Copyright © 2012 by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer Introduction copyright © 2012 by George R. R. Martin All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Some of the recipes contained in this work were originally published on the authors’ blog, The Inn at the Crossroads, www.innatthecrossroads.com. Photographs col1.1, 1.4, 1.10, 1.12, 2.9, 2.12, 2.15, 3.10, 4.11, 4.12, 4.15, 4.20, and 4.25 are by Kristin Teig and styled by Beth Wickwire, copyright © Kristin Teig. Used courtesy of Kristin Teig. All other photographs by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Monroe-Cassel, Chelsea. A feast of ice and fire : the official companion cookbook / Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN: 978-0-34553554-2 1. Cooking, International. 2. Cooking, Medieval. 3. Martin, George R. R. Game of thrones. I. Lehrer, Sariann. II. Title. TX725.A1M646 2012 641.59—dc23 2012009324 www.bantamdell.com Book design by Virginia Norey v3.1 For Brent, for everything. —CMC And for all the cooks, chefs, and powerful women who inspired us along the way. —SDL Contents Dedication Introduction About This Book Stocking a Medieval Kitchen The Basics Pastry Dough, Sauces, Etc. Summary of Cuisine by Region Recipes by Region: The Wall The North The South King’s Landing Dorne Across the Narrow Sea Feasting in Style Index Menus Acknowledgments About the Authors Introduction Come closer now. No, closer than that. I have a confession to make, an embarrassing confession, and I don’t want everyone to hear. Another step, yes … lean close, and I’ll whisper the sad truth in your ear: I can’t cook. There ’tis, my shameful secret. All the paragraphs and pages that I’ve devoted to food in my books and stories over the years, all my loving and detailed descriptions of dishes both ordinary and exotic, all those fictional feasts that made your mouth water … I never actually cooked a single one of them. They were made of words. Big meaty nouns, crisp fresh verbs, a nice seasoning of adjectives and adverbs. Words. The stuff that dreams are made of … very tasty dreams, fat free and calorie free, but with no nutritive value. Writing I’m good at. Cooking, not so much. Well, okay, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m not bad at breakfast, so long as “breakfast” means frying up some thick-sliced bacon and scrambling a mess of eggs with onions, cheese, and just enough Italian seasoning. But when I want pancakes or eggs Benedict or (best) a breakfast burrito smothered in green chile, I head out to my favorite breakfast place (Tecolote Café in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for those who are keeping score). Like all red-blooded American males, come summertime, I have been known to stack up some charcoal briquets, douse them with lighter fluid, and char steaks, dogs, and burgers over the resultant blaze. Indoors, well … I can boil corn on the cob, I can steam veggies (when I must), and I do make a mean cheese-stuffed meat loaf. That’s about the extent of it, though. That meat loaf represents the apex of my personal culinary achievement. When my wife broils a steak, it comes out charred on the outside and red on the inside. I broil the same steak in the same broiler, and it turns a uniform shade of pale gray throughout. Fortunately, I am much better at eating food than cooking it (as a glance at my waistline will tell you, sad to say). Food is one of life’s great pleasures, and I am all in favor of pleasure. Reading is another of those things that help make life worth living, and when one can combine reading and food, well … Which is why my novels are so full of food—a trend that did not begin with A Song of Ice and Fire, I should note. A decade before I began writing A Game of Thrones, I recall, I attended the British version of the famous Milford Writers’ Workshop and submitted a short story for critique. One of the other writers there called it “food porn.” But then again, he was British, from the land of boiled beef and mushy peas. I have always suspected that the British Empire was largely a result of Englishmen spreading out across the world looking for something good to eat. It is true that I spend a lot of words in my books describing the meals my characters are eating. More than most writers, I suspect. This does draw a certain amount of criticism from those readers and reviewers who like a brisker pace. “Do we really need all that detailed description of food?” these critics will ask. “What does it matter how many courses were served, whether the capons were nicely crisped, what sort of sauce the wild boar was cooked in?” Whether it is a seventy-seven-course wedding banquet or some outlaws sharing salt beef and apples around a campfire, these critics don’t want to hear about it unless it advances the plot. I bet they eat fast food while they’re typing too. I have a different outlook on these matters. I write to tell a story, and telling a story is not at all the same as advancing the plot. If the plot was all that mattered, none of us would need to read novels at all. The CliffsNotes would suffice. All you’ll miss is … well, everything. For me, the journey is what matters, not how quickly one can get to the final destination. When I read, as when I travel, I want to see the sights, smell the flowers, and, yes, taste the food. My goal as a writer has always been to create an immersive vicarious experience for my readers. When a reader puts down one of my novels, I want him to remember the events of the book as if he had lived them. And the way to do that is with sensory detail. Sights, sounds, scents—those are the things that make a scene come alive. Battle, bedroom, or banquet table, it makes no matter; the same techniques apply. That’s why I spend so much time and effort describing the food my characters eat: what it is, how it’s prepared, what it looks like, what it smells like, what it tastes like. It grounds the scenes, gives them texture, makes them vivid and visceral and memorable. Sense impressions reach us on much deeper and more primal levels than intellectual discourse can ever hope to. And the meals I describe do other things as well. World building is part of what gives epic fantasy its appeal, and food is part of that. You can learn a lot about a world and culture from what they eat (and what they won’t eat). All you really need to know about hobbits can be learned from “nice crispy bacon” and “second breakfasts.” And orcs … well, no one is likely to be doing The Orc Cookbook anytime soon. The same is as true for individuals as for societies. There’s a lot of characterization going on in those not-so-gratuitous feast scenes of mine. Oh, and sometimes that plot does advance as well. Those are the side dishes, though. The main course here, the reason why I include such scenes in my fiction, is for the scenes themselves. I like writing about food, and my readers—most of them, anyway—seem to like reading about it. Judging by the number of readers who write to say that my feast scenes make their mouths water, I must be doing something right. Unlike my world of Westeros or the real-life middle ages, the twenty- first century is a golden age, at least where food is concerned. Ours is an age of plenty, where foods of all types are readily available at any season, and even the most exotic spices can be purchased at the nearest grocery store, at prices that do not require you to mortgage your castle. Even better, for those of us who love to eat but cannot cook, this wonderful world of ours is full of people who will cook for us. Enter Sariann and Chelsea. At this late date, I can’t possibly recall the first person to suggest we publish a cookbook with all the recipes from my novels. The first such suggestion probably came in not long after the publication of A Game of Thrones in 1996. Dozens of other readers have made the same suggestion in the decades since. Most of them were just tossing out the notion as a joke, to be sure—“You write so much about food, you ought to do a cookbook, ha ha.” And even those who treated the idea seriously made the mistake of saying, “You ought to write a cookbook.” Given my prowess in the kitchen, the chances of that happening were about equal to the chances of me writing an auto repair manual or a guide to computer programming. Sariann and Chelsea were different. They did not just write to me and suggest that a cookbook would be a nifty idea, no. They actually began to cook some of the meals described in A Song of Ice and Fire, hunting up recipes in crumbling books of medieval cookery and pairing each with a more contemporary version made with modern, twenty-first- century techniques and ingredients. They called their blog the Inn at the Crossroads, after a certain namesake establishment in the novels where various dire events take place. Among other things, the innkeep is hanged, and her corpse strung up outside the door to twist in the wind. A fate, I devoutly hope, that will not befall Sariann and Chelsea. Their food is much, much better than what is served at the original inn. How do I know that? you may ask. Have I cooked any of these dishes, in either their medieval or modern versions? Well, no. I told you, I can’t cook. I have eaten many of these dishes, however, and that’s the important thing. When A Dance with Dragons, the most recent novel in the series, came out last July, I kicked off my book tour in Boston, and Sariann and Chelsea themselves showed up with a basket of lemon cakes, meat pies, and other goodies to keep me from feeling peckish during the signing. And thereafter, as I made my way from coast to coast, in a dozen different cities, confederates of theirs and readers of their blog turned up at most every signing, with more baskets and more dishes, each more toothsome than the last. And every basket featured lemon cakes. Sansa would have loved them. Now that I am back home again, working on the next book, the baskets have stopped, alas. But fear not; we have this book instead, so you can cook your own versions of the favorite dishes of the Seven Kingdoms and the more exotic lands beyond. Those of you who cook can, anyway. And, hell, maybe even I will give a few of these recipes a try, assuming I can find a good source for dragon peppers.… Eat hearty, my friends. Winter is coming. George R. R. Martin