Cookbook Survivor: The Resolution
Victoria Rosenthal, Fallout: The Vault Dweller's Official Cookbook
Ok, so fasten your seatbelts, I’m going to whip out a bit of film theory here. Folks talk about diegetical and extra-diegetical elements of a film (or video game). The diegetical are explanations and understandings that exist inside a work—the characters narrate something themselves, or a narrator who isn’t even a character explains things entirely inside the fictional frame of a film or a game. Extra-diegetical elements go outside the film or game entirely, outside its world.
A lot of these theme cookbooks mix diegetical and extra-diegetical recipes and it’s kind of an uncomfortable mix. They either play at trying to interpret how to make something that you’ve seen in the film or show or even “eaten” as a character in terms that let you make it. But to pad the book, some also offer recipes that are thematically about the world, as we see it and know it. So maybe you pick up a book based on DC Comics and there’s “Lex Luthor’s Kryptonite Surprise”, that’s a delicious cake with green crystals hidden inside of it. Diegetic! But maybe there’s also “Geoff Johns’ 52 Decapitation Nibbles” that’s a bunch of little pastry heads of unimportant Justice Society family members in a sweet red-food coloring blood sauce. Extra-diegetic!
I kind of think that the extra-diegetic recipes feel like what they are, padding—the authors have run out of stuff that makes sense in the fiction they’re adapting. At least today, that holds up. The meringue “mushroom cloud” desserts? They really don’t make sense as desserts, just as extra-diegetical “this is a game that has nuclear war as a thematic element”. Curiously, they work as mushrooms, not mushroom clouds, at least visually, but not as something to eat—the only thing that makes any sense at all would be meringue cookies dipped in chocolate, which is what I did after messing with a few honest tries. This is a fussy recipe under any circumstances that depends on VERY stiff whipped egg whites with cream of tartar (glad as I am to have the one opportunity in every 2 years or so to actually use it) for a very visually tentative staging that isn’t about the eating. (They actually did end up looking like actual mushrooms rather than mushroom clouds.) Nobody in the world of Fallout would be doing this, and they wouldn’t be in a mood anyway to sit back and enjoy eating a dessert visualizing the origin of their suffering, even with the games’ characteristic dark humor. Even if I were gonna try making something that was “like a mushroom cloud”, I’d do it differently. Make somebody spin up some sugar in a cotton candy machine with a bit of orange food coloring, use a little torch to burn a bit, voila! Nuclear Despair. It’s not all that much more elaborate than this prep was.
The diegetic recipes? Well, I took the ground beef out of the “desert salad”, which is just basic '“taco salad” by any other name—corn, beans, tomatoes, queso fresco, lettuce. It’s fine—it is at its core that kind of salad you make when you have stuff that needs serving and maybe some finicky people who need it basic. It’s super-1970s, which is kind of the Fallout aesthetic to begin with.
The goat stew? It’s a basic West Indian curry: cumin, garam masala, coriander, turmeric, tomatoes, coconut milk. I thought it was lacking some peppers that weren’t hot per se, so I added two poblano peppers to the starting sofrito.
I used some of our homemade tabasco sauce instead of the called-for cayenne and serrano peppers, in part because if anything looks radioactive around here, that does.
I was happy to have a chance to use up the lemongrass that’s growing like crazy out front in a garden container. I had some goat around from the Swarthmore Farmers’ Market, so it was pleasant to use it up. I’d use this recipe again if I had two packets of goat in the freezer, though I might decide to go closer to the source of the basic idea if I really needed a recipe.
The Quantum Cola? Well, the recipe gets you something that looks like the real thing and it’s not bad.
Though the accurate unreality of the look got me several anxious queries about whether I was sure I wasn’t going to kill everyone, since it looks roughly like the stuff in a barbershop where they put the combs for disinfectant.
I was going to make the Instamash with bleu cheese, but rice seems best for a goat stew (the recipe even calls for it) so maybe I’ll do that in the coming week—mashed potatoes and bleu cheese seems like a good idea generally.
So ok, it survives. That seems best for a cookbook based on a world where people survive, improbably, despite being irradiated and hungry and carrying a small arsenal around on their backs.