Yes pastry, no nug: Dragon Age food you can actually cook

Food and culture are inseparable. Here in the US that’s perhaps more noticeable during this week than at any other time of the year, as tens of millions of us plan to break bread together in observance of Thanksgiving. But I’ve spent most of a decade considering it in the context of a culture that doesn’t actually exist: Thedas, the setting of BioWare’s Dragon Age franchise.

I’ve been part of a devoted Dragon Age tabletop campaign since 2015. Our group has spent days on Discord discussing ultimately made-up questions that still echo real life. Where does rice come from? (Antiva, because it’s far enough north to have the tropical mix of wet and dry seasons you need to grow it.) Can you have lemonade in Denerim? (Yes, but the lemons are imported from Rivain, which is temperate enough to grow citrus and friendly enough to trade with, and it’s sweetened with honey, not sugar.) How expensive is chocolate? (Very — the most suitable climates for growing cocoa beans are in semi-hostile Tevinter or Qunari territory.)

This isn’t just nerdy pedantry. Food is how we come together, but it is also where we find our differences. Food traditions speak our stories to one another. Does your Thanksgiving table have squash on it? What about ham, macaroni and cheese, or tamales? Is your turkey brined, deep-fried, or made of tofu?

If you want to make an imagined world feel real, you need to think about its food.

BioWare, too, has now given some detailed thought to these questions, in an official Dragon Age cookbook. The book, which hit store shelves in October, is full of the kind of recipes you might expect from a franchise tie-in, featuring a mix of foods that are directly mentioned in the video games together with foods that feel like they might as well be.

But it’s not Dragon Age without a strong narrative through-line. To that end, the book is narrated by a new character, Devon, who features both in an introduction as well as in all the blurbs heading up each recipe. Devon is the child of Nan, a minor character from the human noble origin in Dragon Age: Origins who worked as Castle Cousland’s cook. Devon travels Thedas, following in the footsteps of the games’ heroes and villains and eating their way around the world.

“Food is a very interesting way of establishing details about a world, and in a very subtle way,” the author behind Devon, Jessie Hassett, said in a phone interview. “A particular dish that you choose to include in your fantasy world can say a lot about that world.”

Writing the blurbs was like having an opportunity to write “canon fanfiction,” Hassett said, and that meant staying true to characters and cultures that have