Have you ever got hungry while reading a fantasy novel? Are you planning a theme night? What follows is a list of websites where you will find a lot of recipes from fantasy books of five different sagas and a couple of personal suggestions. Some of these recipes are easier than others and results may vary, but one of these dishes may be a nice touch in your next social gathering.
Recipes from A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones)
Without any doubt, the best place to find Game of Thrones-related recipes is The Inn at the Crossroads. The recipes are classified by region, so you can take a look at the simple food they give in the North or at the splendid dishes they serve at the banquets of King’s Landing or Dorne. However, no possible modern recipe could get close to some of Martin’s food descriptions.
In Vulture, they have even made a list of 10 moments in which George R.R. Martin has described food more erotically than sex. Just an example:
The Lord of White Harbor had furnished the food and drink, black stout and yellow beer and wines red and gold and purple, brought up from the warm south on fat-bottomed ships and aged in his deep cellars. The wedding guests gorged on cod cakes and winter squash, hills of neeps and great round wheels of cheese, smoking slabs of mutton and beef ribs charred almost black, and lastly, on three great wedding pies, as wide across as wagon wheels, their flaky crusts stuffed to bursting with carrots, onions, turnips, parsnips, mushrooms, and chunks of seasoned pork swimming in a savoury brown gravy.
A Dance With Dragons
If you’re planning to do something like this for your friends or family, perhaps you should think twice or accept that you’re going to spend a lot of time in the kitchen for the next three or four days.
Recipes from Dragonlance
Do you remember the Inn of the Last Home from the Dragonlance series of books? My dad, who is also an avid fantasy reader, has a recipe for the famous Otik spice potatoes he does on special occasions. Curiously enough, his original recipe does not depart too much from the official version of the dish you can find in Cookfiction.
We use olive oil instead of butter, which is healthier, and some drops of Tabasco sauce (McIlhenny’s original one from Louisiana) mixed with fried tomato. Be careful with the proportions, though, as it can end up being really hot!
Recipes from Lord of the Rings
Perhaps J. R. R. Tolkien was more preoccupied with linguistics and mythology, but his worldbuilding skills were still extraordinary, and that definitely included food. From the British-inspired cuisine of the hobbits, full of cakes and pies and mulled cider, to the simpler but still interesting Gondorian or elfish dishes, in The Lord of the Rings scrapbook website, you can find lots of recipes from the much-beloved saga of fantasy books. There are even some weird, inspired ones, such as Mirkwood cookies and something called Sauron’s Eyes.
One thing I’m particularly interested on is the lembas bread. Every time we go hiking we bring cookies or some sort of shortbread along and we joke about the elfish bread, how it would taste like and how easy would be to carry some in our trips. It would be nice to prepare an actual lembas bread for the next outing.
Recipes from Discworld
As an alternative to lembas bread, you can use dwarf’s bread, of course. You can obtain more or less the same results, but it does not seem very appealing. As they say in Witches Abroad:
“It was miraculous, the dwarf bread. No one ever went hungry when they had some dwarf bread to avoid. You only had to look at it for a moment, and instantly you could think of dozens of things you’d rather eat. Your boots, for example. Mountains. Raw sheep. Your own foot.”
The rat pies and rats in a stick are also very popular options among Discworld’s dwarves. For human alternatives, you can resort to Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook: A Useful and Improving Almanack of Information Including Astonishing Recipes from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. However, you can also use the list of foods and beverages for the Discworld Wikia. Who knows? Maybe you feel adventurous.
Recipes from Harry Potter
The list of websites that offers Harry Potter inspired food recipes may be too long to include it here. One of the most famous ones is the butterbeer recipe. You can even get creative and prepare butterbeer pancakes, butterbeer Jell-O Shots or even steak and butterbeer pie! With a bit of extra work, you can prepare cauldron cakes and chocolate frogs, and you can even buy some official Harry Potter Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Jelly Belly Beans.
For “older audiences”, some fire whisky must be nice. On The Leaky Cauldron’s Website, the suggestion is to mix regular whiskey with Tabasco sauce. Here, they offer a more elaborate recipe, which includes cinnamon schnapps and rum. You can probably ignite this one with a lighter, and it will be like witnessing flames expelled from a Norwegian ridgeback.
Now it’s your turn! If you have tried to prepare one of these recipes (or any other recipes from fantasy books), please let me know the results in the comments section.