A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook (A Song of Ice and Fire)

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

About This Book

Stocking a Medieval Kitchen

The Basics

Pastry Dough, Sauces, Etc.

Summary of Cuisine by Region

Recipes by Region:

The Wall

The North

The South

King’s Landing

Dorne

Across the Narrow Sea

Feasting in Style

Index

Menus

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Introduction

Come closer now. No, closer than that. I have a confession to make, an embarrassing confession, and I don’t want everyone to hear. Another step, yes … lean close, and I’ll whisper the sad truth in your ear:

I can’t cook
.

There ’tis, my shameful secret. All the paragraphs and pages that I’ve devoted to food in my books and stories over the years, all my loving and detailed descriptions of dishes both ordinary and exotic, all those fictional feasts that made your mouth water … I never actually cooked a single one of them. They were made of words. Big meaty nouns, crisp fresh verbs, a nice seasoning of adjectives and adverbs. Words. The stuff that dreams are made of … very tasty dreams, fat free and calorie free, but with no nutritive value.

Writing I’m good at. Cooking, not so much.

Well, okay, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m not bad at breakfast, so long as “breakfast” means frying up some thick-sliced bacon and scrambling a mess of eggs with onions, cheese, and just enough Italian seasoning. But when I want pancakes or eggs Benedict or (best) a breakfast burrito smothered in green chile, I head out to my favorite breakfast place (Tecolote Café in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for those who are keeping score). Like all red-blooded American males, come summertime, I have been known to stack up some charcoal briquets, douse them with lighter fluid, and char steaks, dogs, and burgers over the resultant blaze. Indoors, well … I can boil corn on the cob, I can steam veggies (when I must), and I do make a mean cheese-stuffed meat loaf. That’s about the extent of it, though. That meat loaf represents the apex of my personal culinary achievement. When my wife broils a steak, it comes out charred on the outside and red on the inside. I broil the same steak in the same broiler, and it turns a uniform shade of pale gray throughout.

Fortunately, I am much better at eating food than cooking it (as a glance at my waistline will tell you, sad to say). Food is one of life’s great pleasures, and I am all in favor of pleasure. Reading is another of those things that help make life worth living, and when one can combine reading and food, well …

Which is why my novels are so full of food—a trend that did not begin with A Song of Ice and Fire, I should note. A decade before I began writing
A Game of Thrones
, I recall, I attended the British version of the famous Milford Writers’ Workshop and submitted a short story for critique. One of the other writers there called it “food porn.” But then again, he was British, from the land of boiled beef and mushy peas. I have always suspected that the British Empire was largely a result of Englishmen spreading out across the world looking for something good to eat.

It
is
true that I spend a lot of words in my books describing the meals my characters are eating. More than most writers, I suspect. This does draw a certain amount of criticism from those readers and reviewers who like a brisker pace. “Do we really need all that detailed description of food?” these critics will ask. “What does it matter how many courses were served, whether the capons were nicely crisped, what sort of sauce the wild boar was cooked in?” Whether it is a seventy-seven-course wedding banquet or some outlaws sharing salt beef and apples around a campfire, these critics don’t want to hear about it unless it advances the plot.

I bet they eat fast food while they’re typing too.

I have a different outlook on these matters. I write to tell a story, and telling a story is not at all the same as advancing the plot. If the plot was all that mattered, none of us would need to read novels at all. The CliffsNotes would suffice. All you’ll miss is … well, everything.

For me, the journey is what matters, not how quickly one can get to the final destination. When I read, as when I travel, I want to see the sights, smell the flowers, and, yes, taste the food. My goal as a writer has always been to create an immersive vicarious experience for my readers. When a reader puts down one of my novels, I want him to remember the events of the book as if he had
lived
them. And the way to do that is with sensory detail.

Sights, sounds, scents—those are the things that make a scene come alive. Battle, bedroom, or banquet table, it makes no matter; the same techniques apply. That’s why I spend so much time and effort describing the food my characters eat: what it is, how it’s prepared, what it looks like, what it smells like, what it tastes like. It grounds the scenes, gives them texture, makes them vivid and visceral and memorable. Sense impressions reach us on much deeper and more primal levels than intellectual discourse can ever hope to.

And the meals I describe do other things as well. World building is part of what
gives epic fantasy its appeal, and food is part of that. You can learn a lot about a world and culture from what they eat (and what they won’t eat). All you really need to know about hobbits can be learned from “nice crispy bacon” and “second breakfasts.” And orcs … well, no one is likely to be doing
The Orc Cookbook
anytime soon.

The same is as true for individuals as for societies. There’s a lot of characterization going on in those not-so-gratuitous feast scenes of mine. Oh, and sometimes that plot does advance as well.

Those are the side dishes, though. The main course here, the reason why I include such scenes in my fiction, is for the scenes themselves. I like writing about food, and my readers—most of them, anyway—seem to like reading about it. Judging by the number of readers who write to say that my feast scenes make their mouths water, I must be doing something right.

Unlike my world of Westeros or the real-life middle ages, the twenty-first century is a golden age, at least where food is concerned. Ours is an age of plenty, where foods of all types are readily available at any season, and even the most exotic spices can be purchased at the nearest grocery store, at prices that do not require you to mortgage your castle. Even better, for those of us who love to eat but cannot cook, this wonderful world of ours is full of people who will
cook for us
.