Winter's Blanket

Ingredients:

300ml of Milk
3 Ice Cubes
10 Cranberries
10 Blueberries
150ml of Vinegar
50ml of Kuhul

Instructions:

Pour your Milk into a pot and bring to a boil over a fire. Once it begins to boil, add your Ice Cubes one at a time, allowing each cube time to be mostly melted before adding the next one.
Meanwhile, put your Cranberries and Blueberries into a mortar and pestle and crush together into a fine paste.
Once crushed, mix the paste into a bowl along with your Vinegar until fully combined. Stir until the mixture has thickened. Gradually add your Kuhul as your continue to stir to ensure that it combines with your Vinegar mixture.
Now, add the Vinegar mixture to the boiling milk and stir until the solution turns a shade of teal and has thickened to the point that it has taken on a cream-like consistency.
Leave the solution to boil for a while as you dig a whole outside large enough for your pot.* Once dug, put out the fire and place the smouldering and smoking wood into the hole, placing your pot, now lidded, onto the wood. Ensure the lid is on tightly and bury the pot using the soil that you dug out of the hole, leaving the pot out there overnight.
Come morning, dig up your pot, being careful as you lift it out of the hole as it will be very hot. The potion should now be ready to be poured into your containers and stored away until needed.
*If you are attempting to make Cauldron’s Crust, it is at this stage that the instructions will differ.
Background: Winter’s Blanket is a thick, viscous potion that is designed to preserve food and extend its expiration date. This is done by pouring the solution over your perishable foods, ensuring that they are completely covered, after which the potion will dry and create a waxy teal seal around your food. This seal will ensure that bacteria and other undesirable effects stay away from your stored food, which can then remain in storage for around six months. After those six months are up, the seal will begin to become brittle and cracks will form, meaning that your food only has its natural shelf life remaining.
In order to make use of blanketed food, one must cut away the waxy seal surrounding your meats and/or vegetables as one would do when preparing and removing the pellicle from a dry-aged steak. The downside to Winter’s Blanket, however, is that it has the unfortunate side effect of eliminating all but the faintest of flavours from any food coated in it. For this reason, the potion is highly popular among the common people who would rather ensure that they have food available so that they can make it through the lean winters than have only a few bites of something that tastes nice.
Meanwhile, the nobles and some of the more pompous merchants refuse to use Winter’s Blanket at all, prizing their tastebuds over all else. Most butlers and heads of household will tell you that they do keep some blanketed food in storage, however, just in case of emergency. I personally have found Winter’s Blanket to be incredibly useful in my travels throughout Atoom, as it has meant that I always have travel rations available to me. It has also meant, however, that my travel companion spends every mealtime bemoaning the fact that she hasn’t eaten anything that tastes nice in far too long.
When studying this potion to find its origins, I was surprised to find that there was very little to be found on the topic within the libraries of the Sorcerer’s Collective. All that they had simply discussed was how to make the potion and its applications, but nowhere did it mention who made it and how. Likewise, when I asked the Witches, they had no creation tales, cautionary or otherwise, even as I spoke with one such Witch while they were in the middle of brewing a batch of the potion. It wasn’t until I visited a village butcher that I finally found a soul who knew of the story behind the invention of Winter’s Blanket.
The story goes that their village had suffered through the harshest and longest winter in living memory. Many of the villagers had run through their stores of food and had come out the other end looking like shadows of their former selves. Many more had unfortunately not made it through the winter at all, and so much of the first few months of spring were spent digging graves and mourning those that had been lost.
It was at the end of this period that the local butcher, Siyam Abbas, who had lost both of his parents and one of his sons that winter, resolved to ensure that this calamity would never happen to those that he loved again. Burying his grief under a veil of determination, he set about gathering all of those young in body and bright of mind so that they could work together to devise a solution.
Some in this council of experts suggested creating a room within the village that was enchanted with magic to keep the food within it cold and safe to eat. This was disregarded however, as Siyam pointed out that they would need someone with powerful magic to create and maintain the room, and there were none in their village or even in neighbouring villages that were capable of such feats. Others recommended that they call on their Lord, or the King and Queen themselves, to send aid their way. This caused the rest of those gathered to laugh at their naivete as the older villagers knew that no help would come from the nobles that sat within their castles and mansions and grew fat off of their tithes.
For the next few weeks, the professionals within the village would gather to discuss ideas for preventing another tragedy when the next winter came around. During these conversations, they would keep returning to one idea in particular. Siyam had suggested early on that they work together to create a potion that would preserve their food through winter for them, however, there were none in the village with enough skill in brewing potions to know where to begin with creating something from scratch. Being a butcher, Siyam had some experience in making potions like the Mild Curative, but that was as far as his expertise went. However, as every other idea was found wanting, creating a new potion sounded more and more plausible.
Deciding to take steps to begin the process, Siyam organised his neighbours into teams to practice with different ingredients to see what would work best to preserve their food. Rather than have them dig into their own food stores, Siyam would provide each of them with meat from his shop and gladly took a loss so that they could complete their project.
Each time they found a method that would work, the teams would then begin working on combining the successful methods to see if that would preserve the food even longer. Before long, autumn had come around again and panic had started to spread amongst the villagers who dreaded the coming winter. Deciding that it was now or never, Siyam took the most successful methods out of all of those that they had tested and put them all together to create what would become Winter’s Blanket. Upon seeing the colour of the potion, Siyam was convinced that it was a failure as teal did not seem like a good colour for a preservative, but with winter around the corner, he did not have time to try anything else. Throwing caution to the wind, he covered his stores of meat with the potion, gave a fervent prayer to the Gods and his son to watch over them and help them through the season, and then passed out bottles of Winter’s Blanket to his neighbours as he wished them all good luck and hoped he’d see them again next spring.
Then, leaves began to fall from trees. Snow began to fall and settle upon the cold and frosty ground. The nearby lake froze over and children began to skate across it until it became even too cold for them. Soon, the only activity within the village was the few who would brave the cold to find more firewood and clean water. The village seemed almost devoid of all life, and everyone hoped that it would only seem that way.
Eventually, the snow would begin to melt and the trees would begin to bud once more and the villagers emerged from their hibernation dreading what they might find. As each resident emerged, however, hope began to build as more and more people saw their neighbours alive and, even more surprisingly, looking full and healthy. It quickly became apparent that everyone within the village had miraculously survived and rather than losing anyone, there were actually a few new residents as a couple of families had given birth and others were now pregnant.
Overwhelmed with joy at the success of all of their work, Siyam broke down into tears, letting go of all of the tension he had felt in the last year and finally allowing himself to grieve the loss of his loved ones. After all of the work that he had put into leading the villagers and caring for them, Siyam would go on to be named the new Mayor of their village. After he had passed away, the villagers unanimously decided to rename their village Abbas in honour of their hero and the continued work he and his family had done for them. Even today, the village has grown into a town as more people moved to the home of the potion that saved villages throughout Atoom and there are many businesses, including a few butchers, that are named after Siyam Abbas, the man who defeated the cold.