How the author of The Elder Scrolls Cookbook brought Tamriel’s cuisine to life

From Hylian Shrooms to 1-Up mushrooms, Nuka-Cola to Grog, food plays an important role in video games. In addition to providing temporary upgrades or filling up a health bar, video game food assists in world-building, adding flavor (pun most certainly intended) to the gameplay experience.

For food writer Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, crafting meals in video games is way more than just a quick way to replenish some HP — it’s research.

Monroe-Cassel has built a career out of bringing fictional foods to life. She started blogging recipes based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series in 2011, which were eventually published in an official companion cookbook. Since then, she’s workshopped recipes inspired by The Witcher, Star Wars, and various other geeky properties on her long-running blog, and published cookbooks based on the cuisines of World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Lord of the Rings.

Her latest book of recipes, inspired by the cuisine from the Elder Scrolls franchise, will be published on March 26. Polygon spoke with Monroe-Cassel over email to learn how she develops recipes for foods that don’t exist in the real world.

Polygon: Have you always been interested in fictional foods? What piqued your interest in crafting recipes for fantasy settings?

Chelsea Monroe-Cassel: Curiously, I really have almost always been interested in fictional foods. The first time I remember encountering it was in the Brambly Hedge series when I was very small. The art in those books is just lovely, and the pantries of the little mouse houses were always packed to the gills with The idea of mouse feasts was reinforced when I discovered the Redwall series later in childhood, and even though I was a terribly picky eater, the food was so lovingly described that I found I was desperate to know what a strawberry cordial or a watercress tart tasted like. My first fictional food meal was a Redwall feast with friends, and we made a bunch of recipes that I’d probably find cringeworthy now, but I think that was the start of everything.

Insight Editions

What’s the process of coming up with a new recipe? Do you draw from historic sources? Try to emulate the game’s crafting or cooking process?

So with every new project, I’ll start off with a really deep immersive dive into the source material, whether it’s novels, television shows, reference books, video games, or some wacky combination. I’ll definitely pull from historical sources when it’s appropriate to do so (say for a definitively medieval setting), but in general, I try to work directly from the source material and extrapolate out from there. I’ll usually have lists of ingredients and actual dishes in the world, and I also take into account who’s eating the food, who’s growing it, how costly the ingredients might be, etc. In the end, it’s all about creating food that is aesthetically consistent with the world I’m working in, whether it’s Westeros or Morrowind.

Is there a difference in creating recipes from books vs. games?

Great question! Every project I’ve worked on has been really different from the last. It always comes down to how much detail the source material has to offer. In general, books offer more descriptive detail about the food, but games have images of the dishes.

The photography in The Elder Scrolls Cookbook is beautiful — how did you capture the feeling of a video game with IRL images?

Chelsea Monroe-Cassel/Insight Editions

Thank you! I was really proud of a lot of those photos, and I worked hard to get them. One of the big features of the Elder Scrolls games, thankfully, is the beautiful visual aspect of the worlds. As with the recipes, I always start off looking at the source material. This process is way more awkward in a multiplayer game, since I’m usually the oddball standing on a table in the tavern, spinning in circles trying to get a good screenshot of a plate of food. Thankfully, I was able to pull a lot of the reference images from Skyrim, so nobody caught me staring dreamily up at the northern lights, or skulking around the attic of a meadery.

From there, I pick the cutlery, backgrounds, and other props that are the most iconic and memorable to folks who have played the games. Then I either buy it if I can (and the price is right), or I set to making it myself, which is usually the case with at least the backgrounds. I’m also lucky enough to live in Vermont, where the winters can look a heck of a lot like Skyrim, so I was able to get some fun snowy shots, too.

Were there any foods from Elder Scrolls that you really wanted to include, but couldn’t figure out how to make them work?

There’s always some recipe or dish that just fights back! In this case, it was the two cool-sounding cocktails from Riften. The ingredients were just a little too variable for me to perfect recipes for the cookbook, but I’m hoping to revisit them for my blog.

What’s your favorite recipe from The Elder Scrolls Cookbook?

First off, I’m a dessert fiend, so obviously the sweetrolls had to be “tested” until they were perfect. Because they’re pretty quick to make, they’re awesome with breakfast in addition to after dinner. Or with tea. They’re pretty much great whenever.

I always have some absurd favorites. In this collection, I really loved the Rye Crisps, the Canis Root Tea, and the quick meads. I keep bees, so getting to use my own honey to make those was awesome.

The Elder Scrolls Cookbook is available for pre-order now, and will ship on March 26.