Two words for you: Turkish Delight.
In a discussion of food in the fantasy genre, we may as well start with one of most well-known examples. When I read the Narnia books at age 12—an age when I fervently wanted magic to be real—I was overwhelmed with curiosity about this mysterious confection called Turkish Delight. I mean, it had to be really good for Edmund Pevensie to sell off his family to the White Witch.
The Narnia books were not favorites of mine—my preference went to Prydain—but that mention of Turkish Delight stuck with me. Later in my teen years when I visited a Cost Plus World Market for the first time, I encountered the candy for sale. I had to buy it.
I also had to throw it away because I found it to be outright vile.
Yes, I know the version I had wasn’t legit Turkish Delight. What is important is the food and the experience. I wasn’t even a Narnia fan, but I wanted to connect with and understand that scene years later.
Food is incredible like that. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the Force. It’s what binds people together within and across cultures and eras. As a worldbuilding element, it’s essential because what we eat (and don’t eat) is personal, is religious, is a snapshot of our very moment in time. Mess that up, and believability in the literary world shatters. If a book has samurai in feudal Japan regularly munching on yeast-risen white bread or William the Conqueror drinking hot chocolate, there had better be some major alternate history going on or a believable magical angle, or I’ll stop reading right there.
Even in outright bizarre settings, food in fantasy usually utilizes recognizable ingredients. There’s a big reason for that. Describing flavor is like trying to describe color to someone who can’t see quite the same range. Have you ever tried to explain a spice to someone who has never had it before? I did that with cardamom once, and I couldn’t get much better than, “It’s like cinnamon, but not at all like cinnamon.”
Bread is probably the most common food across the genre, but it can easily be an anachronism. Fluffy white sliced bread is a fairly recent thing; a book shouldn’t say something is “better than sliced bread” before 1928 unless you’re setting up a paradox.
In my Blood of Earth trilogy, I created an alternate history 1906 setting where many elements of Japanese culture are infused with American daily life. In actual history, European-style yeast breads weren’t successfully adapted to Japanese tastes until the Meiji Era of the late 19th century. For my setting, it therefore made perfect sense for Japanese sweet rolls like an-pan and jamu-pan to be common pastries in America. In Call of Fire, I introduce sylphs who engage in contractual alliances in exchange for bread.
That melding of familiar foods and the magical is something I particularly love about historical fantasies. J. Kathleen Cheney’s Golden City trilogy utilizes this especially well as she establishes her setting of 1902 Portugal:
The waiter arrived then with two plates: Duilio’s hearty meal of liver and sausage with fried potatoes, stuffed mushrooms, and broa, along with Joaquim’s fish soup.
There’s nothing inherently fantasy about that simple line, but basic details like this matter because they accurately portray the culture, place, and period. That kind of detail is also evident in her worldbuilding of the sereia, selkies, and otter-folk who live at the fringes of human society. Broa, by the way, is a yeast-leavened bread made of cornmeal and rye, and it’s delicious.
On the more explicitly foodie-fantasy side are two recent series: Matt Wallace’s Sin du Jour, with a wacky catering angle on urban fantasy, and Cassandra Khaw’s Gods and Monsters, wherein chef Rupert Wong serves man (literally, on a platter) to ghouls in Kuala Lumpur. The two series are radically different yet both invoke food in funny, seriously twisted ways.
A more traditional approach to the theme is found in Christina Rossetti’s famous poem “The Goblin Market,” which explores the old-as-Adam concept of magical beings tempting and destroying humans through food:
…Come buy, come buy:
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come buy, come buy.”
I think most of us know that if we ever get that long-awaited invitation to the Fairy Court, we shouldn’t eat the food, no matter how extraordinary it looks and smells. Certainly, things don’t go well for the maidens Laura and Lizzie in Ms. Rossetti’s poem. The historical context around that poem can’t be ignored, either. We in the 21st century are spoiled by the wealth of international produce offered by even the smallest of grocery stores. In the Victorian era—or really any time before the mid-20th century—a bounty of juicy, ripe fruits like those offered by the goblins would defy geography, seasons, and preservation methods. No wonder such a meal is an infernally tempting event.
Fairies can be the tempters—or the tempted. As I noted earlier, I use this with the sylphs in Call of Fire and my new release Roar of Sky. I love this trope, not just because I’m a foodie, but because there are so many ways to give it a fresh spin. One of the great side characters in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series is the dewdrop fairy Toot-Toot. While Toot is originally summoned through more traditional means of a magical circle baited with bread, milk, and honey, protagonist Harry Dresden discovers Toot and his kind really, really, really love pizza. Moments like that provide a moment of levity in an otherwise intense story.
Since the old-fashioned fairy spread of ripe fruit doesn’t embody quite the oomph it once did, pizza actually works well as modern-day bait for human and fairy alike—and other creatures, too. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles certainly have a passion for pizza that kids and adults can relate to.
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Sin du Jour: The Final Course
That brings me around again to what makes food essential to world-building in fantasy: we all eat. Our favorite book characters eat (some divine or immortal beings excepted, of course). Even if their world is completely bizarre in contrast to contemporary Earth, the food likely is not. Food provides the common bond between our worlds. It makes the fantasy more real.
Fantasy genre-connected cookbooks and blogs make that realism downright edible. As a Dragonlance-obsessed teenager, I was enthralled that the Leaves from the Inn of the Last Home: The Complete Krynn Sourcebook actually contained recipes based on food from the novels. I begged my mom to give the fried potatoes recipe a try. They weren’t as tasty as I’d hoped, but I still geeked out over it because I was eating Dragonlance food, something that Raistlin Majere might eat.
A more current example of this recipe trend is the food blog Inn at the Crossroads, whose efforts to cook their way across George R. R. Martin’s Westeros garnered them a book deal for an official Song of Fire and Ice cookbook. Devout fans cook up themed meals to enjoy while they watch the show on HBO.
An official cookbook for Outlander takes a more historical tack by providing recipes from postwar Britain to the Scottish Highlands and beyond. Video games also come to life through their foods, as bloggers and Twitch-streamers make mana potions and other dishes into genuine fare. Video game powerhouse Square Enix maintains an official Dragon Quest-themed restaurant in Tokyo called Luida’s Bar which features a full menu of food and drinks, including many that pay tribute to the role-playing game series’ beloved slime.
These examples highlight a major perk of being a reader/gamer and foodie in our modern age: food enables us to celebrate the worlds and characters of the books, movies, and video games we love. Not only does it make the fantasy world feel more real, but social media allows us to be, well, social about it. The internet isn’t just for cats. It’s also about sharing food pictures on Instagram and Twitter, blogging about recipes, broadcasting the cooking process live on Twitch or YouTube, and pinning everything on Pinterest.
On my Bready or Not food blog, I’ve shared recipes related to my Clockwork Dagger duology and my Blood of Earth trilogy. Readers love that they can eat what my characters eat. So do I. I want that level of interaction when I enjoy other books and games, too, whether that involves damsons and bilberries, broa, or a slime-shaped meat bun at Luida’s Bar.
I write fantasy because I want magic to be real. Eating food from the fantasy genre is a way to make worldbuilding into an actual, visceral experience. That is a delicious kind of magic—even in the case of Turkish Delight.
Originally published in October 2018.
Nebula-nominated Beth Cato is the author of the Clockwork Dagger duology and the Blood of Earth trilogy from Harper Voyager—book three, Roar of Sky, is available now. She’s a Hanford, California, native transplanted to the Arizona desert, where she lives with her husband, son, and requisite cat. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter at @BethCato.
‘The Worm of Ourboros’ includes a detailed description of a feast in Carce, capital of ‘watery Witchland’. Lots of sea food.
If you want a really good, Americanized version of Turkish Delight, look for Liberty Orchards Aplets & Cotlets. That was our family’s go-to treat during the holidays. So when I understood the connection, I got why Lewis had his characters rave after that treat. When I got more as an adult, I loved them just the same. The backstory of Liberty Orchards reminds me of how to world build with these foods and treats in mind, too. Food comes from somewhere, and goes somewhere else.
Now ya got my mouth a-waterin’! xD
L’Amour’s The Walking Drum isn’t strictly fantasy, but it takes you away to a time and place almost-but-not-quite familiar. It uses food throughout to great effect, whether the treats and drinks of the Andalusian salon culture, tricking the greedy landowner out of the honey unfairly taken from his tenants, or just the lack of it at times.
Rule 117: Never read Brust on an empty stomach.
Growing up, I had not the faintest idea what Turkish Delight actually was. (If I think back, I think I was envisioning it as kind of like those meringue cookies or something?) Fast forward to my mid-20s — I’m now living in the big city and slowly broadening my culinary horizons. I stop in Bill’s Imported Foods, a local, primarily Greek/Middle Eastern market, in search of some spices, and lo and behold, on the shelf they have boxes of Turkish Delight!
So I buy myself a box of the rosewater-flavored sort (that seeming the most exotic), take it home, and find that Turkish Delight (at least in this context) is little cubes of gel candy liberally dusted with powdered sugar. And the rosewater flavoring is … interesting; certainly not like anything I’d ever tasted before.
Long story short, I didn’t hate it the way some folks do, but it didn’t really become one of my staples either; and I remember that when I’d bring a box to work or to a friend’s house, I’d end up bringing most of it home with me.
There are two main things to know about Turkish Delight in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. One is that Turkish Delight (rose and lemon, dusted with powdered sugar and packed in a fancy wooden box) is one of many luxury sweets traditionally eaten at Christmas in Britain, but not seen much during the rest of the year. The other is that the book came out in 1950, when sweets had been rationed (8 oz/month) since the beginning of the war, so most of the children reading it had probably never seen Turkish Delight either. Genuine fantasy food!
track down a copy of “NANNY OGG’S COOKBOOK. , which also includes includes “Notes on Etiquette” and ” Good advice for Young People”. The recipes range from Nobby’s mum’s Destressed Pudding, through C.M.O.T.’s Sausage inna Bun, and Lord Downey’s (head of the Assassins Guild ) Mint Humbugs with NO arsenic.
Aplets and Cotlets! Yes!
mndrew@5 glanced at it, but I want to note specifically Steven Brust’s novel Dzur, which has as its framing story a meal taken at a superb restaurant, with truly mouth-watering descriptions of gourmet Hungarian cuisine.
How about a mention of Tolkien’s lembas? We were never given much description of its taste, beyond that someone taking their first taste immediately gobbled down the rest of the serving – and was then told that he’d eaten a whole day’s ration, it was so nourishing. When I was a kid I ate Triscuits and pretended they were lembas, but I bet the real thing was much better. And of course herbs, potatoes, and stewed rabbit are important in a chapter later on.
I disagree about Aplets and Cotlets — I have always found them incredibly boring. Actual lokoum I usually like, especially with nuts, though too much rosewater gets to me (I prefer orange-flower water).
Jack Vance was a whiz at describing foodways in his SFF fiction, usually employing such descriptions to quickly sketch cultural differences, and often to hilarious effect. From The Killing Machine:
S.M. Stirling bestrews his Emberverse series, as well as his Islandverse series, with scenes of people eating, talking about, or thinking about food. A random sample:
Emberverse: The scene is a post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest community self-consciously patterned after a (Victorian Celtic Twilight imagining of a) Celtic dun; people are wandering by with bows and dogs and kilts, and then the viewpoint character smells pizza cooking
Emberverse: People are discussing how they made it through; one couple says ruefully that they had been making a good profit charging a premium for organic free-range eggs, and now that’s the only kind you can get–when the hens are laying…
Islandverse: The first and last scenes of the first book feature the scent of fish and chips
Islandverse: To show that they are cutting-edge thinkers, two rulers born in the Bronze Age share a meal of roasted chicken and chocolate cake while they discuss how to deal with the time travelers who brought them the recipes and ingredients
Emberverse: People who are farming like hell (and most of them for the first time in their lives) on meals of vinegary wild green salad and tiny bread rolls find themselves subject to a particular form of self- and other-torture: uncontrollable fantasies of the food they were able to enjoy just a couple of months ago, before the Apocalypse, which they must now verbalize to everybody else at the table–it hits somebody different every day
Emberverse: The same group at their first harvest, really understanding why a huge table covered in food is so important at this time of year, even when it’s about half potato dishes
Emberverse: Even facing starvation, some people would rather leave the lima beans behind in the RV…
The Redwall books do an amazing job of getting you hungry over food dishes that if you really stop and think about them would probably not be good, being made out of all vegetables and things like grass and such. But Brian Jacques was a master of description and and made the food so ENTICING that it was really difficult to read his feast scenes without wanting to go have a snack.
I always imagined lembas to be like butter shortbread cookies, but with longer shelf life. I may have been swayed by the movies.
I am always surprised that primitive or basic breads in many many books have risen / baked breads as the staple. Surely it makes more sense that the first, most basic and easier breads when means and/or times are limited are flatbreads, and not somthing that waiting times and ovens!
…as a baker and lover of cornbread, I now have to go try to make some Broa. Also, I was always intrigued by the obsession with “klah” in the Pern stories, reading them at a time in my younger life when I hated coffee.
One of my first disappointments when reading “The Name of the Wind” was coming across “modern” delicacies such as chocolate or coffee in a Western medieval fantasy setting.
Whatever about describing food that is appropriate to the world in question, inappropriate culinary allusions can really spoil the mood. Take this example from ‘Bloodstone’. Kane the immortal swordsman has a rendezvous with an equally ageless sorceress.
She laughed an uncanny, high-pitched laugh. “Kane…you’re a total loss as a lover. Do you always tell your ladies that the years you’ve spent away from their presence have passed like days?” Her wide silver eyes appraised him in frank curiosity, the black, vertical pupils almost circular in the darkened room. ‘You seem unchanged to me, Kane,” she judged. ‘But then you always look the same – just like my shadow servants here. Come…sit beside me and tell me what things you’ve seen. I’ve already had the wine and hors d’oeuvres set out.”
Hors d’oeuvres?
@18: Ha ha! That reminds me! The despotic leaders of one of the factions in the post-apocalyptic Emberverse have gone whole-hog medieval, right down to the pointy hats. This is partly because their force of arms is medieval weaponry (the series starts out as an expansion on “The Waveries,” with some cosmic force making high-energy technology Just Plain Not Work in Earth’s habitable layer), partly because they are welding together a disparate bunch of survivors who are desperate for something more than the scraps left behind when everybody else died or was killed…and partly because they used to be a sociopathic history professor and his differently sociopathic wife. So in the midst of their elaborate social construct of precedence and fealty, they still have occasions when they and their mostly-former-gang-leader barons stand around in their nicest clothes, holding little plates of appetizers and talking.
One of my first disappointments when reading “The Name of the Wind” was coming across “modern” delicacies such as chocolate or coffee in a Western medieval fantasy setting.
I can’t understand this, to be honest. The Name of the Wind isn’t set in the middle ages and it isn’t set in Europe. It’s set in a made-up world, and chocolate and coffee are no more out of place there than roses and turnips (or indeed horses and men). And I’d argue that coffee wouldn’t necessarily be out of place even in a novel that’s actually set in late-mediaeval Europe; it grows in Africa, and was being drunk in the Islamic world before the end of the middle ages. It wasn’t drunk in Europe but that seems to be just because no one liked it; if you really wanted to have a coffee-drinking character in mediaeval Florence you could have one, though your should probably include some line about how he imports it from Cairo or something.
Tolkien had potatoes in Middle Earth. I reckon coffee in a made-up fantasy world is fine.
. In the Victorian era—or really any time before the mid-20th century—a bounty of juicy, ripe fruits like those offered by the goblins would defy geography, seasons, and preservation methods. No wonder such a meal is an infernally tempting event.
Not really. Reminder that the Brontes, in their rectory in rural Yorkshire in the early 19th century, could expect to buy fresh oranges, lemons and limes in their local market. You can export fruit for long distances, even without refrigeration, even with only sailing ships to move it – or you could grow them under glass (many stately homes had orangeries). At the start of the 20th century, reefer ships were carrying bananas and other highly perishable tropical fruit from the Caribbean to the UK.
The world was incredibly global in the years before 1914 – certainly it was if you lived in Britain.
@9: David_Gordfarb
And of course herbs, potatoes, and stewed rabbit are important in a chapter later on.
Yes, but I am annoyed every time I read it that after all the time and effort Sam expends to tempt Frodo’s palate and get some nourishment into him, that instead they are taken by Faramir’s men before they can actually taste it!
@17 Chocolate came over to Europe in the 16th century, coffee as well. Pope Clement VIII blessed coffee as a drink (originally Muslim) appropriate for Christians around 1600. It’s not an anachronism, it’s just not really common knowledge. Of course, chocolate was created by the Maya by 400 AD at the latest.
@13 Redwall is what I came here to say. I loved those recipes as a kid, absolutely mouthwatering. Those feast scenes are indelibly stuck in my mind.
Just as a quick note: in the Pike Place Market in Seattle, there’s a little restaurant called Turkish Delight, that sells MANY flavors of Turkish Delight, as well as a lot of other food. Flavors include Rose, lemon, orange, strawberry, mango, peach and lychee.
Also, I always liked that the Leaves From the Inn of the Last Home included a woodchuck stew that included instructions on how to clean the dead woodchuck.
That said, Mercedes Lackey books usually include food. I like to read them while I eat.
The food detail from the Emberverse that stayed with me is the community in the North, where “banana” and “orange” and so on are just words now.
Jack Vance was a master at describing … very bad food. From “The Face”:
Girsen and Rackrose gingerly addressed themselves to the food. After a few moments Rackrose said: “I can’t decide what tastes worst. The chatowsies are fetid, but the ahagaree is ferocious. The pourrian is merely vile. And the lady seems to have washed her dog in the beer … What? Are you eating more?”
@26: The one where Hot Pockets have returned to their roots, as homemade items that are frozen for winter by burying them in the snow outside?
“Chocolate came over to Europe in the 16th century, coffee as well. Pope Clement VIII blessed coffee as a drink (originally Muslim) appropriate for Christians around 1600. It’s not an anachronism, it’s just not really common knowledge.”
Absolutely – a real nitpicker, though, would say that that isn’t quite mediaeval because the Middle Ages are generally defined as stopping in 1485 or 1492…
David Drake’s space stories (RCN series) have people eating grits and bacon which is interesting (betraying his own preferences?) compared with the bizarrely named “handwiches” (I believe) from the Sharon Lee/Steve Miller Liaden universe. David Eddings’ semi-divine characters seemed to dislik pork but favour goat milk.
I tried many times to make Pernese klah. Finding an interview where Anne McCaffrey said it was essentially hazelnut coffee felt like a letdown. I melted so many chocolate chips, and I could have just hit up a Starbucks?
srEDIT@22: Not sure what you mean by “they are taken by Faramir’s men before they can actually taste it!”
“Sam and his master sat just within the fern-brake and ate their stew from the pans, sharing the old fork and spoon. They allowed themselves half a piece of the Elvish waybread each. It seemed a feast. … They finished, and Sam went off to the stream to rinse his gear.”
It’s after that that he notices his fire smoking, hears the whistle, etc. Are you perhaps thinking of the movie? I can’t remember how it goes there, but adventure movies are notorious for not letting people get anything to eat.
I tried the Turkish Delight from the store that comes in the wrapper, and didn’t even finish it. I couldn’t believe what an idiot Edmund had to be to sell out for that. But then I found some of the good kind on vacation in Carmel in California at the Cottage of Sweets and decided my judgment of Edmund had been premature.
I googled it and found it here: https://store.cottageofsweets.com/turkish-delight . In retrospect I shouldn’t have looked it up online; now that I know you can buy this without going on vacation first I may have an issue similar to https://xkcd.com/418/
Food, cuisine, and taverns are such useful props they get used even with characters who shouldn’t need to eat: robots.
In the Blue Sky movie Robots (2005) oil is relaxing and refreshing, and it’s shown being taken internally and poured over one’s head.
The Transformers (1984) starts with machine/alien imagery of “recharging slabs” and Megatron absorbing energon cubes directly through his chest-plate, but progresses to more organic imagery: Insecticons nibbling at cubes (to emphasize the locust simile), sipping from energon cubes and thereby “over-energizing” (i.e., passing out drunk), “energon goodies” that resemble sticks of gum, low-quality stuff that “always gives me the surges”, and so forth. The IDW comics (2005-2018) have several characters running taverns and serving fancy drinks, even if we don’t understand how energon and “engex” can have different formulations or what physiological-emotional effect they have on imbibers.