The amount of lore (most of it erroneous) that will accrete around a given recipe over decades—let alone centuries—can sometimes be astonishing to the unprepared researcher. The quality of a given dish can be attributed to all kinds of causes: specific measurements of ingredients, secret additives, unspecified characteristics lent to the food by being sourced or made in a particular area. And naturally, in the Kingdoms, all kinds of rumors may spring up about magic being somehow involved—sorcery, the blue Fire, or even the direct intervention of the Goddess.

In the Four Realms, few items of cookery have suffered more from this kind of speculation than the roast chicken that comes out of the royal kitchens of Kynall Castle. Some of this notoriety will inevitably have to do with its source, as the kitchens themselves naturally have their own reasons for fame. Though not quite as old as the ancient Castle proper, in their earliest form they do at least date back to the early 1300s p.A.d.;¹ and their extension in the following century brought with it the establishment of the first and largest royally-subsidized communal kitchen in the Four Realms.

The tradition of such community resources naturally did not begin in Arlen. Though pre-Realms history before recordkeeping began is understandably spotty, both tradition and folklore suggest that such kitchens originally first started being informally organized by immigrants making their way slowly westward across the nascent Four Realms during the earliest centuries of human recovery.  Hamlets and villages, and (eventually) small towns, began establishing such local storage hubs and kitchens as a hedge—sometimes seasonal, sometimes year-round—against localized food shortages or crop failures. In times of (at least relative) plenty, townsfolk or neighbors would set aside space to store extra food and grain ahead of the winter months, both for themselves and for neighbors who might fall into difficulty. There may additionally have been a connection to the Autumnal festival tradition of Aerrudath, the Lady’s Table, during which all those visiting or passing a household are fed from a spread of the season’s bounty.

Even in Arlen’s heart-city Prydon—where recordkeeping has historically been better due to the royal archives it protects—the reasons for the early establishment of a royal kitchen where all comers were fed without question remain uncertain, due to the lack of specific documentation. Certainly Héalhra himself is traditionally quoted as having said, “As She feeds us freely, demanding no price, it well behooves us when we may to feed others as she feeds us.” So the temptation to treat the royal Kitchens as an organic development of this sentiment is strong… but perhaps flawed.

The rationale may be far more straightforward in a culture where food security is significantly more fragile than ours—and one where tales of the dreadful Realms-wide famine associated with the great Dark are unsurprisingly never far below the surface. The essential responsibility of royalty to keep their people not merely safe, but fed, is never far from the minds of either the rulers or the ruled; and Kynall Castle’s kitchens are a concrete, everyday sign of the royal side of that compact being kept. Any hungry person, from anywhere, can walk in the Kitchen’s gates by day or night and know that for no price asked, they will be given (as the saying goes) “food and drink and all things needful”.

The current sejant of the White Throne takes his responsibility for the Great Kitchen quite seriously, and this has apparently resulted in occasional enthusiastic discussions (and apparently some disagreements) between Throne and Hearth on the structure and features of the day-to-day menu offerings. But there have been no discussions whatsoever about the roast chicken… except for one member or another of the royal household being heard to mention loudly that Sixday Is Roast Chicken Day, and they want to get down there and get some of it. In this regard, the population of Prydon in general appears to agree with them. Sixday meals are by far the Great Kitchen’s most heavily attended ones, and visiting dignitaries must just queue up for as long as any of the local working people who’re dropping by to grab a quick quarter-chook for their nunch. 

It perhaps smacks of the anticlimactic to discover that the secret of the roast chicken itself turns out to be not so huge a secret…assuming that you can get the famously closemouthed and misdirection-loving Master of the Kitchens to discuss it without his tongue in his cheek. Master Ulten has been known to spin casual inquirers straight-faced tales about unusual ingredients and (most recently, due to changes in the royal House) the possible involvement of the blue Fire. However, sources close to the roasting ovens have revealed two important aspects of the chickens’ treatment once they pass through the Kitchen’s portals. One is prolonged brining in a solution based on assorted “warm” spices, two different sugars (these slightly specialized ingredients fortunately not difficult for the Kitchens to obtain due to their royal patron’s papermaking connections), Westwall-mined rose salt, and concentrated sycamore syrup—in this case deriving from the Kingdoms’ variant of Acer pseudoplatanus, the “European” sycamore or sycamore maple, which grows plentifully in the mixed-forestry regions adjacent to the southern Highpeaks in Arlen. Locally-bred, grain-fed chickens destined for the Kitchens spend anywhere from several days to a week in this brine, depending on their tenderness, age, and various other qualities (particularly the season of the year).

After that, according to our privileged source, the secret is apparently not blue Flame, but expert management of the red kind. Interestingly for the Kingdoms (where roasting normally takes place in front of an open fire), the chickens are cooked in stone ovens of Darthene basalt, fired far hotter than a household or town oven can achieve, while smoking woods are added at varying times during the process. Apple and hickory are favored, but again, Master Ulten will admit to using different woods if a given batch of chickens seem to require it, or if there are local shortages. The remaining part of the “secret” is simply expertise: months or years of working with the chickens, the seasonings, and most specifically the way the ovens handle their firewood, and their fire, as the seasons turn. 

In our own alternate Earth, sycamore syrup is relatively hard to find. So it’s just as well that maple syrup substitutes straightforwardly into this recipe without damage to the desired flavor. (Possibly a finicky cook in our world might add some lemon juice to the brine to simulate the slightly more acid quality of sycamore syrup.) The associated spicery of the brine is nothing too exotic to be easily found on our Earth. What counts in this dish is time, and care taken… the most basic kind of magic.

Check the Recipe tab above for the details.

¹ The commonly-used abbreviation for pai Ajnedäre derüwin: “since the Arrival”—i.e. of the Dragons, and therefore since the destruction of the Dark.