Cooking for Wizards, Warriors and Dragons: 125 Unofficial Recipes Inspired By The Witcher, Game of Thrones, The Broken Earth and Other Fantasy Favorites

by Thea James, Isabel Minunni, Tim Foley (Illustrator)

100+ Spell-Binding Recipes Inspired by Diverse Fantasy Worlds, from The Witcher to The Broken Earth

Created by Hugo Award-winning co-founder of The Book Smugglers, Thea James, Cooking for Wizards, Warriors and Dragons collects recipes inspired by fantasy classics and groundbreaking new voices, including: Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher , N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy , Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time , Tomi Adeyemi's Legacy of Orïsha, Patrick Rothfuss's The Kingkiller Chronicle, Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness, and many more.

Fortify yourself for the road with classic dishes, such as Pernese Meatrolls or Geralt's Life Saving Chicken Sando. Embrace your dark side with King's Landing Barbecue smoked meats a la Daenerys, channel your inner Saruman with Charred Broccoli Stalk Salad, or a Fifth Season-inspired Solving the Meat Shortage Osso Bucco. Learn to make your own Grishaverse-inspired Butter Week Cakes or Orïshan Coconut Pie, and try your hand at a Spiritwalkerverse-inspired Lamb Tajine.

Organized by different meal types and ingredients (including Breakfasts & Second Breakfasts, Soups & Stews, The Hunt, The Farm, The Catch, Snacks & Sides, and Desserts), Cooking for Wizards, Warriors and Dragons includes illustrations from noted artist Tim Foley and recipes developed and tested by professional chef Isabel Minunni. With five bonus feast spreads, this grimoire is sure to sate hungry readers from any realm.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Nonfiction, Food

176 pages, Hardcover

First published September 21, 2021

About the author

Thea is one half of the maniacal duo behind The Book Smugglers, a Hugo Award-winning sci-fi and fantasy book review blog. Thea is Filipina-American and lives in New York, but grew up in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Japan. COOKING FOR WIZARDS, WARRIORS, AND DRAGONS (available August 31, 2021) is her first cookbook.

Reviews

[Becca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous cover, incredible variety of recipes with well written directions, and dishes INSPIRED BY TAMORA PIERCE'S ALANNA SERIES?????
I screamed when I was going through the book and saw the first Alanna inspired recipe. This is the first time I've seen Tamora Pierce's work referenced and talked about in length out in the wild. Thank you for giving her writing the nod it deserves!

[Devon Flaherty · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was October when I was at a great Southern Pines, NC bookstore called The Country Bookshop with a coupon, so my choice of Cooking for Wizards, Warriors and Dragons by Thea James (co-author of the award-winning The Book Smugglers fanzine) was not just about enjoying fantasy books nor just about me having a project in the works that is similar to this book, but also about it being Halloween and so many of these recipes fit the mood of the autumn. Wizards. Warriors. Dragons. The fall is the time for imagination of a certain sort, amiright? The book was on display as a sort of recommended read. (It was just published in the summer of 2021). I had never seen it before, but it appealed to me and made me wonder about the project I was already working on. So I bought it.

Since then, I have seen it around. Apparently a cookbook is the sort of thing many fantasy fans would enjoy, or at least bookstores think that readers of fantasy would like it. Or maybe booksellers are just enamored by the book itself. I wouldn’t blame them. Though not particularly thick, the book is a pretty one (pretty being a strange choice here, but still). The cover is nice, but inside it’s a treasure trove of stylized, black and white illustrations scattered amidst pages full of graphics, patterns, epic borders, and appropriate font, not to mention that the pages are made (clearly just for fun) to look like old parchment. Is it a spell book? Is it the history of a secret, magical land? Or is it a cookbook? The designers behind this book really should win some sort of prize.

Image from The Book Smugglers, the booksmugglers.com
Each recipe (or set of recipes) has a brief introduction to tell you where the recipe was inspired from. Every recipe in the book is inspired by a specific bit of literature, and while that may excite you fantasy readers, there is of course a limited catalogue. Thea James wanted to include some up-and-coming writers as well as minority and women writers, so it’s not a recipe book for the classics. She did include some The Lord of the Rings, A Song of Fire and Ice, The Earthsea Cycle, and one or two small things for The Hobbit and The Once and Future King. Other than those obvious ones, though, less of the standards and more of the new and underrepresented. (I am reading the Daevabad series, which she includes.) There is an index that make finding these recipes easy. (Beware: some of them are only a drink recipe.)

I have tried some of the recipes by now, which were written my Isabel Minunni. (Strangely enough, Minunni is a cookbook author mainly for special diets (including Mediterranean and vegan (and pegan?)), and there’s not even a whiff of that here. There couldn’t be: these are mostly hearty, trail-life nourishing, often medieval foods from books that traditionally have hunting and roasting in them.) I have marked recipes to try from Rice, Pickles and Miso Soup, to A Soup to Keep the Wolf Away, from Roasted Pork Shoulder with Rice and Plantains, to Mixed Berry Bubbly Tarts. The recipes run the usual gamut from breakfast to dessert (including cocktails and feasts) and the more unusual gamut of European to Asian to Middle Eastern, from ancient or simple or traditional to more innovative and imaginative (as do the books used to inspire them). The recipes are not completely “true” to the books, as in they are often extrapolated from the text or even a play on words or ideas (like Mordor’s Lava Cake. Get it?). I imagine some cosplay types howling that they aren’t authentic enough.

I made A Simple Hunter’s Stew (inspired by The Farseer Trilogy) which my teens loved and I thought was a little boring. The recipes appear to work, though many of them are quite involved and also many of them are recipes which I already have and use (like coq au vin or shepherd’s pie or lemon poppyseed bundt cake with a (sometimes) new name). As far as planning a fantasy supper club or bibliophile event, you could use this cookbook, though I imagine it gets used more to peruse through or submit families to manic-eyed suppers with speeches on more usual nights. It makes a good coffee-table book, though it could help you wrap up an especially involved book club (which would have to include food cards and more food speeches). Whatever; it’s a beautiful and thoughtful book that might not be exactly what you expect and so both excite and (a little) disappoint (I’m a bibliophile and a foodie) at the same time. Still, worth the purchase for a fan of fantasy, I think.

***REVIEW WRITTEN FOR THE STARVING ARTIST BLOG***

[Linda Malcor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting concept. Unfortunately many of the ingredients are impossible to come by (lark breasts?) or involve cooking methods that are not known to the average cook. Then there are the pots and pans that not everyone happens to have on hand.

Otherwise, it looks good.

[Afton Mortensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one was clearly written by dedicated fans! All of the recipes were creatively sourced and easy to follow. As a 'hates cooking' person, I felt like these were recipes I could use for everything from food prep to potlucks and would create fans for both food and fantasy in the process! HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought Thea James’s COOKING FOR WIZARDS, WARRIORS AND DRAGONS for a middle school young man as a Christmas present. I knew he currently enjoyed cooking (his team at school won first prize in an interscholastic cooking contest). I didn’t know what to buy him. Searching for cookbooks, I saw Cooking for Wizards, Warriors and Dragons.

The cover is soft leather with engraved lettering. Feels great. Looks great. Inside are recipes, the story behind the recipes, and some fantastic artwork.

The young fellow sent a Text saying he was extremely pleased to receive the book. In fact, he prepared his first meal using a recipe from the book. He said it tasted great.


I’m so happy someone liked a present I bought for them and actually put it to use, I’m rating the book Five Stars.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just got for my birthday! Can’t wait to find my next favorite meal!

[sam☆ · Rating 5 out of 5]

so aesthetically pleasing and tho I won't have most of the ingredients to make the recipes I shall have them one day but for now they will be modified and transformed😭💪

[Taldragon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cooking for Wizards, Warriors and Dragons collects recipes inspired by fantasy classics and groundbreaking new voices, including: Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher , N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy , Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time , Tomi Adeyemi's Legacy of Orïsha, Patrick Rothfuss's The Kingkiller Chronicle, Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness, and many more.

[Becca · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of recipes from fantasy books - many of them stories that are incredibly meaningful to me, places I've escaped to. And though this book, Thea has given me a way to bring their world into mine. There are some dishes that are familiar (but maybe with a twist), and some that aren't found in a typical recipe book. I'm not the cook in my home, but these recipes seem manageable. I appreciate the notes that accompany each recipe, one sentence to acknowledge the book that the dish can be found in. You can tell a lot of love went into this book, and I'm looking forward to sending that love forward when trying out these recipes.

[Deena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amending my review a bit due to editorial errors throughout the book. So far they’re mostly typos (extra words, incorrect page numbers in the index, changes in tense, that kind of thing), and I hope those don’t translate into errors in the recipes themselves.

[Stella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a Cookbook, with a capital C on purpose. No color photos of the finished recipe. Summaries of scenes from the author's favorite fantasy fiction, followed by intricate recipes (14-20 ingredients is not uncommon), with beautiful black and white sketches of scenes from the books. It's lovely to hold, with an embossed cover and edged pages, and fun to read through. But I think the only thing I was tempted to make was Trail Fruit and Jerky, which is basically dried fruit, seeds, nuts, and beef jerky. It's trail mix. I'm certainly not up to making the pickle platter, with instructions on how to pickle your own onions, peaches, and sour pickles. Canning is not on my current list of joys, so pass. And roast rabbit, boar, and lark? Um...no. For more adventurous cooks who also love reading, this might be one to check out.

[EdieReads7 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was gifted this by a friend and was immediately delighted with it. It’s well thought-out and beautifully laid out and illustrated. I have only cooked one thing from it so far: Elyas’s Roasted Rabbit. It came out amazing to be honest, and the sauce was to die for! What I loved the most though was that while I had not heard of all the fantasy series mentioned, I had read enough of them. For example, I had forgotten all about Patricia C Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles. But I saw it referenced along with a Cherries Jubilee recipe and man, it took me right down memory lane. Now I am re-reading those series as a 30-mumble-year-old woman and it’s taking me back to being 12 and reading those books under the old dogwood tree at the childhood home. For these myriad reasons, I adored this book. Highly recommend.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a wonderful cookbook! It has recipes from series that I was pleasantly surprised to see represented. I thought the recipes were quite long, but looked amazing. I will be adding this one to buy!

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly liked it.

[Olivia Ambrose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very pretty and a fun idea, but not that greatly executed.

[Deb · Rating 2 out of 5]

Found a couple recipes to try but not many.