Jakob's Brews, ed 161. In GP Newspaper: Potatoes! Yes, Potatoes!

It's the first column of summer again and that means I get a whole page to talk about ALCOHOL! But first, a history lesson.   If ever you visit the jungles of Phænaterr, you will almost certainly see the Phænkill'y mountains, where the ruins of Frööngladd remain sealed after the Human War.   While you may have heard of the Frööngladd before in school, there are a lot of misconceptions about their culture. Firstly they never ate rocks, so if you've heard that in a stage play, please know it is absolutely ludicris. Second, you may have heard their civilization survived mostly on mushrooms. While that is much closer to the truth -they did in fact eat a LOT of mushrooms- they had a lot more going on in their diet than that.   Sidebar: I want to point out that most, although not all of these mushrooms were the boring kind. And probably bland. The very real, historical king Menach's father was known as a great cook and about half the country's exports were exotic spices from hybrid plants. This is partly why the document that formed the First Republic was called "The Treaty of Garlic."   What most people don't know is that they actually ate a lot of surface foods even before the First Republic. We're talking bread, cheeses, goats, pork -Yes they ate ribs! We're talking about dwarves here!- wines, fantastic beers that would probably blow the brains of anyone alive today, and potatoes.   I'll probably write a section on two of those later this month. You can probably guess which two. "But Jakob", you ask "why did you say potatoes last? You'd normally stop with beer." That's absolutely true. But these potatoes were very, very special. Not only were they an all-around great food to pair with just about any meat, these dwarves were the first in known history to make hi-proof vodka.   I repeat the first in history to make VODKA.   Many of the other surface-grown foods were actually grown by their neighbors and traded, including much, but not all of the barley used to make said vodka. What they used to buy them is debated by historians. But that's already too much economics for this column. These potatoes the dwarves grew themselves. I'm told that, honestly, they were probably grown underground by the agrimagusi - which literally translates to magic farmers. Why don't we have these today? I mean, last year there was a small famine in Pel, and let me tell you. If you don't ever have to eat conjured food for lunch, don't. It just tastes stale.   Anyway. An agrimagus would have a farm underground, growing anything that isn't supposed to grow underground. There isn't a lot of information about these guys outside of farming potatoes and barley. Maybe other things just didn't work well? I'm not sure, but potatoes did work, and the Frööngladd made sure modern historians 90,000 years later would know it. But there's one more thing the dwarves did with these potatoes that I learned about. After brewing vodka (How many dwarven tales start with that phrase?), the brew master would actually use the head and the little bits of mash in the still. For the lighweights reading, the head is the part you don't want to drink, but not the part that isn't toxic. They'd pour the head into the original mash, and ferment that. They probably added more barley to this mixture, but that part isn't clear. Adding wheat flour, they would make a sort of wafer out of the potato mixture. It must have been a sort of "secret family recipe" shared by the whole kingdom because we know they did this quite a bit. But there is no surviving manuscript of their recipe. But we do know that they called it "Vodka Cookies" and they were sold outside mountains, across the First Republic.   I don't know if they actually made a tasty food or just a quick and portable way to get drunk. Or maybe they just learned to tolerate vodka cookies because they knew the elves never would. I can't recommend this, even if you brew your own vodka at home, or you're one of my dwarf readers. But I will boldy proclaim that I don't take my advice either and have my weekend plans cut out for me! I'll let you know how it goes. Remember brew, don't brood. I'll be back next week.