Таверны и постоялые дворы - Inns and Taverns

INNS AND TAVERNS
Inns are primarily places where a traveler can sleep for the night, stable one’s horses, buy semi¬secure short-term storage, and get simple meals either in one’s rooms or in a “common room” (dining room).
Alehouses (taverns) are mainly places for drinking, sometimes with rentable private booths or chambers for conducting business meetings. Such chambers can also be rented for overnight stays, and simple food of the sausage, meat-pie, stew, and bread-loaf variety can be had. (Taverns in the Realms seldom offer extensive menus.) The main room of a tavern is a taproom, and taverns have tavernmasters and even tankard-tenders (but never barkeeps, barkeepers, or bartenders). Female servers are known as wenches (not a dis-respectful term), and male servers are known as keghands, never waitresses and waiters. Taverns serve ale in tankards, and wine in tall glasses or flagons (no one uses the words “mug” or “pint”).
The Realms has uncounted thousands of both inns and taverns. A small wayside settlement might have just an inn that serves also as a tav¬ern. Conversely, backcountry hamlets and villages not on a trade road often lack an inn; the tavern serves both functions, with a stable loft offering crude overnight sleeping facilities for travelers. Although generalizations are by nature oversim¬plifications, taverns are generally noisier and less formal than inns, and taverns tend to welcome everyone, whereas inns are restricted to paying guests—and perhaps one or two persons who come to meet with each guest. Local law keep¬ers tend to be slightly more lax in disciplining the patrons of taverns (“Well, what did ye ex¬pect? Drunkards brawl, and you went to a place where folk go to get drunk!”) than they are for the guests of inns, where it’s understood that patrons are paying for some measure of peace, quiet to sleep, and security.
Taverns and inns often have stables, run by stablemasters who direct hostlers to tend to horses (these handlers are rarely called grooms). Both inns and taverns have cellarers who see to the procurement, storage, and retrieval of drinkables and sometimes of food, too. Female servants are generally known as maids, and male servants as jacks. 
A wayside inn or tavern might buy, sell, and trade mounts and pack animals, but in cities and market towns, such guild-dominated trade is done at “livery stables” instead.
In a small inn where one servant sees to ev¬erything for multiple rooms, that servant is a “chambermaid” or “chamberjack” (less formally, just “maid” or “jack”). If the inn is a little larger, it will have “chamberers” assisted by “warmers” (more formally, “warming maids” or “warming jacks”) who see to chamber pots and to ewers, basins, and towels, for wash water and drinking water. These names are used even in inns that never heat water. An even larger inn will separate the warmers from those who deal with chamber pots, who then are “nightmaids” and “nightjacks” or, less for¬mally, “potmaids” and “potjacks.”
Typical superior tavern fare throughout Faerun consists of inexpensive drinks—such as mint water, small beer, local ales and wines, and some offering of stronger spirits—as well as an assort¬ment of nuts, wheels of cheese, small round loaves of salty bread, sausages, soups, and “everything in” stews. One of these stews usually contains boar scraps and barley, the broth thickened with mashed yellow peas. It is always salty, to encour¬age more drinking, and always served in tankards with long spoons chained to their handles for use in scraping out the last food at the bottom of the tankard.

Public Dining and Menus

In the Realms, the most popular everyday terms for “restaurant” are “feasthouse” and the slightly grander “feast hall” (more often these days “feast¬ing hall,” to avoid confusion with “festhall).” The Chondathan word “skaethar” has crept into Common as formal usage, meaning “dining es-tablishment,” where the word “feasthouse” has a meaning closer to “eatery.” Small wayside inns and taverns that offer the only public dining in a town don’t bother with menus. Whatever’s “on” tonight is it, with usual meal choices so simple that the platter¬maid just verbally imparts them (“What’ll it be, goodsirs? The fish or the joint?” or “Full meat or the stew?”) and outlines the drinkables and desserts—the latter being the real “treat worth paying for” in the eyes of most commoners and farmers in the Realms.
A larger settlement might have multiple places to eat but little true competition. For example, a village might have a temple that serves food only to pilgrims and night guests, an inn that serves a different sort of fare but only to patrons, and a tavern that serves only sausages, cheese, and hot hardbread with lots and lots of ale to everyone who comes in the door and pays. Again, no writ¬ten menus are needed or used.
Most feasthouses and feast halls inside inns and taverns are located where there’s true com¬petition, as is usual in market towns and cities, as well as places where food sources change often (fresh fish landed at ports, for example). Newly arrived fare is chalked up on menu boards, typi¬cally on display beside the bar as well as on a pillar not far inside the front door. Royalty, nobility, and wealthy social climbers have always regarded beautiful printed menus (often taken home as remembrances) as a mark of what they call “proper” or “superior” dining. As a result, all highborn feasting halls and inns that have ornate feast chambers or agreements with feasthouses and dining clubs tend to prepare handsomely calligraphed “provender bills.” These provender bills cover both sides of one sheet of heavy paper; menus are a field in which exotic pa¬pers are the rage, not parchment. In Waterdeep, almost every eatery in North Ward, Sea Ward, Castle Ward, and Trades Ward west and north of the City of the Dead employs such printed menus. Even some of the more exclusive “upstairs clubs” in Dock Ward, frequented by young nobles, use either printed menus, done by the broadsheet printers, or handwritten cards. A few establishments boast what we would recognize as coated-paper, multipanel foldout menus. The coating is wax, to keep stains from stews and sauces off the paper, which is usually shield-shaped rather than rectangular. These es¬tablishments are mainly in Calimshan and the Tashalar, but there are a few in Amn, coastal Tethyr, and the Vilhon. An old tradition around the shores of the Shin¬ing Sea—still seen in some places there, and flourishing in Var the Golden—is that of the ban¬ner maids. These are provocatively or grandly dressed lasses who accompany the platter-maid to a table of diners. The banner maid is literally MIC Н МЛ КОМАКСК

wearing the menu, as a fore-and-aft stiffened fabric that fits close to the body. She stands and moves as diners direct, they choose their meals, the platter-maid records the orders, and off both maids go to the next table. Good-looking and at¬tractively dressed banner maids often get called back several times throughout a meal. It’s con¬sidered good fun and acceptable to “call forth” the banner maid once more or even several times as one eats, but it is not considered good form to dally over the initial order, or to recall her mul¬tiple times immediately after making that order. Some restaurants use their banner maids for deal¬ing with rowdy diners, equipping them with bulbs of swiftsleep gas or liquid drugs that act as seda¬tives when mixed with wine or ale hidden beneath their menu boards.

WHAT’S TO EAT?

The bounty of the land and agriculture are watched over by Chauntea; however, no deity governs food and drink. Many faiths use special foods, meals, food preparations, and drugs in various holy rituals, but food and drink are not exclusively the portfolio of any one deity. The best food nowadays is never imbued with magic, after centuries of accumulated fear and abhorrence of the results of magical tinkering with food. Too often in the past has magic been used to poison foes, transform foes, or just trick someone into eating dung, glass shards, or other disgusting or harmful substances that had been temporarily transformed into something more ap¬petizing. Just about every Faerunian society down the centuries has shunned magical meal prepara¬tion—except for specific tasks such as peeling and ingredient mixing—and the prevailing attitude across the Realms is admiration of cooking done without magic. That said, no one will cavil at someone who uses a spell to get drenched wood burning for a cooking fire in a rainstorm, or uses a spell to thaw frozen food in a blizzard. Some jaded and wealthy nobles see enchanted food as exclusive, rare, and special because it’s forbidden or frowned upon, and they handsomely pay wizards—especially sorcerers, who can work magic without a lot of obvious casting prepara¬tions—to prepare food magically at private feasts and revels. Of course, nobles who love such fare claim it has a taste that more mundane food can never achieve; many lonely wizards who are poor cooks privately disagree. The backbone of many human diets is grain and meat. Most meat in the Realms is marinated simply and cheaply in stale beer with sugar, garlic, salt, and mustard, or the cook’s preferred hand¬ful of herbs, to taste. An alternative marinade is fruit juice, most often the wet mash of grape skins left over after grapes have been pressed and the fluid poured off for wine making. Meat that’s been salted to preserve it is soaked overnight, and the water is then poured off to cut its saltiness. Lamb and boar are often scored, with cloves or garlic buds thrust into the slits, before cooking. Most meats are painted with a mix of powdered spices (sage, rosemary, and the like) before being spit-roasted, and Calishite cooks even add certain substances to the hearth-coals so the aromatic smoke will permeate the meat as it’s roasting. The aromatic herbs are always secrets of the cook, however, most are tinctures or tisanes made from rose petals or the leaves and petals of other flow¬ers. The blood from slaughtered animals is always saved to be cooked as drippings or used in mak¬ing gravy, sometimes with a few drops of vinegar to prevent congealing. Handfoods Snacks are popular in most places in the Realms, particularly in crowded, fast-paced cities. Here follows a far from complete list. Hand Pies: Meat-and-gravy-filled, savory palm-sized pastries of an astonishing variety of ingredients and tastes, from curries, to leek- with-bacon, to minted lamb. Popular in the Heartlands, the Dales, and the Savage Coast North. Salted, Roasted Seeds: Especially pumpkin and loalurr (pistachios). Popular in the Tashalar. Wheels of Sharp Yellow Cheese: Some with ground nuts or diced olives inside, or laced with zzar or various liqueurs. Popular in the Heart¬lands, the Dales, and the Savage Coast North. Raisins: Popular in the Heartlands and on the coast of the Sea of Fallen Stars. • Date Cakes: Served as pressed, flat ovals. Popular in Calimshan and the Tashalar. Fig Cakes: Served as pressed, flat ovals. Pop¬ular in Calimshan.  Cranberry Cakes: Served as pressed, flat ovals. Popular in Sembia, the Vilhon, and Turmish. Dried Apricots: Popular in the Tashalar, Lu- iren, Var, and Estagund. Quince Sticks: Cakes of dried quince pressed together with various beetles and formed around edible klooer roots (licorice-like roots of a parched wilderland bush). Popular in the Vilhon, Shaar, Var, and Estagund. Honeydrops: Thumb-sized candies of honey mixed with an edible gum and spices to provide flavor and keep the honey from melting and run¬ning in hot conditions. Popular in Calimshan, the Vilhon, Mulhorand, Raurin, and Chessenta. Sugar Cakes: Like real-world petit-fours, sugar icing-drenched confections of baked cake that have been laced with jams or chocolate or herbal distillates. Popular everywhere, but they tend to be in short supply and expensive. Cherrybread: Like real-world fruitcake, vari¬ous diced fruits, marinated in spirits, baked into a molasses cake and sold as small whole loaves or as slices wrapped in leaves. Popular in the Border Kingdoms, the Vilhon, and on the coast of the Sea of Fallen Stars. Blood-Drops: Beets sliced very thinly, fried in oil, and then dusted with salt and various spices, from sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg to the various hot spices (like vegetable crisps). Potato Cakes: Like real-world Irish wedge¬shaped griddle cakes. There are many more, but almost all large mar¬kets during summer and autumn, across most of Faerun, should have the majority of those men¬tioned above for sale. One appetizer popular in Sword Coast ports in the early 1300s DR that crept into Cormyr, West¬gate, and then Sembia as the century unfolded is the talyth. This morsel is a cracker the size of HEARTH AND HOME  a small human palm with a thin slice of sausage on top, and various sorts of herbs, spices, and mushed-down-flat foodstuffs in between, lightly baked to glue it together. Talyths are usually sa¬vory, and can include anything from snails and oysters and spiced worms right up to diced eggs and mixed cheeses. Talyths have been made fresh in Waterdeep, Neverwinter, Luskan, Mirabar, Elturel, Ever- lund, Silverymoon, and Scornubel for decades. In winter, talyths can be premade and packed on ice, for later heating or reheating, to be served immediately. Also popular as appetizers are sugar bladders. These are confections wrapped in pig’s bladders, heated on metal plates over fires to drive out their moisture, tied shut, and then painted all over with tansel (an egg- and plant-based mixture that provides an airtight seal). The bladders are then packed in pitch-sealed tins full of edible plant oils to guard against spoilage. Caravan companies ship these tins to shops and eating establishments. Some handfoods aren’t suitable as traveling fare, but others are prized by adventurers and wayfarers across Faerun as essentials, particularly if they go beyond the standard hunk of sausage, whole pickle, and wedge or small wheel of cheese.