldom included charm.

Bread, pulse and the honest table

A cuisine reveals itself most honestly in what its people eat without thinking.

Visitors remember the fried frogs, eel-maws, peppered venison, and festival sausages because these make excellent stories upon returning home. The Eyrsh themselves mostly eat citchel, briw, cicery, snead, greenmeat, eggs, onions, pickles, and whatever fermented thing is ready enough to be opened.

This is not a deficiency of the table. It is the table.

Citchel is a round flatbread of rye or barley, mixed simply and, traditionally, cooked upon a hot stone. It is bread, plate, spoon, and, in an emergency, napkin. Fresh citchel should possess a cooked exterior, a tender center, and enough strength to lift briw without abandoning half of itself in the bowl. It is eaten so constantly that many otherwise conscientious accounts of Eyrsh food omit it altogether, rather as descriptions of the city omit the ground.

The greatest citchel is eaten immediately. The second greatest is eaten because it is there. There is no third greatest.

Briw is the mother dish of the West: pulse cooked with onion, garlic, and butter, enriched with wine, seasoned heavily with cumin, and served with citchel. It may be made from chickpeas, lentils, peas, or beans, though these choices are not socially equal. Chickpea is preferred when available, bean expected, lentil accepted, and pea nervously pardoned.

There are red briws, white briws, green briws, fish briws, hard briws, fasting briws, and household briws which appear to contain every edible remainder except the spoon. No two cooks agree where variation ends and impropriety begins. Some insist that wine is indispensable; others claim the oldest forms never used it. Some finish with butter, some with oil, some with curd, some with fish liquor. All agree only that it must be served hot and that no one makes it as well as grandma.

Cicery is a smooth pulse purée, usually set on the table as one sets down salt or a lamp. It is less a dish than a standing condition of the meal. Snead is pulse made festive by frying: crisp outside, tender within, and especially good with cefir, pickled radish, and onion. This has not prevented restaurants from embellishing it with unnecessary towers of herbs and charging according to the height.

Greenmeat is the other great constant. The name preserves the older meaning of meat as food and should not encourage the visitor to wait for sausage. It is a bowl of gathered greens—dandelion, wild lettuce, mustard, radish leaf, nettle, kale, cabbage, fiddleheads, whatever the season and place provide—usually eaten with egg, onion, and citchel. In Eyr it is dressed with vinegar; farther north it may be cooked in lard.

Modern Eyr has become exceptionally generous in greenmeat. Empty lots, ruined courtyards, abandoned foundations, and the edges of old canals fill with useful plants. Housewives and old women know these places best, though children, students, and underemployed philosophers may also be observed gathering from them.

This ordinary foundation is important because Eyrsh cuisine is too often represented by its fried foods: the hashes, roasts, cutlets, sausages, and brown gravies which look well in illustrations. All are worthy when properly made. They are not, however, the daily substance of the table. Most Eyrsh meals are composed from bread, pulse, greens, curd, egg, onions, and something fermented. Meat appears, but it does not rule.

The prosperous do not necessarily eat differently; they eat more particularly. Their chickpeas have a district, their vinegar an age, their curd a maker, their pepper a story, and their fish liquor a bottle too small for its price. A poor woman and a burr may both eat briw. The difference is that the burr can tell you where the cumin was grown.

Fat and its proper use

The Eyrsh have no quarrel with richness. They merely insist it have a chaperon.

Butter gives briw its roundness, softens garlic, carries herbs, and makes old fowl worth the hours required to cook it. Ghee keeps better and appears wherever the pantry is warm, the journey long, or the cook sensible. Lard produces the crispest snead, the best fried frog, and a number of breakfasts which shorten the afternoon by making sleep unavoidable.

Oil has its place, especially in summer, during fasts, and in southern dishes. Olive oil is admired in Eyr partly because it is good and partly because it has travelled far enough to be expensive. The distinction is not always maintained.

The important point is balance. A fatty meat wants mustard-fruit, vinegar, or soured greens. A buttery pulse wants pickle. Fried food wants a sharp dip. Smoked fish wants curd and onion. The Eyrsh do not lighten rich food by making it less rich. They make it more alive. This is wisdom.

Sweetness with a name

The Eyrsh do not deny sweetness. They require it to show its papers.

Sweetness in Eyr generally arrives as honey, fruit, syrup, or chocolate. It belongs to something. It tastes of apple, pear, cherry, birch, walnut, flower, smoke, wine, or the particular field in which the bees spent their summer. It is never simply sweet.

For this reason, many visitors find Eyrsh sweetmeats less sweet than expected and far more interesting than feared. A sweetmeat is most often fruit preserved in reduced fruit juice. It may be dark, sharp, concentrated, and slightly fermented. It may be eaten with cheese, meat, fish, or simply lifted from the crock with a spoon when nobody is looking.

Fruitbriw is the plainest and most beloved form: cooked fruit reduced to a thick purée. Mustard-fruits are preserved with vinegar and mustard and belong beside meat rather than after it. Rimefruit retains the bright, cold taste of fresh juice by concentrating it in the frost. Mungberries ferment beneath fat and differ so wildly from town to town that enthusiasts have been known to travel considerable distances for the privilege of arguing over them.

Then there is Weatherwax-briw: smoked peach and apricot minced with concentrated pear juice, yearen, and anchovy. The people of the eastern Vale adore it. Everyone else approaches it first as a test of manners, then as a test of courage, and, in a surprising number of cases, as a second helping.

Honey-confit is a luxury, especially when made with choice fruit, and belongs to birthdays and prosperous nurseries. Chocolate belongs to holidays, gifts, and those moments when adults decide that a bad day has become ceremonial. Moon pies—marshmallow root between coarse amaranth-and-honey crackers, coated in chocolate—are the great exception to Eyrsh restraint. They are sweet, childish, sticky, and perfect, especially when thrown from a festival float on White Queen’s Day.

Eyrsh children do not inhabit a separate sugary republic from their parents. They consume mild beer, fruit, curd, berry milk, sweetmeats, and the same pulse, greens, and bread as everyone else. This may explain why Eyrsh adults do not speak of sweetness as though it were a moral failure committed in secret. It is simply one pleasure among others, and therefore need not appear everywhere.

The pantry and the year

The Eyrsh appetite is inseparable from preservation. Fish are salted, smoked, pickled, dried, potted, and reduced to sauce. Greens become sorgreens. Pulses become toarsh and beanshort. Fruit is dried into jerk, pressed into cakes, cooked into briw, steeped in vinegar, concentrated by frost, or ghosted in spirit. Meat is cured, encased, soused, or sealed beneath fat. Scuit is twice baked, then sometimes baked again until it may be carried into battle or used to settle one. The pantry is an argument with winter, and Eyr has been winning it for centuries.

Preservation does more than keep food. It determines taste. The Eyrsh palate developed among crocks, smokehouses, orchard presses, eel pools, curing sheds, brewery vats, and the immense stomach of the Admiraltie. A city that provisions ships learns to admire food which travels. A city that provisions armies learns to make virtue from the durable. A city surrounded by wetlands, orchards, and volatile weather learns that abundance is not the same as security. Thus the year has an appetite of its own.

Spring brings first greens, young herbs, eggs, and the arrival of frogs in such numbers that enthusiasm becomes exhaustion before the tenth is over. Summer favors cold drink, raw greens, fruit, and lighter meals. Autumn is the great season of pressing, smoking, rendering, and slaughter: blood, liver, heart, tripe, sausage, fresh offal, and the second salmon run. Winter belongs to roots, pickles, salt meat, beanshort, hard bread, stored fruit, and dishes which improve a dark room by steaming in it.

People who eat only in restaurants may believe seasonality is a philosophy. People who keep a household know it is weather.

The large mouth of Eyr

Eyrsh food is not pure. No food worth eating ever is.

Eyr has swallowed the cuisines of subjects, allies, rivals, migrants, sailors, merchants, and students, digesting some completely and leaving others strikingly intact. A food’s name often tells the story.

The Hyber dumpling has lived in Eyr so long and so thoroughly that it is called hyber in one district, salamander in another, manners in Fauwside, and something still more affected among students. Many who eat manners have no idea the food was ever foreign. This is how empire appears at lunch: not as a banner, but as a word whose origin no one remembers.

Food in Eyr is full of such histories. The foreign becomes domestic, the sacred becomes fashionable, the poor man’s meal becomes expensive, the imitation inspires an original, the insult becomes regional pride, and a dish invented last year acquires a grandmother by spring.

The appetite of Eyr is acquisitive, but not merely greedy. It is curious. The city wants to taste what arrives at its docks. It wants to butter it, sour it, put an egg beside it, rename it, and argue over which hill now prepares the authentic version.