Cauldron's Crust

Ingredients:

For the list of ingredients, see Winter's Blanket

Instructions:

For the first few steps, see Winter’s Blanket
Once your solution is boiling, leave it there for as long as it takes for the liquid to reduce. Be careful, as there will be a lot of steam generated and the fire will still need to be tended to ensure that no accidents happen.
When the liquid has been completely reduced, you should be left with a grainy, teal crust around the sides and at the bottom of your pot. Remove this crust and grind it up with a mortar and pestle.
Pour these grains into a container and you are then ready to sprinkle them over your food as needed.*
*Other herbs and spices can be added to the Cauldron’s Crust to manipulate the final flavour to better suit the dish that it will be used with or the personal tastes of the consumer.

Background:

Cauldron’s Crust, an accidental offshoot of Winter’s Blanket, is used as a flavouring for all foods, and some drinks. Due to how easy it is to make, there are many amongst the commonfolk who have made it their main source of income as the nobles are so in love with the Crust that they are willing to pay large sums of gold for it. The commonfolk themselves also enjoy the flavouring, however, as it is made by burning Winter’s Blanket, many people see it as a waste of ingredients and that the flavouring is to frivolous of a thing to waste good Blanket on.
There have been some attempts to create a sauce out of Cauldron’s Crust by skipping the reduction phase and serving it still in it’s liquid form. While it was found that the resulting product still tasted great, the thick viscosity of the liquid was so unpalatable that the taste testers immediately spat the sauce back up, comparing it to trying to drink a slug.
I was unfortunately unable to meet with the creator of Cauldron’s Crust to hear about how he came up with it as he was apparently busy with a meeting with nobles at the time and would then be travelling around the continent to manage his many restaurants. I was able to read about it all in the man’s rather candid autobiography, in which he discusses many sordid affairs and intrigues, however the most important piece of information to my own personal studies was how he first came to make the first batch of Cauldron’s Crust.
Rajul Nar was a poor boy from a small village in Atoom. His family were simple farmers trying to scratch a living from the marshes that made up most of their land and would spend every waking moment working to make ends meet. When Rajul was old enough to be left alone, his parents would give him a long list of chores to do while they were out and about. One such chore was to keep an eye on the cauldron as they brewed a batch of Winter’s Blanket and to dig the hole in preparation for his parents moving the pot over.
It wasn’t a particularly challenging job and Rajul, being a helpful young boy, relished the opportunity to aid his hardworking parents. Unfortunately, when he was completing this very chore, a group of neighbourhood children were passing by with a ball and their hockey sticks.
Shouting out to Rajul, the group kindly invited him to play with them. The boy was faced with quite the dilemma, as he wanted to finish all of his chores before his parents returned, but in the corner of his eye he could see his own hockey stick and the urge to play with his friends began to build. Ultimately, deciding to choose the only logical option for a boy of his age, Rajul grabbed his stick and ran off to join his friends on the nearby field.
Spending the next few hours running around the field, scoring his own share of points (half of which were in his own goal), Rajul eventually wandered home, panting and sweaty, but smiling. His smile would blow away like the leaves in winter, however, as he approached his house and saw the smoke billowing from the open window.
Racing into the kitchen, Rajul found the source of the smoke. The potion that his parents had tasked him with watching had burned away and was left stuck to the sides of the cauldron. Rajul quickly moved to take the cauldron off of the still burning fire, injuring his hands in the process, in the hopes that some of the potion might be saved, however the damage had already been done. Feeling defeated and knowing that his parents would be so angry with him for failing them, the young boy fell to his knees and began to cry.
It was in this state, in a fit of depressed delirium, that Rajul would absent mindedly reach out to the potion that had been burned onto the side of the now cool cauldron. Scratching a piece of it off, the boy would look at it for a while before bringing it to his nose, desperately searching for some way that this situation might be salvageable. Upon smelling the substance, faint fragrance drifted up Rajul’s nose that he did not find unpleasant. Curiosity getting the better of him, he broke a piece of the crust off and put it onto his tongue.
Immediately his tears dried up and his eyes went wide as flavour exploded from the crust. He was stunned by just how amazing this burnt scrap of potion tasted, especially as he had grown accustomed to the tasteless food that he and his family would normally eat year round. It was in this state of confusion that his parents would find him, arriving from their day of working the land to see their son with tears dried on his face, burnt hands and a ruined potion. Summarising what must have happened from what they saw, the expected punishments and admonishments did not come as Rajul’s father ran to him to hold him and make sure he was ok while his mother ran to collect some Mild Curative for his hands.
Over the next few years, Rajul would never forget the moment he accidentally discovered this taste sensation and would begin work on replicating the process to make it and experimenting with it. He’d create variants of the crust, finding that it had the astonishing ability to change it’s flavour entirely when coupled with only a small amount of other herbs and spices. Following this discovery, Rajul would be inspired to create new dishes and recipes using this ingredient that would delight his parents who had also spent most of their lives surviving on bland food.
In time, Rajul would move to the capital to open a stall where he would sell his dishes, which would prove to be hugely popular. Merchants, nobles and even the Royal Families would eat at his stall and Rajul’s business would grow and grow until he found himself with a chain of restaurants in multiple cities throughout Atoom. It was during the opening of his sixth restaurant that he decided to reveal the secret to his success and began to sell not just the recipe for Cauldron’s Crust, but he also began selling batches of it in bottles with a lid full of holes so all one need do is shake it onto their meal.