Well-stocked larder is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
First Edition Appendix I included lists to stock a larder that did not make it over to 5e. Like all the lists, the Food & Drink list was organized in alphabetical order. It provided 52 different entries, with 55 different words. There also was a Condiment & Seasonings table of just 6 entries, for a total of 61 words. Like with the random monster tables, probability ranges were used to show how common foods are. Meat was the most common followed by water, wine, bread, beer, nuts and tea. Tea is a peculiar choice, as it was not available in medieval Europe. Gygax deferred naming cheeses, meats, fish, roots and greens, "in the interest of space", as they "can be enumerated by the DM with little or no difficulty". He also had a whole separate Appendix J with about 180 herbs and vegetables and their purported medicinal effects.
The alphabetical order makes it easy to find any word, but is a hindrance if you are scanning the list for a certain kind of food. The list below expands the one from the 1e DMG (except in the herbs category), and arranges them by broad categories. As the random selection aspect is less useful than the density of ideas to post the list to a DM screen, I omit detail probability ranges. In each category, other than herbs, items are ordered roughly by how common they are.
What should a typical larder contain?
This will vary strongly with setting, e.g. in a desert adventure you will have dates and couscous, rather than pork and turnips.
We're not trying to be historically accurate, after all we are talking about fantasy worlds, but the general backdrop for the typical campaign is similar to medieval Europe. In historical medieval Europe, there were no potatoes, rice was confined to Asia, sugar was rare, honey or fruit were used for sweetening. Typical cooked foods were stews or gruel of some kind. Otter counted as fish, so you could eat it on Fridays. The basis of poor people's diet were grains, cooked into gruel or ground to flour for bread, robust sorts like rye or barley where more common than wheat. This was supplemented with vegetables or roots and protein from milk or cheese. In coastal settings, even the poor would eat fish. Meat or fowl would only be available to the noble or affluent. The rich would have expensive spices.
A minimal larder should have barrels for drink, and some sort of durable, dried food.
A normal one would have thin beer or wine, unless there is a well for fresh water; sacks of dry stored grains, flour or nuts, and some roots or vegetables. This would be supplemented with cheese, fowl, fish or meat and sausages for protein. There would be butter, lard or oil for fat, and a few spices -- most likely salt. A well-stocked larder would have all of these, and extra variety, plus fresh options.
d20 Food
01-04 Drink: water, beer, wine, ale, mead, brandy, cider, rum, spirit
05-06 Grain: rye, barley, oats, corn, wheat, millet, buckwheat, sunflower; meal of them
07 Cooked: gruel, porridge, stew, soup, broth, pudding, pie
08 Baked: bread, hardtack, grouser, cake, cookies, pastries, biscuit, muffin, sweetmeats
09 Roots/tubers: turnip, celery, carrot, radish, rutabaga, beetroot, black salsify
11 Nuts: walnut, hazelnut, beechnut, chestnut, almond, acorn
12 Greens: cabbage, onions, mushrooms, peas, lentils, pumpkin, squash, pickles, beans
13 Fresh: salad, leeks, cucumber, green beans, spinach, rhubarb, sorrel, artichoke
14 Meat*: pork, venison (deer, rabbit, boar, bear), goat, mutton, beef, donkey, horse, veal
15 Sausage: ham, cured sausage, liver sausage, black pudding, speck, gammon, pepperoni
16 Fowl: chicken, capon, turkey, goose, duck, pheasant, peacock, dove, crane, stork, swan
17 Fish: cod, herring, sardine, sprat, carp, trout, eel, pike; clams, shellfish, lobster, crab
18 Dairy/Fat: cheese (typically wheel), oil, milk, (pickled) eggs, butter, cream, lard
19 Fruit: (crab)apples, prunes/plums, raisins/grapes, pears, apricots, berries, cherries, dates, figs, quince, orange, lemon, pomegranate; jams/jellies of them
20 Spices: salt, pepper, vinegar, mustard, garlic, honey; chives, cinnamon, cloves, dill, fennel, ginger, mint, oregano, parsley, parsnip, poppy, rosemary, sage, saffron, thyme, tumeric
* hung, salted, smoked or dry
How is food conserved?
The most common methods are drying, salting, smoking, fermenting and pickling in vinegar or oil. Small game like birds or rabbits are hung on hooks and eaten fresh. Lean meat is cut into strips and air-dried or salted. Fatty meat or fish is smoked and hung or pickled in oil, meat also stored in boxes with ashes, or ground into sausages and hung on hooks. Fruit, or berries are cooked into jams or air-dried. Vegetables and mushrooms are typically stored fresh in cool, damp places, or dried. Some are pickled in vinegar, like gherkins or fermented with salt like sauerkraut. Eggs were pickled in saltwater.
How is food stored?
Barrels are used for nearly everything mostly for large-volume liquids like water, beer, ale or cheap wine, but also fruit, vegetables, pickled goods, to salted or dried meats. They come in a wide variety of of sizes, from humongous to very small. More expensive liquids like oil or better wines are often stored in amphoras very rarely in bottles. Dry goods are stored in sacks for fine grained material like flour, grain, and nuts and in boxes for items like jerky, dry meats, hardtack, or cod. Pickled goods are stored in earthenware. Carcasses, hams or sausages would be hung in air from hooks, cheeses would be stored in the open on a shelf. Spices were very valuable and stored in small jars or small boxes.
How much is it worth?
Wine or brandy is actually pretty expensive, and even a small barrel can be worth hundreds of g.p. and make legitimate loot. Rare spices like saffron are more expensive than silver, and even cheaper ones beat copper. Most food however is too heavy for the the amount of money you could get. You can also easily reduce the value to nothing by making the food stale, moldy, the wine taste of cork, etc.
What would monsters have in their larder?
Go all out on the yuck factor. In addition to what humans would eat, gnolls, goblins ogres and their kind obviously eat human meat, as well as halfling, gnome, dwarf or tender elf, and meat from their own kind. Kobolds and goblins will happily eat cockroaches, maggots, spiders, centipedes, snails and slugs, conserved in oil. Stirges, rats, bats, snakes, dogs, wolves, or giant centipedes top the bill for wildlife, and can be salted.
Example Larders
Pick a few items to create a feeling that fits the denizens. For example:
Bandit hideout on the river: smoked trout, a barrel of wine, and a sack of hazelnuts.
Kobold lair: A big jar of snails in oil, a rotting eel, a sack of dried cockroaches and a keg of stale water.
Druid grove: rutabagas and turnips in burlap sacks, dried mushrooms and herbs, fresh water in a large earthen jar.
Farmstead: a can of goat milk, a shelf with bread, goat cheese, butter, eggs in box filled with straw, a sack of rye and barley each, a barrel with apples, and a earthen jar with onions.
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