Food and Drink in the Ardisphere

Ardispherian cuisine is as diverse as its people, including all the peoples of the world with their various food traditions. Over its history, however, there have emerged some characteristic Ardispherian dishes and drinks, too.

Dishes

The base of the Ardispherian diet are pastas and rice, with all manner of toppings and side dishes. Bread is less common but still found everywhere, and fruit is widely consumed not just alone but added as an ingredient to all kinds of savory dishes too. There are some unique and nearly unversal Ardispherian dishes.

• Pande - Typically, a hot rye or maize flatbread, topped with diverse ingedients such as beans, shredded cabbage or radish or beetroot, olives, various pickled vegetables, spicy sauces, and, nowadays, cheese or meat or fried egg. Pande is called the "Ardispherian pizza."
• Curanda - A spicy rice and vegetable stew found in almost every home, with sausage or beans, or, in the South, seafood.
• Boquencho - Various types of thick savory sauces, made with beans, fruit or nuts, served over rice or with meat. Most popular are the boquencho negro, made including chocolate, red peppers and peanuts, and the boquencho rojo, made with a tomato base but including raisins, peanuts and red pepper.

Alcoholic Drinks

Aside from the popularity of traditional wines and beers, both produced in excellent quality in the country, and available at any restaurant and served in most homes (the vino tinto of the family dinner table and the cerveza of the corner pub), there are also some drinks which are more specific to the country.

• Guasco - Ardispherian brandy, the most popular spirit in the country.
• Coreo (복분자 bokbunja) - Gohangukian traditional black raspberry wine.
• Mégoli (rice beer) - A milky colored, lightly carbonated beverage also originally brought from Gohan but nativized
• Susco - distilled rice spirits.
• Mesco - distilled maize spirirts.

Non-alcoholic Drinks

Coffee and tea, both natively grown, are everywhere. Ardispherian traditional black, white and green teas grown in the Lebrasca valley are world-famous. Many Ardispherians traditionally drink tea in the morning and coffee after afternoon or evening meals (called colloquially la depuesa), but now the commercialized global "cafe culture" makes both types of drink available all the time. Ardispherians often make cold teas to drink with meals instead of water.

• Lebrascano - hot brewed black aged tea. Often in South taken with milk but in the capital this is abhorrent.
• Boriya - cold barley tea.
• Oquisuya - cold maize tea.
• Zeraque - hot ginger and rose hips tea, sometimes sweetened with honey, often with a dash of red pepper.
• Guafuso - a sweetened, very strong dessert coffee with chocolate or mint.