Regional Cooking from Middle-Earth: Recipes of the Third Age (More randomness)

[radiantfracture]

Have you got a favorite in the genre of Literary Cookbooks?

Or -- though this is a separate genre and a bit out of fashion now -- Those Novels with Recipes in Them? (See Like Water for Chocolate.)

I have a cherished book produced two decades ago through the print-on-demand place, called Regional Cooking from Middle-Earth: Recipes of the Third Age.

The cookbook is divided regionally -- Shire, Bree, Regions of Rohan, etc., and also has an Index by Season. I think all the recipes are given both in English and in the local languages. It is the very exemplar of a labour of love.

I am almost certain I have never cooked anything from this book, but I feel happier knowing I could. There are three kinds of lembas. The recipes are simple and practical. There is a rabbit stew. Tarcoron, "high mound" is better know in this age as Yorkshire Pudding.

Why the question

I was thinking of trying to make batch cooking feel more appealing by making it literary-flavoured. I did once make a pretty passable Boeuf en Daube for a party.

(So the Surrealist Cookbook would be unhelpful in this instance. I want to make real food for my real body to eat. I just want to eat some ideas at the same time.)

--any edible and palatable crossover would do, really. Cheers!

(For example, I count New England Spider Cake as literary because I learnt it from a post by sovay .)

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Comments

[sovay]

Or -- though this is a separate genre and a bit out of fashion now -- Those Novels with Recipes in Them?

I had to excavate a lot of dead links to find this one, but it is one of my favorite pieces of fiction built around a recipe: Samantha Henderson, "Scones" (2004).

[edit] The same author's related "Hungry: Some Ghost Stories" (2008) contains no recipe, but the question structure made me think also of you.

My mother has a surprising number of mysteries that still come with recipes in. I once baked a Pernese bubbly pie from a published recipe that I would amend as an adult. rushthatspeaks and I have been trying for more than a decade to reverse-engineer a butter-pie from Diana Wynne Jones' Time City.

[edit edit] (For example, I count New England Spider Cake as literary because I learnt it from a post by sovay .)

It's an honor!

[sabotabby]

Does my own count? (I occasionally toy with the idea of following it up with a collection of Fiction You Can Sink Your Teeth Into).

[radiantfracture]

Yours is great and I refer to it often.

Tell me more about the fiction idea!

[sabotabby]

Oh, we have the column in our newsletter/blog that Rohan normally does that's recipes inspired by fiction. I was thinking of collecting them and publishing them.

[radiantfracture]

Oh, I feel silly -- I do actually read the newsletter (I went back to make sure) but somehow I hadn't clocked the name of the column. I like the idea of a collection -- links people back to the reading, too.

[sabotabby]

I like the idea too, but now I'm once again having Amazon issues and it makes me never want to self-publish again.

[radiantfracture]

I was feeling embittered about the enshittifcation of all transactions this weekend for a much lesser reason -- just watching my dad try to pay for a Tim Hortons order and having to use this stupid app to get points. Of course, the app is designed for recruitment and not at all for actual use, so it's difficult to distinguish between signing up and logging in, for example.

Anyway, it's not the sabotage of your great small-press cookbook by an evil company, but it is tormenting an elderly man for no reason and it makes me mad.

[sabotabby]

Same. I'm increasingly becoming a cash stuffed under the mattress person.

[redbird]

There's the "quick after-battle chocolate cake" from Patricia Wrede's Book of Enchantments--it goes with the short story "Utensile Strength," set in the universe of her Enchanted Forest books. On the one hand, you may not be looking for dessert recipes; on the other hand, I've made the recipe and like it.

Other than that, what's coming to mind are either recipes I haven't tried for one reason or another (ranging from lack of interest to not wanting to track down food-quality acorns), or recipes that involve ingredients that don't exist in our universe.

[radiantfracture]

Same problem with acorns! Actually I think the Anthropology prof does an acorn unit. Maybe I can get in on it.

[elusis]

I feel like I've heard that Diane Mott Davidson's cozy mysteries have recipes in? But I haven't read them myself.

Oh, there is a recipe book from The Good Place, but it's short!

[bibliofile]

For someone who claims not to cook, Alexis Hall ends up writing a lot of stories about people who can cook:

For real -- m/m kinky romance that includes a recipe for lemon meringue pie from a very steamy scene in the book. One of the protagonists is a young dom who's a short-order cook and who happily geeks out about food and learning to cook new things.

< a href="https://quicunquevult.com/books/winner-bakes-all/">Winner bakes all series -- about people doing baking on television, in a couple of contexts. "Expect queerness, kissing, and all the baked goods. Each book can be read as a standalone." (Two books out, with a third in the works.) Paris D. in the second book also has an anxiety disorder, which, yay for realistic character issues.

[bibliofile]

For books with food that sounds amazing, I've liked the cozy mysteries by Mia P. Manansala, the Tita Rosie's Kitchen series. The main character is a baker whose family owns a restaurant. Said baker is always trying to come up with Filipina takes on "standard" (for contemporary US predominant culture) baked goods. Her web site has a bunch of recipes, though there's no section heading to link to. I still want to make the Lila's ubu crinkles (cookies) recipe for my holiday cookie swap.

[wordweaverlynn]

Nora Ephron's HEARTBURN included recipes. They're supposed to be quite good.

If you enjoy Patrick O'Brian's novels about the British Navy in the days of Napoleon, you'll love LOBSCOUSE AND SPOTTED DOG. A mother-daughter team researched recipes for all the food mentioned in the Aubrey-Maturin novels and ate the results. The cookbook includes the recipes and snippets of the original descriptions, as well as reviews of the food. (Turns out that rats are surprisingly tasty.) It was a joy to read.

Nanny Ogg, of Discworld fame, wrote a cookbook called THE JOYE OF SNACKS. You can actually buy Nanny Ogg's Cookbook: A Useful and Improving Almanack of Information Including Astonishing Recipes from Terry Pratchett's Discworld. Again, great fun to read, and I understand that the recipes are all edible.

[radiantfracture]

This is just what I'm looking for -- thank you! I think I will have to commit the O'Brian tie-in.

I'd forgotten about Heartburn. I wonder if she originated that device in its full-recipe format. Hmm.