Harvest Brunch

A bodyless voice said, "Madam, may we offer you breakfast? We are proud of our Harvest Brunch: a lavish bowl of assorted fresh fruits; a tray of cheeses; a basket of freshly baked hot breads, crisp breads, and soft breads with jams and jellies and syrups and Belgian butter. Basted baby barlops en brochette; drawn eggs Octavian; smoked savannah slinker; farkels in sweetsour; Bavarian strudel; your choice of still and sparkling wines, skullbuster Strine beer, Mocha, Kona, Turkish, and Proxima coffees, blended or straight; all served with-- [1, p. 3]

This one is going to be a doozy. Google did not turn up anything definitive, but one can assume that a Harvest Brunch would be full of grains, as historically, the harvest season was a time when many crops would be harvested, and among those crops would be plenty of grains. Maybe not the most rigorous analysis, but the logic seems sound. Google also didn't turn up anything specific on categorizing breads by their temperature, crispiness, or softness. Perhaps a bread connoisseur would be able to shed more light on that subject. I did find a short article on the history of bread here. That site also contains a glossary of many of the world's known breads, so if you're really interested, I'd suggest at least skimming through it. I also found another short treatise on the history of bread and several types of bread at this site; you will notice that towards the bottom of that page, they mention a type of specialty bread known as Men's Bread. It's an organic blast of doughey healthiness. If you're interested in buying, you can look here.

So, the main difference between a jam and a jelly? The short answer is that jelly has been run through a filter to remove the pulp from the fruit it is made from, while jam has not. There is a third type of confection that fits along these lines known as fruit butter, which I had honestly never heard of until I read up on it. This brief response on Yahoo! Answers provides a pretty decent overview of the three types of confections. So, syrup? Syrup is basically sugar in water. The water is boiled away and the sugar is cooked to produce the amber or golden color that is typically associated with syrup. Maple syrup is, of course, made from maple tree sap. The sap from maple trees contains small amounts of sucrose and large amounts of water. Once most of the water is boiled away, the result is maple syrup.

The best that I could find in terms of Belgian butter is a type of gourmet butter known also as Chimay butter. So, where is Belgium, anyway? It is located directly north-east of France, with Chimay being a city near the border between France and Belgium. I did find some article on the web about butter from Belgium being banned in the U.S. and various other countries due to a high dioxin content, although I have no idea if this is referring to Chimay butter, or some other butter. Either way, it sounds good.

Basting is a style of cooking meat; it is cooked either in its own juices, or a prepared marinade, and the juice is occasionally reapplied over the with. According to the Heinlein concordance, baby barlops are an unidentified food item--it is quite possible that Heinlein simply made the name up.

I was not able to determine what drawn eggs are, but in my quest, I did discover--although not much to my surprise--that there is quite an array of different ways to prepare eggs. Wikipedia, being our ubiquitous buddy, has a list egg dishes that is quite enlightening to peruse through. Perhaps Heinlein was simply adept at inventing his own savory-sounding food items.

Smoked savannah slinker is listed in the Heinlein Concordance as being yet another unidentified food item, while farkels in sweetsour just plain doesn't turn up anything useful in Google.

Finally, something that actually exists. My search for Bavarian strudel turned up an item called Bavarian apple strudel, which, as you can imagine, is a pop tart-ey type pastry dish with apple in it.

The difference between still and sparkling wines is, of course, that sparkling wines have been carbonated.

Apparently Strine is a syncope of a joke for the way Australians pronounce "Australian", in a broad Australian accent. So "Strine" beer is just Australian beer.

Mocha coffee comes from mocha beans, Kona coffee comes from Kona coffee beans, which are grown exclusively in the mountains of Hawai'i, and is a highly coveted and highly expensive coffee, at least according to Wikipedia. Turkish coffee is made by boiling finely powdered roast coffee beans. I think Heinlein made up Proxima coffee; it likely refers somehow to the star Proxima Centari.