Cooking Skyrim: Introduction
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a fantasy video game in the mode of a first-person shooter. Mainly, your character shouts at things and picks flowers while wandering the countryside—or maybe that's just been my experience. The point is, Skyrim is ostensibly about fighting a dragon-god with your own god-dragon powers (or possibly about brokering peace between white nationalists and racist elves), but the developers saw fit to include numerous mini-games, like picking locks or brewing potions, which don't interact with the combat system at all. You can, in fact, completely ignore the plot and just focus on improving your skills in the mini-games.
One mini-game that is especially interesting to me is the cooking or baking mini-game. Although TES: Skyrim has skills (i.e. non-weapon proficiencies), there is no relevant skill for making food. You can't improve your ability to throw things in a pot and produce cooked versions of raw stuff. Fortunately, the kind folks at Bethesda have worked out the recipes for each of the various food items on your behalf!
For example, Braided Bread requires a Sack of Flour (good) and one Salt Pile (okay...), and that's it. If you've ever made bread, you may have noticed some ingredients are missing. Like water. It turns out that there *is* no water in Skyrim, however—at least, no water your character can carry. There are no skins or canteens to fill, and no food merchant sells it. The closest you can get is filling the Initiate's Ewer at the various Waystations in the Dawnguard add-on, but that doesn't actually affect your inventory; it just triggers a little animation of your character dipping the ewer in a font. I guess the writers felt it would be unsporting to require an ingredient that no one has?
So, in Skyrim, water just... happens. If you're cooking, it's not on the list, so you have to infer it. Fine. But there's also no leavening agent in that Braided Bread. This is actually, maybe, plausible: after making dough, if it's left out on a sunny windowsill, wild yeasts can cultivate it and help the dough rise. This means the yeast is kind of an atmospheric effect and not an actual ingredient.
Except that's silly; humans have been harvesting and controlling wild yeasts for millennia. Certainly a society with food merchants is specialized enough to have baker's yeast, or at least to culture wild yeasts for sourdough starters. Besides, they have *ale*. If they have brewers' yeast, why not use the ale barm to leaven the dough?? Regardless, yeast also apparently "just happens" in Skyrim.
There are also not a whole lot of seasonings, or indeed flavors, in Skyrim's cooking. Despite a number of alchemical ingredients being potentially edible, only a handful are used in recipes: Moon Sugar (a controlled substance in this universe), Salt Pile (basically kosher† salt), Garlic (a bulb of garlic), and Lavender (a few sprigs of fresh or dried lavender). Garlic features in seven recipes, not counting "hot" versions of regular soups, and Lavender appears in just two (again, not including the "hot" version of a regular soup). Moon Sugar likewise appears in two recipes (not including, etc.).
This is not terribly unrealistic, considering how expensive a tropical product like sugar ought to be in pseudo-medieval Scandinavia; but I would have liked to see some recipes with Elves Ear, which looks like sage, or Frost Mirriam, which looks like parsley. The writers did make some use of milk, butter, and honey, but for the most part, cooking in Skyrim is a lot of flour, salt, and meat.
What would that actually look like? What would that actually *taste* like? I'm guessing anyone who's tried World War II-style rationing would find it all pretty reasonable, while those accustomed to modern Western products would find it pretty bland and tasteless. That said, many of these recipes can easily be modified to suit a modern palate.
In this series of blog posts, I plan to go over three versions of each recipe: one that is true to the ingredients listed in the game (with the above caveats regarding water and yeast); one that completely ignores the listed ingredients in favor of a quick recipe that can be thrown together to impress geeky friends; and one that uses the listed ingredients as the starting point, but adds more flavor one way or another.
Ideally, I'll make the "recipe as-written" dish, and possibly one of the others, but a large part of my interest is in making the stated ingredients as tasty as possible. I'll record my results, and share any opinions I can get on the flavors or textures; sadly, most of my friends and family are currently out of town—like, all but one—so early feedback may be... scanty. Naturally, anyone who wants to try the recipe out can leave a comment on the post describing the experience!
As I post each recipe, I'll add a link to the 'blog post here:
†Note that salt itself cannot be kosher; rather, the large-grained salt called "kosher salt" is the kind most commonly used for salting kosher meat in many Ashkenazi communities.
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