Yeah, Crafters prefer foods that don't take that much work, and being able to grow things when they need them makes that limitation much more practical. Maybe he'll try some of their jarred nut paste while he's in the city tomorrow and see if he likes it.

With the kumquat plant converted back into crafting material, he dissolves it back into fertilizer again and picks out three more plants to grow. These are different varieties of pepper, he explains; the fruit is edible - birds like it, in particular - but the seed is the part he uses.

They try the seeds — first individually, to gauge spiciness, and then a bit more. They all have reasonable spice tolerance, but eating straight pepper is a bit much.

"We have pepper that is like this; I think this one is most like the peppers we have, and the other two are more different," the farmer conveys.

"We also usually store pepper dried and ground," one of the women remarks. "How much do you like in your food? People from the south traditionally use more spicy ingredients, and people from the north traditionally use less, so the city has a mixture of different kinds of food."

He grinds it to use it, yeah, and most dishes don't need more than a little sprinkle of the powder. He'd expect it to lose flavor pretty quickly if it was stored ground, though, he grinds a seed or two at once and if he keeps the powder for a couple days he can already notice a difference; maybe they've bred for varieties that don't lose flavor as much?

The farmer checks some things on their phone.

"It looks like the flavor loss is because of evaporation and exposure to light," they relay. "We store pepper in air-tight, opaque containers, which helps. Also, there are steps to dry the pepper and treat it with purpler-than-purple light before it's ground which help too. But you're right that the best foods are made with fresh-ground pepper. I suspect this is another difference down to how much in groups we are — most people in the city don't cook for themselves, because it is less work for a few people to make big batches of food that everyone can have some of. But cooking in big batches is pretty different from cooking in small batches. Ingredients get used up faster, and people want to find ways to do it that have fewer steps."

"People who live outside the city often cook for themselves," one of the women adds. "I don't know if they are more likely to grind their pepper instead of trading for it already ground."

That's interesting. He's assuming they're going to want copies of all his nonpersonal stuff sooner or later - he's sort of expecting to end up giving someone a miniaturized copy of his whole house, when he figures out who the right person is for that - and it'll be interesting to hear what various people think of the different spices.

"That would be great! People will definitely want to try the spices," they agree.

One of the women has been thinking as they discuss spices. Finally, she makes an exclamation, and then scribbles "salt!" on the tablet. After a moment she expands that into a proper thought.

"You can make plant-based spices easily, but I bet you can't make salt with crafting material. You can probably get it from seawater, but you're not always near the sea. And you don't have trains to make moving it from the sea to where people are easy. I bet we use more salt in our food than you do; salt helps enhance the flavor of other things in the food."

Huh! Yeah, he doesn't use salt much even when he has access to it; if they're using it regularly they're using more than he does.

He's thinking he might grow the leafy herbs next, or he can do more seeds - he has a couple of anisses and fennels they could try, things like that.

"I think I know the plants you mean, but neither of those is a common herb here."

The þereminians check among themselves.

"We would be happy to try those next. Really, any order is fine."

All right.

For leafy herbs he's got varieties of sage, thyme, chives, tarragon, and two kinds of dill, one with particularly flavorful seeds and another with big dense sprays of edible flowers in addition to the tasty leaves of both; he passes around cuttings of each as he finishes growing them.

They nibble at the herbs.

They're generally of the opinion that the sage, thyme, and chives would probably all go well in rice, and say as much.

When they get to the dill, the woman with the tablet gets a thoughtful look.

"I think this the same plant as gets used to flavor pickles," she writes, using the LCTL word for pickles in a little circle, since she can't really draw a pickle as distinct from a cucumber. "They're vegetables — usually cucumbers, but you can also use carrots, peppers, kalhornaðor, etc. — that have been soaked in salt water and vineager to preserve them," she explains. "And flavored with different spices. The recipe started as a way to preserve food for winter, before we had good ways to store food for that long. But they're flavorful and salty, so we still eat them. You might like them if you like dill."

He'll definitely have to try that, dill is one of his favorites. Cucumbers aren't, but dill is good on carrots, maybe he can find some of those.

"Pickle carrots shouldn't be too hard to find. Although I prefer pickle cucumbers to plain cucumbers, because the process changes their texture. I bet you should look for foods that are based on preservation techniques generally, because it will probably be newest to you. Do you have dried and preserved meats?" the farmer asks.

He's not sure what specifically they mean by 'preserved', there; he dries meat so he can keep it with him if he's going to be away from the house all day and to put in the feeder for the dogs, but for regular use he mostly keeps it frozen.

The three of them briefly search for the right words.

"Maybe just drying it is the same as the thing we're thinking? But how you dry it changes the flavor. And there are some ways to preserve it that aren't drying or freezing," the woman tells him.

Huh,  maybe it's the same thing? By drying he means he slices the meat thin and has a machine blow slightly-hot air on it for several hours, sometimes with spices on it for flavor, to make jerky. He doesn't know about ways to preserve meat besides those two.

"You can preserve meat by packing it in salt," the woman elaborates. "That makes it pretty salty, but it can taste good. Also, if you dry meat over a fire instead of using a machine, you get flavor from the wood. But maybe it's not very different; not everything can be different."

One of the others makes a comment.

"You can also preserve meat by taking all the air away around it and keeping it cold. That makes it very light, but also kind of crunchy and flavorless," she adds.

Well, that explains why he's never heard of those - most Crafters don't have access to that much salt, and they don't like messing with fire, it's too unpredictable. And he's not sure what the advantage of vacuum-drying is, if you still have to keep the meat cold.

"Oh, no. You just need to keep it cold while it's drying. After that, you can store it in warm places," they clarify. "Preserved like that, and in a sealed box, it stays good for many years. It's good for emergencies because sometimes the machines that keep things cold break. But if you can just make them stay cold without little lightnings, it probably isn't important. Preserving meat without air is not very popular, because it doesn't taste as good as freezing or drying it."

That is an advantage of crafted things, yeah, that they just keep working forever if you make them that way.

Speaking of meat, he'll grow the sumac and juniper trees next - again, as bushes - since those are for flavoring meat. The bright red sumac berries have a lemony flavor usually paired with a little bit of pepper, and the deep purple juniper berries have a herbal piney flavor with a bit of citrus tartness.

Those are both a bit more reasonable to taste-test on an individual basis than some of the other spices. The sumac berries get a better reception than the juniper berries, but they like both. 

They can have some seeds to take with them, if they want, by the way; he's not sure how useful that will be without them being Crafters, though.

Next he's got nutmeg, cinnamon, and a couple of varieties of green cardamom; these are all good in sweet dishes or tea. He's all out of butternut sugar, though; that he does make a few days' worth of at a time, since it takes a few hours to boil down the butternut sap, but he ran out while he was in the sky and hasn't gotten around to making more yet.

"We'll just have to grow the seeds the slow way," the farmer answers. "But that still means that in a few years we'll have plenty of seeds to share with everyone who wants some."

"Do you know what the natural season for these is? What kind of soil and water they like?"

Nutmeg and cinnamon are both familiar; cardamom is less common, but it's something they have as well. The women are a bit sad about not getting to try butternut sugar, since they don't really think it's used for that here.

"We usually use sugarcane or maple for sugar," the woman with the tablet mentions. "But you can get more sugar in the city if you want to."

He knows what kind of conditions the established plants like, but not their usual growing seasons or anything about starting them naturally, since he's never bothered to do that - the usual setup, for a Crafter, is having a building specifically for plants and growing them up to a nice established size when you first put them in there so you can harvest from them right away.

He's had maple and cane sugars, they're also popular back home; it's good that he'll be able to get them here. Butternut sugar is very similar to maple sugar, too, just with a little bit of a deeper nuttier flavor.

"That makes sense. I do want to try it at some point. I think maple sugar is popular because you can set it up to harvest itself, and lots of people like the wood flavor," the woman explains.

The farmer jots down the growing condition information to pass along with the seeds.

He definitely thinks maple sugar is tastier than cane sugar, yeah. He'll include some butternut seeds in with the rest, of course; he expects to be too busy to do enough food-growing for everyone to get to try it that way.

He finishes out the spices with three varieties of anise and two of fennel, which he was intending to get rid of all but one or two of - all five have a similar licorice flavor, but the anises have slightly more complex taste profiles - one is almost creamy, which he hasn't decided if he likes or not - whereas the fennels have tasty bulbs, leaves, and flowers in addition to the seeds.