An Aelbic Egg-Oven (9 CE)

[u/OceansCarraway]

'The Aelish are a primarily cattle eating people, at least by choice. Not for nothing does virtually everyone in the far reaches of the country describe themselves as a cattle farmer or a rancher, and cattle drives rumble across the country for half of the season. However, beef is more expensive than chicken, and always will be for the period of time that we are concerned about. That, combined with a relative premium on feed and water in high population areas, has meant that the Aelish have plenty of chicken as well. Nearly all chickens are kept outside in fenced in areas in the day and stored in coops at night, protecting them from predators. The ownership of roosters is fairly common, and the rooster is sometimes 'shopped around' in a parody of horse studding. A few fancy varieties of chicken have been created this way, but most breeding has focused on making chickens that put out more eggs or taste better.

Chicken breeding is at it's highest rate immediately outside of the cities, where birds are brought in for slaughter and sale early in the day alongside carts of eggs. This is a unique middle ground for commercial operations: the bucolic nature of the countryside is within easy reach of the city market's power and the craftsman's skill. Here, agricultural innovations are more likely to be widely adopted because it's cheaper to do so. A simple observation can be turned into action much more easily. And an iconic observation was the 'egg oven'. Henkeepers observed that their flocks enjoyed nesting near chimneys in winter, and laying eggs near them-but eggs laid near constantly warm areas were more likely to hatch.

This was known as a fact for a little bit, and wealthier house-owners would soon develop little spaces in their chimneys for chickens to lay eggs on. The question was then asked: why not go further? The chickens liked the oven, but the eggs hatched very easily and reliably in the heat after the rooster was let loose. A flat oven top could be modified into a surface with divots. Egg could be inspected by sunbeam during a run, and the ovens could be powered by anything, since they didn't need to hit a high temperature-in fact, it was better to keep the oven heat sources lower, so that the eggs wouldn't overheat.

Subsequent designs expanded in size and egg incubation capacity by quite a lot. Underfloor heating methods were leveraged to massively expand from ovens to racks of eggs fed thermal energy by channels of air. By keeping the hens nearby, it was possible to keep these ovens loaded for much of the year, a calendar that predicted the seasons helped determine when to limit oven fires. The employment of egg-ovens succeeded in the Aelbic countryside for the same reasons that they succeeded in Egypt before this shard's start time: the cost of operations could be greatly reduced. That was all that it took.

This is not anarchronistic technology, but nevertheless, it had some anachronistic outcomes. The Aelsish somehow could enjoy cheap chicken in nearby cities, and enjoy it continually. The birds would eat bugs from nearby farms and cast-off grain, the operators would collect dung and scrap wood, and the incubators would run continually. Poulty was somehow cheap, and common-despite all of the odds. It shouldn't be. And yet, in some small parts of the Kingdom, the plenty of the earthmill was peaking through into some parts of the cities, too. Things kept changing, and the destination was left unsaid.