This is one of the posts that would have happened last month if I didn’t have a 31 day challenge going on. They say that there is an official (and sometimes unofficial) cookbook for everything. Late last year I picked up Heroes’ Feast, the official Dungeons and Dragons cookbook. This 212 page hardbound book was published by Ten Speed Press in 2020. ISBN: 978-1-9848-5890-0 with a cover price of $35.00US. The book was written by Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson and Michael Witwer.
My college age kid wanted to see this book after she had heard about it. It sounded interesting so I picked it up. I do some minor cooking on the side (nothing too deep, mostly crockpot experiments of recipes that I find online) but nothing that I’d write home about. My wife has some secret recipes that she has which I am very grateful for. Here meatloaf is to die for and often requested in the house. For me, if the recipe is too complicated, I tend to find something easier. While I’m still reading the book, I’ve flipped through several of the recipes. We decided upon the first recipe that we were going to try came from Mithral Hall, Potato Leek Soup. We already had a family recipe for this and we wanted to see how it compared.
For something like this, I wisely stayed out of the way. And I’m glad that I did. While I’m not going to post the recipe here, I will say that they had a special ingredient, bacon. The family loved the soup with this special ingredient. We’ve added bacon to the family recipe and it has been added to the rotation. This Dwarven recipe was listed as one of the Heroes’ Feast entries that was specially marked.
In the book is divided into several sections with specific recipes for each. Human Cuisine (with 19 recipes), Elven Cuisine (with 13 recipes), Dwarven Cuisine (with 12 recipes), Hafling Cuisine (with 11 recipes), Uncommon Cuisine (with 11 recipes from different races) and finally Elixirs & Ales (with 13 drinks, some of them alcoholic). There are also menus from several famous inns and taverns from different Dungeons & Dragons game worlds. Included in the book are tips on cooking and prepping for meals around gaming sessions. I was also impressed with the art and photos that the book contained. Some of the images looked like something you would see on a restaurant website, but they looked really good.
A few of the recipes that I am interested trying are Hand Pies, Otik’s Skillet-Fried Spiced Potatoes, Tavern “Steak”, Greenspear Bundles in Bacon, Meal’s End, Bangers and Smash, Black Pudding, Arkhan the Cruel’s Flame-Roasted Halfling Chili, “Orc” Bacon and Barovian Butterscotch Pudding.
Even if you are not big on cooking, I’d still recommend this book for some of the back story behind some of the locations and recipes. Heroes’ Feast will be sitting on my shelf next to the other Dungeons and Dragons books that I have collected. As for my daughter, she stated that she felt like Ratatouille after she had completed the recipe so she was very happy.