Question: In Breakfast with the Tethamagrions, Gillian and Ryde mention 7 meals ( Breakfast, Brunch, Elevenses, Lunch, Tea, Supper and Dinner, not including Snack, which does not count as a meal). I thought there were 8?
Answer: In fact you are indeed right. There is the fabled Midnight Snack or Anti-Lunch. Usually ice cream or hot chocolate and cookies.
Question: I thought it was "Afters", or was that just one of the courses...?
Answer:
Afters is indeed a course of which there can be many. The number of
courses is dependent on the meal, season, state of the household, location
(travelling, visiting, in bed), weather and of course, number of guests. A
bare minimum would include a serving from each of the food groups:
Meat, Fish, Baked Things, Fried Things, Fruit, Vegetables, Mushrooms, Spices and Things to Drink
Call it 9 courses for the major meals of Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. Of the three Dinner is likely the largest meal.
The food rules can be quite elaborate in some circles. Gillian has quite the pantry, and can afford some serious tucker.
In poorer houses some of the food groups are combined into pasties or casseroles but the food group rule is observed whenever possible, even if it can only be done at one meal (dinner usually).
Hobbits are always hungry, and can be lousy on campaign.
Afters is the dessert course, which can be followed by a light conversation enhancer like Port Wine and Walnuts, which lead into cigars and brandy. One can say that Cigars and Brandy are not a proper course but they are included here to show the level of sophistication hobbit cuisine can rise to and the intense detail I lend to this ego trip known as my campaign.
Question: So hobbits do not distinguish between vegetables and
starches... interesting. Traditionally, is the order fixed, or may it
vary?
Answer: The vegetable course can be either or both, yet it is still the vegetable course. A simple vegetable pie could contain up to 12 ingredients and since it has a lightly browned cream potato and garlic crust, still be regarded as a vegetable course.
The order is not fixed per se, since there is an arcane but certainly evolved system of flavor precedence that varies according to the meal's palette. Whether a sweet & creamy pie should appear before a crunchy & hot rissole is dependent on that meal's "oeuvre" or gestalt.
Some of these meal oeuvre have become quite traditional, and are easily recognized amongst hobbits. The food cognoscenti (very respected and admired) can often recognize as many as 60 different types of meal oeuvre by smell! Master hobbit chefs can prepare more than three hundred different types of courses, not counting variations within each course. They can cook more than that, but usually have only mastered the smaller number. Hobbits are very discerning eaters.
Cooks guard their research and practice their art in hopes of inventing a new type (or maybe even a style!) of dish and getting it entered into the Great Book. That they seem to combine the precision of alchemy and the kick of magic can be no mistake.
The Great Book is the result of happy accidents, some come from serious
dedicated culinary research, and some are cobbled from the lesser
traditions inspired by other races that dabble in cooking art (fish
dishes, for example). The book is huge. It is available in very fancy
hobbit kitchens. Abridged portions of it are available in human city
booksellers. The hobbits don't hide this knowledge, they know that only a
real cook could handle the recipes anyway. It's kind of a gauntlet thrown
down to the other races. Not a few famous human restaurants use parts of
this book as their grail.
The menu/food precedence rituals contained therein (known as "what's on" or the "spread") can convey a variety of subtle or overt messages and emotions, of course. A mature hobbit can tell to within hair what message a spread is conveying.
Various food compositions are named, after the kitchen or the cooks who invented them. Some are named after the towns they came from.
Of course hobbits don't expect this sophistication outside of their folk, much like Japanese people don't expect westerners to get the bowing thing right.
For example, a typical "(Fall) Welcome to my house, but please don't stay more than three days" lunch (also known as a Bulwyn) would start right off with stir-fried tiny fishes in garlic, a few ginger and onion poached trout, a cinnamon baked muffin, chilled Bing cherries over a fried bread (shaped like a flower), a stewed mushroom dish, either a spiced & pickled cabbage dish or a pickled yellow radish dish, and a few medallions of rare beef. The drink course would be sarsaparilla mixed with a pale ale. Dessert would be a custard flan with no topping.
(Adding a topping would change the message to something else.)
The breakfast being observed at the Tethamagrion's meant "(Spring) Things are returning to an even keel, but there are still a few burning issues to resolve between you and I." In fact there two issues, with one being more important than the other. But we will not pry into the Tethamagrion's business now.
A very direct and to the point meal is known as Belcher's Melange. This
is prepared by experts only, and served in iron kettles that have seen
better days. After being carefully rendered and spiced, the recipe is
gently lowered onto a catapult and fired into the ranks of the unwanted
guests. This causes minor burns, tearing, major burns, blindness and death
and even loss of appetite. This is usually reserved for bands of orcs, and
other rude folk. The message is "Go Away Right Now". The kettles used are
not usually recoverable afterwards.
Hobbits make excellent siege weaponry, since they are very, very good ballisticians (all that hunting for just the right-sized bird).
Question: Hey, do hobbits tell tales of the Evil Dietician, who forces people to eat low-calorie diets? Seems like a much more frightening prospect than a mere Necromancer, or somesuch.
Answer: Well, no. Most hobbit evil person stories evolve around eating unsatisfactory food, being stranded without food, poisoned delicious food, evil guests or worse yet, food that just makes you hungrier and hungrier. It is hard to get poison into a hobbit; their advanced sense of taste gives them ample warning. There are some tales of cannibalism, but they are stories to scare teenagers.
"Diet" is something that happens when they aren't eating hobbit cooking. Kind of like how we view third world water supplies.
Being sent to bed without supper is serious abuse amongst them. Kind of like being shunned. If the matron wanted her child/spouse to know she is angry at their behavior, she would simply serve them one of her recipes that indicates her state of displeasure.
Having to go out into the wilderness and pare down to less than four meals a day is regarded as very arduous, serious and possibly dangerous. A hobbit wanderer is a cranky wanderer, unless he is well victualed.
Beware of thin hobbits, for they are prone to morose acts of self destruction, like shooting arrows at things they cannot hope to eat. Being peckish tends to exaggerate their behavior, making them more aggressive and dangerous fighters.