Cooking Skyrim: Meats

    One of the most common food items in TES: Skyrim is raw or cooked meat.  Usually, slain animals will drop meat of the appropriate kind (beef from cows, etc.) which can be taking to a cooking pot or cooking spit and combined with a Salt Pile, turning it into a cooked food item.  Cooked meat restores more Health points—or, in Survival Mode, more Hunger points—than raw meat, and weighs less, as well.  In Survival Mode, there is also a chance of catching diseases from eating raw meat.  So, in Skyrim, cooked meat is objectively better for the player to carry around.

    Raw meat items (and their cooked equivalents) include the following:

• Boar Meat from bristlebacks; combines with Salt Pile to make Cooked Boar Meat
• Chicken Breast from chickens; combines with Salt Pile to make Grilled Chicken Breast
• Clam Meat from clams; no cooked equivalent
• Crab Meat from mudcrabs; no cooked equivalent
• Horker Meat from horkers; combines with Salt Pile to make Horker Loaf
• Horse Meat from horses; combines with Salt Pile to make Horse Haunch
• Leg of Goat from goats; combines with Salt Pile to make Leg of Goat Roast
• Mammoth Snout from mammoth; combines with Salt Pile to make Mammoth Steak
• Pheasant Breast from (hanging) pheasants; combines with Salt Pile to make Pheasant Roast
• Raw Beef from cows; combines with Salt Pile to make Cooked Beef
• Raw Rabbit Leg from rabbits; combines with Salt Pile to make Rabbit Haunch
• Salmon Meat from salmon; combines with Salt Pile to make Salmon Steak
• Venison from deer or elk; combines with Salt Pile to make Venison Chop
  

    Note that most of these items can be combined with other foods to forms soups, though shellfish were a raw-only food item in the base Skyrim game.  The Fishing Creation also added many more fish for players to catch, some of which are food items and can be cooked in the usual manner.  Finally, there is an item in Raldbthar Deep Market called Charred Skeever Meat, which is a food item but cannot be made by the player; while skeevers drop Skeever Tails, the tails are not food and cannot be cooked, and the alchemical ingredient Charred Skeever Hide cannot be made by the player at all.

    The above list gives us our main sources for meat.  Most should come from wild game, or free-range domesticated livestock, rather than commercially farmed animals; this is both more accurate to the kind of farming shown in Skyrim, as well as a great way to provide more flavorful meat.  Of course, mammoth are extinct, and their closest relatives, elephants, are highly endangered; so I won't be trying that recipe.  Likewise, horse meat is illegal to buy or sell where I live.  Horkers are basically three-tusked walruses, and I believe walrus meat can be sold to non-natives only by Alaska Native groups.

    (Skeevers are clearly sized-up rats, but I don't have to worry about that because there are no recipes to make skeever meat!)

    It is weird that every kitchen seems to have a dead pheasant hanging from the ceiling, when there are no live pheasants to be found in the game.  I'm not sure what that would signify, in-universe; have all the pheasants been slaughtered for the season?  Did the people of Skyrim replace their domesticated pheasants with chickens en masse?  Is pheasant meat something that has to be purchased from a butcher, and perhaps imported from other parts of the empire?  If so, why are the pheasants so... fresh-looking?  All the other hanging animals from which players can harvest meat (horker, salmon, rabbit) can be found around Skyrim as living creatures.

    Aside from the mystery of the pheasants, I think that about wraps up meat.  Commercially-farmed animals will produce cheap meat available in most places, so anyone looking for a quick and easy way to cook Skyrim-type food can rely on that; while those seeking a more "authentic" flavor can splash a bit of cash on butchered game or free-range livestock.  Specific animals and their meats will be dealt with in separate posts.