Further headcanon on why Aldish food is known for blandness:
Aldish recipes will just list things like 1 dried pepper. Any Ald knows this is obviously a frostfire pepper (and theyāve only got frostfires and wax peppers to deal with, and who the hell would put one single wax pepper into a whole soup?) but they arenāt associated with food outside Alderode, theyāre associated with industrial applications like pesticide and anti-grebber fogs. So they use whatever chili is handy, and are underwhelmed, because to get to a comfortably warm point, the stew needed a weapons-grade chili, not a pissy little habanero.
Other Kasslynian countries have a different base flavour profile, probably more sweet and salty and spiced as opposed to Alderodeās fermented, malty and meaty. As a result, everything just tastes the same to them. Itās the same concept as someone complaining all American food is creamy or all Korean food is sweet. Thereās major basic components of a balanced meal taste missing in Aldish food to non-Aldish tongues.
They flavour a LOT of stuff with things that just taste like grass to others. Frost giant slurry, birch syrup, rosemary, hops, pine. So much pine.
There are enough simple, bland basics in the cuisine that it isnāt necessarily completely untrue - in a climate like that, sometimes a meal needs to be hot and hearty more than actually tasty, and thereās also a lot of value in a flavour profile like that one to having simple breads, grains, or potatoes on the side to sop up meat drippings and such with, but without those meat drippingsā¦
