Cookbook Survivor: Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
Ok, one more semi-silly genre-based cookbook. I have this author’s World of Warcraft cookbook too, but I’m not feeling very affectionate towards World of Warcraft and its corporate owner at present.
The Elder Scrolls games are certainly among my favorite ever. Food plays an important decorative role in the game environments. You see food on tables and in houses, and rather famously you can collect cabbages (and other foods) to stash in your own dwelling and they never go bad.
There aren’t that many iconic dishes in the game, however, and I don’t recall feeling the need to buff with food all that much. There is the famous sweetroll that appears in a line of constantly repeated dialogue in Skyrim, of course.
So the author of this cookbook had to think of some plausible dishes that fit the gameworld and that were recognizable. Interestingly, she chose to skip pork, which I think is right—I don’t remember seeing a pig in the game ever. Maybe a boar? But I’m not sure.
Honestly, no knock on the author, but it’s a pretty dull cookbook. Genre fun or not, I can’t imagine cooking from it ever outside the context of this column—this one is hanging on by its fingernails. I suppose partly because there isn’t that much that I could make from it for a party or something where all the Skyrim geeks would go “oh wow that’s XXX”, unlike the Nuka-Cola Quantum from last week.
I’m going to make the sweetroll (naturally) but that’s a dessert. For dinner, I’ll make a chicken dumpling (simple) and a “horker loaf”. Horkers are walruses, more or less, but this one is made with ground beef and canned smoked oysters, which strikes me as a combination that could either be delicious or revolting. (It’s the dish on the cover, with the bacon draped over it.) We’ll find out!