Review: Heroes' Feast
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recipecommunityHeroes' Feast: The Official D&D Cookbook
Hardcover – October 27, 2020
by Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, and Michael Witwer; recipes by Adam Ried
This is an excellent example of a fantasy cookbook, in this case based on the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons across its various iterations and settings. It features a lot of big, full-color photos of food with fantasy-style presentation along with some picturesque fantasy illustrations. It reminds me very much of an earlier favorite, The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook.
The front matter includes Introduction, About This Book: Creating Food and Water, Worlds of Flavor, and Tips for Magical Cooking. Oh, and casting Mage Hand to chop food safely? Totally works in a magical world, and is one of the best and most popular applications of practical magic. Finding a reference to this in a book inspired by heroic magic is hilarious. The chapters are Human Cuisine, Elven Cuisine, Dwarven Cuisine, Halfling Cuisine, Other Cuisine, and Elixirs & Ales. Sadly this one doesn't have spice blends, which would've been a great addition. The back matter includes Afterword: Playing with Your Food, Acknowledgements, About the Authors, and Index. The index includes references both by ingredient and by recipe title.
We marked a ton of recipes. These include Hand Pies, Vedbread, Feywild Eggs, Drow Mushroom Steaks, Cherrybread, Moonshae Seafood Rice, Miner's Pie, Chicken-Something Dumplings, Halfling Oatmeal Sweet Nibbles, Everything Soup, Honeyed Ham with Pineapple Gravy, Arkhan the Cruel's Flame-Roasted Halfling Chili, Deep Gnome Trillimac Pods, Bytopian Shepherd's Bread, and Evermead (nonalcoholic with alcoholic option). Menus are provided for several famous locations, such as the Inn of the Last Home.
Some of the recipes are just a good version of fairly common things, like Traveler's Stew. These often lend themselves well to using whatever ingredients you have. Many of the ones we marked were notably distinct versions, like the Feywild Eggs, that had clever seasoning blends. There's an art to interdimensional cooking -- I do it a lot -- where you learn how to mimic tastes and textures of missing ingredients using what you can find locally. The right spice blend can go a long way toward replicated the original flavor, and a similar trick works with combining different types of meat. Several were just plain novel to me, like the Pineapple Gravy. Yes, that is a real gravy, made with the ham drippings and pineapple. Dark Molasses Nutbread is a really creative version of fruit-and-nut travelbread using rye flour and cornmeal.
A few recipes miss a beat but are still good. Heartlands Rose Apple and Blackberry Pie overlooks the fact that we have multple things that we could call "rose apples" here -- pink-fleshed apples, such as Hidden Rose or Pink Pearl; rosehips, which are edible (roses and apples are related); medlar, often used in desserts; and quince, which has to be cooked. Those would likely go better with blackberries than random cooking apples, but ordinary apples will work just fine. Oh wait, we have two more actual rose apple fruits, Syzygium jambos and wax jambu, but they're tropical only. So the cookbook is also fun for inspiration, if you happen to know extra goodies that you could riff into the recipes.
This is a great cookbook for gamers, especially fans of the featured races and settings. It generalizes well to other fantasy contexts. It's also good if you like rustic food. Most highly recommended.
Hardcover – October 27, 2020
by Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, and Michael Witwer; recipes by Adam Ried
This is an excellent example of a fantasy cookbook, in this case based on the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons across its various iterations and settings. It features a lot of big, full-color photos of food with fantasy-style presentation along with some picturesque fantasy illustrations. It reminds me very much of an earlier favorite, The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook.
The front matter includes Introduction, About This Book: Creating Food and Water, Worlds of Flavor, and Tips for Magical Cooking. Oh, and casting Mage Hand to chop food safely? Totally works in a magical world, and is one of the best and most popular applications of practical magic. Finding a reference to this in a book inspired by heroic magic is hilarious. The chapters are Human Cuisine, Elven Cuisine, Dwarven Cuisine, Halfling Cuisine, Other Cuisine, and Elixirs & Ales. Sadly this one doesn't have spice blends, which would've been a great addition. The back matter includes Afterword: Playing with Your Food, Acknowledgements, About the Authors, and Index. The index includes references both by ingredient and by recipe title.
We marked a ton of recipes. These include Hand Pies, Vedbread, Feywild Eggs, Drow Mushroom Steaks, Cherrybread, Moonshae Seafood Rice, Miner's Pie, Chicken-Something Dumplings, Halfling Oatmeal Sweet Nibbles, Everything Soup, Honeyed Ham with Pineapple Gravy, Arkhan the Cruel's Flame-Roasted Halfling Chili, Deep Gnome Trillimac Pods, Bytopian Shepherd's Bread, and Evermead (nonalcoholic with alcoholic option). Menus are provided for several famous locations, such as the Inn of the Last Home.
Some of the recipes are just a good version of fairly common things, like Traveler's Stew. These often lend themselves well to using whatever ingredients you have. Many of the ones we marked were notably distinct versions, like the Feywild Eggs, that had clever seasoning blends. There's an art to interdimensional cooking -- I do it a lot -- where you learn how to mimic tastes and textures of missing ingredients using what you can find locally. The right spice blend can go a long way toward replicated the original flavor, and a similar trick works with combining different types of meat. Several were just plain novel to me, like the Pineapple Gravy. Yes, that is a real gravy, made with the ham drippings and pineapple. Dark Molasses Nutbread is a really creative version of fruit-and-nut travelbread using rye flour and cornmeal.
A few recipes miss a beat but are still good. Heartlands Rose Apple and Blackberry Pie overlooks the fact that we have multple things that we could call "rose apples" here -- pink-fleshed apples, such as Hidden Rose or Pink Pearl; rosehips, which are edible (roses and apples are related); medlar, often used in desserts; and quince, which has to be cooked. Those would likely go better with blackberries than random cooking apples, but ordinary apples will work just fine. Oh wait, we have two more actual rose apple fruits, Syzygium jambos and wax jambu, but they're tropical only. So the cookbook is also fun for inspiration, if you happen to know extra goodies that you could riff into the recipes.
This is a great cookbook for gamers, especially fans of the featured races and settings. It generalizes well to other fantasy contexts. It's also good if you like rustic food. Most highly recommended.
