Cookbook Survivor: Victoria Rosenthal, Fallout: The Official Vault Dweller's Cookbook
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
The rather odd thing that has happened since I started this column is that I’ve acquired more cookbooks than I’ve de-accessioned. I got a big shipment of older cookbooks from my mother that will keep this column going for a long time. And on an impulse (egged on by my daughter) I bought a couple of novelty cookbooks associated with video games and television shows.
So ok. The point of this isn’t really to succeed in emptying my shelves, it’s to have a fun structure for cooking and sharing the outcome. So here’s the first of those novelty cookbooks, one based on the post-apocalyptic game Fallout. It could still lose the Survivor test if it’s really bad, but then again I have low expectations, considering that this is post-apocalyptic cuisine.
In the Fallout games, eating is important—you can toggle a setting that makes it a life-or-death thing for your character but even without that you generally need to be eating just to heal from battle or to get an advantage from various foods. This being a world full of mutants, robots, ruins and radiation, the food you eat is generally scrounged remnants of the kitschy, consumerist pastiche America that was wiped out by nuclear war. The brand names of dusty boxes and cans found in ruined stores become familiar to any aficionado of the series: Blamco Mac & Cheese, Instamash, Cram, YumYum Deviled Eggs, Sugar Bombs, Fancy Lads Snack Cakes. The basic scene you’re meant to have in mind is Max from the Road Warrior opening up a can of dog food and chowing down, leaving the can itself for his dog to lick off.
You also hunt and gather mutated animals and plants and learn recipes for making them into something more nutritious and less contaminated—but you also “take rads” from many foods and from water and occasionally have to treat your radiation level with scrounged anti-radiation medicine.
Sounds delicious, right? Most of these gimmick cookbooks that are based on games or genre films and TV shows just take a set of fairly standard recipes and then just ask you to imagine that you’re making owlbear fricasse just like the elves of the forest do every Midsummer. Often they at least try to come up with a slightly more interesting or on-point recipe pastiche for the most humorously iconic or constantly mentioned foods in the genre property.
I decided to go for a goat stew where the goat is a substitute for “radstag” (mutated two-headed deers), some “desert salad” (basically just a beans-and-lettuce salad that you might get in a Tex-Mex place), and then more challengingly, some meringue cookies that are meant to look like mushroom clouds (I don’t know that this is gonna work—I’ve started on those and they’re already giving me trouble) and some Nuka-Cola Quantum (a rare beverage in-game that gives you a strong buff).
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THE RULES FOR COOKBOOK SURVIVOR
There are no rules. I’ll substitute ingredients if I want or if I have to, I’ll pick recipes capriciously, I’ll keep a book in contention for weeks or toss it after a single week. If I decide I can still use the book, I’ll keep it. If I decide after I’m just not going to cook from it ever even if I think the recipes are fine, it’s gone. Authors are free to write me and tell me I’m incompetent or a jerk.
You get Cookbook Survivor in TWO INSTALLMENTS. One on Saturday morning telling you what I’m gonna do, and one on Saturday evening telling you how it went.
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