Food & drink

Northern food

Grains and meat are a large part of the diet here, especially wheat and mutton, with potatoes and turnips added to everything. In the Laatzienne beef is the main meat, but the devotion to bread remains the same as with other Northerners. Vegetables are eaten in season, with a primary favorite being watercress taken from the Salis or one of its tributaries. River fish are also eaten, and considered as a special food.

One local delicacy is messel, a breed of fish not unlike trout and served breaded in a sauce made from wild ramsons and radishes. Another involves the brains of a calf, sweetened by a honey and served alongside potatoes.

Northern drink

Beer is the beverage up here, drunk almost exclusively in the North. Whiskey is also popular, as well as mead. However, a non-alcoholic beverage made from honey is called zverr and is a favorite for parties and for children.

Tea is the warm beverage of choice here, with hot cocoa imported at expense by the aristocracy

Southern food

Bread is an important part of the southern Sicinian diet, although it is made from the flour of a breed of wheat known as marret and is made into a flatbread rather than a loaf. Although sheep is eaten, it is almost entirely for the upper classes and the shepherds who raise them. Most average Southerners consume a great deal of fish, both from rivers and from the ocean, and even towns some distance away from either a river or ocean will still boast a fishmonger's. A great deal or the diet is fruit and vegetables, and most of the crops grown in the south are fruit trees, while every farmstead and townhouse has a vegetable garden.

A popular dish for the aristocracy is a subtlety, or a dish which has been made to look like another dish. The most common is to take fish or sheep and with the help of pastry make it appear to look like a wild boar or shark or even a small child! Such dishes are usually the talk of the party.

Local delicacies include aolder, a fish that has been fed exclusively on shrimp and raised in a dilute sugar water. It's expense comes entirely from the time and effort to prepare the fish. Another is great chummy, a coastal dish named because it resembles the discarded fish parts used in fishing. It is in fact a salad of sorts, made of horse radish, tomatoes, and stuffed dormice, which come together in a dish that is usually served at parties with foreigners. The taste of the great chummy will usually reduce a visitor from another country to gagging or worse, much to the delight of native Sicinians.

Southern drink

Brandy and rum are by far the favorite drinks, although ale has been growing gradually in popularity. A native drink, called baarlow, is made from the fermented marret and is popular in the country. Coffee is locally grown in great quantities, and every man, woman, and child in southern Sicinia drinks it in large amounts. It is a popularr joke with ethnic Borriads, who partake of totally different cuisine, that thee coffee is to blame for Sicinia's aggressiveness and impatience.