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The Cursed Blue Rose
Two facts govern what everyone in Kworgalya eats, and neither of them is about cooking.
The first is that bulk food does not travel by land. Grain is heavy and cheap and eats its own value in cartage within a few days' haul. A city that wants to export food inland must therefore export something that has concentrated itself first — cheese, oil, wine, dried fruit, preserved meat, or an animal that walks to market on its own legs.
The second is that iron is scarce and copper does not exist. Everything else follows from that: the leather, the bone, the horn, the fired clay, the enormous quantity of quilted cloth standing in for armour, and the peculiar political weight of anyone sitting on an ore vein.
Grassland and savanna are the dense food bases: wheat and barley in the cooler parts, millet and sorghum where it is hotter and drier, pulses everywhere, and herds. What leaves is hard cheese, wool, hides, tallow, preserved meat, and horses.
Chaparral grows little bulk and exports enormous value: grapes, olives, figs, pomegranates, almonds. Oil, wine, vinegar, raisins, dried figs, nuts, goat cheese, incense.
Temperate forest is not a field waiting to be cleared but an economy of its own — nuts, orchard fruit, berries, mushrooms, honey, pannage-fed pork, game — sitting on top of timber, bark, tannin, resin, pitch, wax and charcoal. The exports are barrels, wagons, furniture, smoked meat and the tanning industry of half a continent.
Temperate rainforest is where ships come from. Big timber, tar, pitch, shingles, resin — and, because the growing season fights back, food that is mostly berries, mushrooms, pigs in the clearings and whatever the water provides.
Steppe and scrubland run on herds and on knowing the country: milk, hard cheese, fermented dairy, preserved meat. Out go horses, felt, saddles, leather, bow materials and the animals themselves.
Boreal forest, taiga and tundra are survival economies. Fish, game, birds and eggs, berries, lichens; furs, hides, antler, bone and sinew going the other way, along with tar, sleds and cold-weather kit that outsiders pay stupid money for and then discover they needed.
Mountains give ore, stone, gems and crystal, hard cheese from the transhumance pockets, and very high transport costs on all of it.
And the Ashen Plains give almost nothing. The baseline there is not hunting; it is total-use subsistence and dangerous extraction — insects, burrowers, reptiles, scavenged carcasses, roots and fungi in pockets, and whatever can be cut off something that tried to eat you first. What the ashlands export is obsidian, volcanic mineral, venom, hide, scale and chitin: reagents rather than dinner.
A river, a lake, an oasis or a coast can be laid over any of the above and will usually dominate it.
Fresh water brings fish, eels, waterfowl, flood-recession crops and irrigation gardens, and it brings something worth far more: movement. Mills, boats, ferries, fords, bridges, river-mouths and the tolls on all of them. A poor biome with a good river is a rich place.
Salt water brings fish, shellfish, crabs, seaweed and whales, and behind them salt, whale oil and bone, nets, rope, sailcloth and port fees. Coastal food security has propped up a great many otherwise hopeless hinterlands.
Engineered water — canals, cisterns, sluices, reservoirs — creates a profession and then a caste. Where the water is built rather than found, the surveyor, the sluice-keeper and the water-court outrank most of the nobility, and everyone can see it in what they wear.
The durable, the concentrated and the self-transporting.
Hard cheese and preserved meat rather than milk. Oil and wine rather than fruit. Dried figs, raisins and nuts. Salt fish and fish sauce. Wool, hides and leather rather than the animal — unless the animal is a horse, in which case it walks.
Above that sit the goods that make a city famous: barrels and wagons out of the forests, tar and ship timber out of the wet coasts, glazed tile and storage jars out of the clay districts, glass out of the sand-and-potash country, felt and saddlery off the steppe, and — everywhere there is crystal or gemstone in the ground — the components that thaumaturgy is built from, which is why there are dwarves wherever those deposits are substantial.
A short list of things whose absence ends an ambition.
Iron. Unevenly distributed and militarily decisive. Whole blocs have organised themselves around access to it, and whole schools of arcane and artifact craft exist precisely as workarounds for not having it.
Tin. Enough on its own to justify a city in a place nobody would otherwise settle.
Salt. Without it the preserved food that makes long-distance trade possible does not exist.
Timber and pitch. No fleet, no barrels, no roofs.
Crystal and gemstone. The physical substrate of artifact-work.
Hemp. See rope, sail, sack, net and tent, and then imagine an army without any of them.
The name on a cask is a claim about power at least as often as it is a claim about origin.
Immirene Black Lemon Wine is the standing example. Immira is a jungle city founded on a tin deposit and controlled through the naval sphere of Mareva, and the citrus and dark grapes that the wine is actually made from are far likelier to have grown on Marevese slopes. The name sells mystery, monopoly and a commercial sphere. It does not describe a vineyard.
Buyers in the northern ports know this perfectly well. They pay anyway, which is the entire point.