Food and Drink

The world of Eberron has a lot to offer in terms of food and drinks, and keen adventurers know where to find inns that suit their regional tastes.

Drinks

Aerenel

• Bars in Aerenel serve drinks that are tainted with weak poisons, designed to bring the imbiber to the edge of death. Actual deaths are rare, as staff in the bars are trained in resusicitation and have antitoxins on hand to counter the poisons.

Aundair

• Fireburst Wine. A dark red wine that warms the blood from the Arcanix vineyards.
• Iltrayan. A dark, dry wine from Aundair. The Iltrayan vineyards lie within a manifest zone tied to Shavarath, and many soldiers claim that a goblet of Iltrayan readies the blood for battle.
• Summervine. A fruity wine from the Summervine vineyard.
• Windshire Rainbow Wine is a type of red wine that changes colour and taste as the wine is consumed.

Breland

• Goodberry Wine is produced in the Greenhaunt and sold in Hatheril.

Eldeen Reaches

• Honey Milk. The shifter's of the Eldeen Reaches ferment honey and milk together, and then spice it with nutmeg, cinnamon, or mint.
• Milkshakes. With the headquarters of House Vadalis, the Eldeen Reaches has access to a variety of magebred animals that produce pre-flavoured milk.

Darguun

• Korluaat. Translated as "hero's blood", korluaat is a strong alcoholic beverage favoured by the hobgoblins and bugbears of Darguun.

Karrnath

• Nightwood Ale. A dark golden lager brewed in Karrnath. It has a full-bodied, fruity flavour, and a sharp, acidic aftertaste.
• Teryk Berry Ale. A pale ale brewed using the many berries of Karrnath's forests.

Lhazaar Principalities

• Salasta. A strong, clear liquor fermented from Sala seaweed found in the oceans around the Lhazaar Principalities.

Mror Holds

• Frostmantle Fire. An extremely potent alcoholic beverage produced in the Mror Holds. It's made for dwarves, which have a notably stronger constitution than most humanoids, and is potentially dangerous for others to drink.
• Mror Mulled Wine. A mulled wine made from fermented subterranean mushrooms. It has an earthy flavour.

Shadow Marches

• Gaeth'ad. An orcish herbal tea that, when brewed correctly, can invoke specific emotions in the person that drinks it. It's not often found outside of the Shadow Marches, as the ingredients lose their potency quickly.
• Hrak. A kind of moonshine brewed by the orcs of the Shadow Marches from various swamp plants.

Tairnadal

• Kumis. The nomadic Tairnadal drink kumis, a mild alcoholic beverage brewed from mare milk.

Talenta Plains

• Tal. A tea made by the halflings of the Talenta Plains by steeping herbs in boiling water, it serves many purposes depending on the herbs that are used. There are dozens of varieties of Tal, with some having medicinal benefits. Tal has been popularised in the Five Nations by House Ghallanda.
  • Blackroot Tal. The most common variety of Tal, Blackroot Tal is a popular mid-day drink and is served hot. It is sometimes sweetened with honey or sugar.
  • Milian Tal. A variety of Tal that is served cold or iced, and is said to help with fevers.

Thrane

• Horchata. A creamy, milk-like beverage made from ground up almonds, melon seeds, or sesame seeds. It is often sweetened with cinnamon or sugar.
• Sigilstar Slush. A sweet, refreshing beverage made from mixing crushed ice with fruit juice.
• Spiced Milk. Thranes heat up milk and then add various spices to it to enhance the flavour. Nutmeg, cinnamon, and mint are common spices.
• Wine Cobbler. A weak alcoholic beverage, made from mixing white wine with fruit juices. It's refreshing and, whilst mildly alcoholic, unlikely to get you drunk.

Xen'drik

• Kurveya. A potent gin made using the berries of the kuryeva bush, a plant found only in Xen'drik.
• Sooka. A mixture of Kurveya and Dreamlily, which efficiently gets the imbiber both drunk and high in one convenient beverage.

Zilargo

• Confession. A strong alcoholic beverage that seems to have a particularly strong effect on the drinker's inhibitions. Many things that were better left unsaid have been uttered under the influence of the Confession.
• Prestidigitated Water. The gnomes of Zilargo mostly drink water flavoured with prestidigitation throughout the day. You can get water that tastes like anything in Zilargo.

Food of the Five Nations

Aundair

Aundairian meals consist of many small portions with a particular focus on presentation, each plate is a beauty to behold and a wonder to savour. Sauces play a heavy role in any recipe, and Aundairian food is considered rich and suitable for special occasions outside of it's country of origin. Aundair also has a reputation for it's top quality vineyards, and the wines of Aundair are considered the finest in all of Khorvaire. Aundairians also have a sweet tooth, and this combined with their focus on presentation means that their pastries and sweets are often works of art displaying a level of culinary expertise not found anywhere else in the Five Nations.

• Pan-seared rabbit with Aundarian wood-nut sauce
• Gold pheasant stuffed with sparkle mushrooms and rice
• Dragon salmon in butter and dark wine sauce
• Tarts
• Cremfels

Breland

Brelish cooking utilises meats, vegetables and hearty sauces to create filling and comforting meals. There is a divide between the cuisine of Northern and Southern Breland. Northern Brelish food tends to be simpler, with a sweet and savoury flavour. This is the food of farmers, meant to satisfy their appetites before and after a day of physically intense work. Here is where you can find Beef Boranel, the king's favourite meal. Southern Brelish cooking is more adventurous, often utilising the spices and vegetables that grow in the more tropical climate. Spicy foods dominate the menu, as do meals influenced by the diverse population of Sharn.

• Beef Boranel (a favorite of Boranel ir'Wynarn), includes dressing made of bread and mushroom roasted inside a full side of beef.
• Farmer's stew
• Thrice-poached eggs and sizzling pheasant
• Kettle fried spider and redeyes berries
• Fire-wrapped golden fish
• Spiced pork and orange peppers
• Hot-spiced chicken in panya leaves

Cyre

Cyre was mostly known for it's candies and cakes. Cyrans value change and experimentation, and their role as the gem in Galifar's crown meant that for the longest time they sampled the best from the other Five Nations. Cyran cooks were known for taking inspiration from (or outright stealing) the dishes of the other nations, but this has lead to interesting combinations that you wouldn't find elsewhere.

Karrnath

Karrnathi cuisine tends to be as heavy and complex as its architecture, with filling, multilayered casseroles being one of the mainstays of the typical family meal. Karrns consider sausage and cheesemaking to be art forms, and one can find all kinds and varieties of these foods throughout the country. Karrnath has harsh winters, and because of this, stews and soups are a staple in their diet, and every hearth has a pot of something simmering over the fire which will be continuously added to throughout the winter.

Karrnath has a strong tradition of brewing, and Karrnath has produced some of the most flavourful and potent beers and ales in Khorvaire.

• Multilayered casseroles
• Stews
• Beef rouladen. Thinly sliced beef is seasoned with mustard, and then covered in a layer of bacon, onions, and pickles, and then pan fried and oven baked. Served with pan-fried potato slices.
• Döner kebab. Toasted flatbread filled with their choice of beef, lamb, or pork, fresh lettuce, tomato, onion, red cabbage and with chilli or garlic sauce.
• Karrnathi Dumplings. Flour-based unleavened dough shell wrapped around venison or beef and mushrooms, and spiced with black pepper and garlic.
• Korth Pasty. Beef, potatoes, swede, cabbage and cheese wrapped in a pocket of puff-pastry.
• Large pork sausages, spiced with curry sauce.
• Potato pancakes. Potato and onion grated together and then fried, served with sourcream.
• Steak pie, filled with onion gravy and served on a bed of mashed potatoes (and optionally topped with cheddar cheese.
• Vedbread, a loaf of crusty bread with ved cheese, sometimes served warm with onion butter.
• Vedykar Ragout, a creamy venison and mushroom stew, seasoned with parsley and lemon juice.

Thrane

Many find that secular life in Thrane can be stifled by the theocracy, but very few who come to Thrane find the food to be disappointing. Thrane is home to a native plant, Thrakel chilis, that they use often in their food. Cooking the thrakel spices in thick sauces, Thranish food tends to be heavy, filling, and very hot. The people of Thrane also enjoy their deserts, to counteract the spicy nature of their main meals, Thranish desserts tend to be sweet and served cold.

• Arepas, filled with a variety of other foods, including thrakel-spiced meat, beans, cheese, and salads.
• Beesh-berry sorbet
• Ice Cream. Thrane is one of the only places you can find ice cream in Khorvaire.
• Silvered vegetable skewers
• Silverfruit pie
• Thrakel-seared beef in red sauce
• Three-thrakel fish stew

Food of Greater Khorvaire

Darguun

Dhakaan was a heavily militaristic culture, and so their food focused on practical nutrition and portability. Waste is unacceptable. Darguul food tends to be thick and chewy, with sour and bitter flavours being staples in their dishes, with spices mostly used to mask unpleasant tastes (such as with spoiling food). On the surface, a grain known as noon is a primary source of food, which the goblinoids cook up into doughy balls. For the Kech clans, a subterranean fungus called suur fills the same role in their diet. Dar enjoy lizards and snakes, both for eggs and meat, and this is primarily where they get their protein. Pickling is a common form of preservation, as is drying out meats to make jerky.

Most dar are not fond of sweet foods, but the golin'dar (goblins) specifically have a sweet tooth. In particular, they enjoy honey cream-filled sweet rolls they call shaat’aar. Most goblinoids are lactose intolerant, and so their diet contains very little, if any, dairy.

• Bananas, a fruit found in the jungles of Darguun. The name is a corruption of the dar idiom, ban'na
• Korluaat, literally "Hero's Blood". A very strong alcoholic beverage.
• Noon and Suur, strachy balls made from grain or mushrooms.
• Shaat'aar, a sweet roll filled with honey cream. A favourite of golin'dar

Droaam

The staple food of Droaam is a ground meat they call "grist", served as a stew, pir or sausage. Grist is tough and sour, it tastes like crap, but it is filling, and the grist mills produce a seemingly endless supply of it. Few of the people of Droaam know or care where it comes from, but grist made of troll meat, ground up and processed for consumption. The Daughters of Sora Kell hold the secrets to processing grist, which isn't found anywhere else, as troll meat is highly toxic and carcinogenic. The daughters have devised a mixture of herbs and spices that somehow makes the toxic meat edible. If you visit Droaam, you may think you wouldn't want to eat a food that is sour and unpleasant, but it's saving grace is that it's free. Nobody starves in Droaam.

If you can afford to pay for your food, grist isn't the only thing they eat. Meat is a staple of Droaamite cuisine, and almost every meal includes it in some form. Many of Droaam's inhabitants actually prefer their meat raw, and you'll need to specify you want it cooked if this isn't the case for you. Some foods, like the Mror Holds, are dangerous for outsiders to eat. Trolls in particular have a fondness for chewing on carrion crawler tentacles, something which would paralyze most creatures.

Most dishes in Droaam are served with a tiny edible ooze, which the Droaamites believe aids in digestion.

• Grist, versatile ground meat with an unpleasant, sour taste.
• Raw Meat of many varieties.
• Chuul meat, popular on the coast

Mror Holds

Mror dwarves are exceptionally hardy and every single one of them is resistant to poison, and this means they can enjoy cuisine that others simply can't stomach. The dwarves live in high mountains and underground settlements, so whilst some of their meats and vegetables will look familiar to the people of the Five Nations, they also use a variety of mushrooms and moss. Red pudding is a major source of protein, a form of peaceful ooze that the dwarves raise as livestock. Mror stews can sicken creatures with more delicate stomachs (most creatures), but many of the stout halflings of the Talenta Plains enjoy Mror food.

Alcohol is also a form of poison, and so for a dwarf to get drunk, the alcohol needs to be really strong. The dwarves often use fermented mushrooms to make their booze, and some of their beverages have light hallucinogenic effects. The drinks of the Five Nations are extremely weak by Mror standards, and some dwarves consider the ability to brew their own hooch to be a basic survival tool when outside of the Holds. When they cater for outsiders, the dwarves are very careful to ensure that their guests only drink things that won't kill them.

• Ironspice, an incredibly potent spice popular in dwarven cooking. A bit much for most humanoids.
• Frostmantle Fire, a strong (by dwarven standards) alcoholic beverage. Possibly deadly to non-dwarves.

Q'barra

The settlers in Newthrone came from Cyre, and many brought their culinary preferences with them. The swamps and jungles of Q'barra are plentiful with natural resources, with the settlers growing and harvesting a bounty of fruits, nuts, leafy vegetables and grasses like rice in the wetlands around their settlements.

The lizardfolk of the Masvirik'uala are mostly nomadic peoples, and their biology gives them a strong preference for meat, though they are omnivorous, and can digest other foods. This means that meat and fish make up a large part of their diet, supplemented by foraging for the variety of fruits and other edible plants that grow in the jungles and swamps.

In areas where resources are particularly plentiful, the Masvirik'uala have set up permanent settlements. These settlements are the only groups of the lizardfolk to practice agriculture, and they engage in a style of farming that allows the wetlands to produce a staggering yield by treating the soil and mixing it with clay. They grow rice and cattails for food, and cultivate fish and amphibians in these managed paddies to give them quite a variety in their diet, even if they still mostly eat meat.

• Roasted or boiled frogs, cooked to remove toxicity and make safe to eat
• Bananas, mangoes, water chestnuts

Shadow Marches

Food in the Shadow Marches is rather alien to those from the east. The peoples of the Marches live in what is essentially a giant collections of swamps and marshes, and so they survive off of what food they can grow or find in that environment. Rice is a staple, as are cranberries, both of which can be grown in large quantities in the marshes. Food is often heavily spiced with the almost endless variety of herbs and spices that can be found in the Marches, and some roots and nuts can serve as entire meals on their own.

The Marches are home to manifest zones to Xoriat that have an adverse effect on the wild life, and this is reflected in their meat. Many of the larger animals can make you sick if you eat them, and they tend to be dangerous to take down anyway, so meat is less common in meals there. They do however eat insects and smaller animals like snakes and lizards, and one of the most popular foods is mootu, a sweet, juicy slug that is often roasted in ginger and other spices. Other insects, such as crickets and ants, are deep fried or candied and serve as snacks.

• Ashi, a golden flatbread made from the Ashi Reed, often eaten with honey or folded around roast vegetables, grilled snake meat, and a hot-sour sauce as quick street food.
• Gaeth'ad, a herbal tea that has a similar effect to alcohol
• Mootu, a sweet juicy slug with a meaty texture
• Swamp Stew, a stew containing mashed berries, chopped wild onions, snake meat and noodles.

Talenta Plains

The halflings of the Talenta Plains are nomadic and spend their years moving throughout the plains. Most tribes travel with a herd of Tribex, a large horned ungulate that is native to much of Khorvaire, which they use for food and milk. All of the tribes utilize dinosaurs, as utility animals and also as livestock, and they hunt wild ones for food. It is rare for a tribe to eat a predator outside of specific events, as the meat is quite lean and not considered worth the risk of hunting the dangerous beasts.

As the tribes are nomadic, they don't really grow their own food. They do, however, scavenge for berries and nuts, and they know how to do so sustainably so that they don't exhaust the resources that the land has to offer. The plains also border Karrnath and the Mror Holds, and the tribes will often trade with those peoples. It wouldn't be unusual to see a tribe eating some Karrnathi stews or pies, and some tribes have acquired a taste for Mror Ales.

The Talenta Plains are the origin of a herbal tea called Tal, which is made from roots found in the region. Made by steeping herbs in boiling water, it serves many purposes depending on the herbs that are used. There are dozens of varieties; milian tal is typically served cold and is said to settle a fever, while blackroot tal is served hot and is a popular midday drink. It's become a popular beverage throughout Khorvaire, and can be found in any House Ghallanda establishment.

• Sagal Powder, a pungent spice used frequently in Talenta cooking.
• Tal, a herbal tea that comes in many flavours, some with medicinal properties.

Zilargo

The fanciful inventiveness of the Zil gnomes means that Zil food can vary wildly, and it's often weird and outlandish. The actual food is generally very simple meat, vegetables and bread, but they tend to add to the food using magic. Illusions make food look like something else, and they often use the same magic to flavour it how they like it. Particularly adventurous gnomes will even make the taste mismatch the look of the food, something which can sometimes make those who aren't used to it feel nauseated. For special occasions, when they can get their hands on it, the Zil have a particular fondness for displacer beast meat, which appears to be somewhere else on the plate to where it actually is.

Visitors to Zilargo should be careful when drinking their alcohol, which has a tendency to make you looser lipped than you might intend to be.

• The Confession, a strong wine that makes people speak their mind
• Zil Zingers, roasted tree nuts served with a sweet and sour sauce