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.
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.
Thanks Beth! I’ll be checking out your blog. And I appreciate food details in books too. I’m trying to create some recipes for Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere books. He does not linger on food details in the way Robert Jordan or GRRM. Though honestly some of the food GRRM describes makes me sick.
One thing I have to remember about Turkish Delight is that Edmund was in war rationed Briton. The poor kid had not enjoyed much sugar in probably years. So it made him wish for the food. Yet when I tasted it, like you, I was deeply disappointed.
My grandmother was a child in England during world war 2 (she would have been a similar age to Edmund). Turkish delight was a favourite of hers throughout her life – no one else in the family liked it. I was never sure whether she asked for it because it truly was a favourite or because she knew she wouldn’t have to share it with the rest of the family!
Obviously somebody likes Turkish Delight or they wouldn’t sell it. Maybe it’s an acquired taste.
Re Turkish Delight: I seem to remember reading that even C. S. Lewis didn’t like it. The point was, Englash was at war, there were food rations, so plain old sugar was hard to come by, let alone sweets. So Edward, a child, craves this treat he probably had once in his short life.
Again, not my idea, something I read somewhere –maybe Laura Miller’s book on Lewis?
When I asked my mom was Turkish Delight was, she replied that that was another name for Applets and Cotlets and I was SO disappointed. They’re like the local (Washington State) fruitcake at holiday times: no one like them, but still they persist. I swear we had a box in the pantry for YEARS that someone had given us.
Huh. Well, at least Applets and Cotlets are fruit-flavored (apple and apricot, for those who are unfamiliar). Real Turkish Delight is rose-flavored, and rose is definitely an acquired taste in Western culture.
In Margaret St Clair’s “The Shadow People”, her creepy, anthropophagous elves would set out plates of hallucinogenic ‘attercorn’ for hungry victims to eat.
The first time I had Turkish delight was years ago when I stopped for the first time in a nearby Greek grocery store and came home with a box of the rose-flavored kind. I … didn’t hate it? But it’s never been a pantry staple or anything, despite the fact that I have a pretty substantial sweet tooth and am partial to jellied cube-style candies of all sorts.
Broa is amazing, and now I want to bake some! I’m glad you’ve tried it ;o)
Food is also tricky when people don’t know what you’re talking about. You had to explain broa, above.
Some days, I don’t mind stopping the story to look up what something is, or I’ll pass over it. Other days, it’s an annoying distraction unless the author drops a hint or two to let us keep going, like mentioning a strong rye smell in the broa or something.
And then there are things that took me years to understand, like this passage from Shakespeare:
“civil, Count, civil as an orange / and something of that jealous complexion”
because in Shakespeare’s day, people were orange with envy, not green – and there was ths thing called Seville oranges known for their bitterness.
One author who uses food a lot is Steven Brust and every time I re-read his books, I get a hankering to try all of the food his characters make and/or eat, whether it’s Vlad’s meals in Dragaera or Billy’s meals in Cowboy Feng’s Bar and Grille (especially the latter’s matzo ball soup).
– – –
And now I’m hungry.
@5, I grew up in Washington and am very familiar with Applets and Cotlets. In my experience though they don’t sit in the pantry forever – the problem in my family is that as soon as a box gets opened they disappear, so if you don’t move quickly you will miss out.
Fry’s Turkish Delight is probably more appealing to the typical British or American palate than the real thing!
I would love to see a cookbook from Steven Brust’s “Vlad” series! Brust infuses his books with “Easterner” (Hungarian) flavor to the extent of making me (in no way a chef) want to try creating the dishes on which he lovingly lingers. All I lack is the recipes.
I mentioned this the last time the subject came up, but in Istanbul I saw (and visited) whole shops devoted to Turkish delight in a wide variety of flavors. I didn’t think to ask whether that was traditional, or a touristy modern development. I’m pretty sure there are more original flavors than rose, though.
As to the substance itself–it got/gets eaten when available, but I don’t go out of my way to look for it. But then I’m not a candy person (chocolate is food, not candy). Speaking of that, Turkish delight also comes dipped in chocolate, although my impression is that’s a British variant.
I recently picked up the first volume of the manga “Dungeon Meshi”, “Delicious in Dungeon” in English. The central trope is that the adventurers, in order to successfully Dungeon Delve, start cooking and eating the monsters.
I have enjoyed trying different Harry Potter foods. Pumpkin juice was, in my opinion, quite nasty. I even tried the Starbucks equivalent of Butterbeer and enjoyed it, though I found it too sweet for an everyday indulgence. I was shocked to discover that pumpkin pasties (once I found out what a pasty is) are savory. But the recipe in the Potter cookbook is very yummy; I’ll likely eat them again some time.
For my Coming of Age this year, I’m having a hobbit-style party and an excited to try my hand at a few never-before-attempted (-by-me) hobbit foods, like seed cakes.
I love fantasy food and it’s fun to imagine. Don’t you just think that lembas would be fun to try?
You will take my Turkish Delight from my cold dead hands! I love it, and I am not at all apologetic over it, I can completely understand why Edmund would be dying for some. It is, however, a “sometimes” food and not an “all the time” food though. I think having it in great quantities all the time would be quite sick making, but it is a staple of Christmas and Easter gifts and family meet ups with my family.
@11: It seemed like most of the people I know in WA have very strong negative feelings around Applets and Cotlets, with only a few that love them. Perhaps they’re just a polarizing dessert: you love them or you hate them (and I by chance have mostly met the latter).
There’s a store in Pike Place Market called Turkish Delight that does Persian food and a LOT of flavors of Turkish Delight, including lychee, orange, pistachio, strawberry, rose, and a bunch of others that are lovely. They’re like Aplets & Cotlets but without the nuts. Yum.
Side note not quite off topic: There are some authors you should never read on an empty stomach. Brust comes to mind.
Pretty sure lemon, at least, is as authentic as rose.
But it’s worth noting here that Turkish Delight comes in four kinds, three I think available in Lewis’ time.
There’s the traditional kind, with firm not-too-sweet gel and a light dusting of sugar, often containing nuts. This is probably what Lewis was thinking of.
There’s the more mass market version, a softer, sweeter gel smothered in icing sugar. There’s Fry’s, a firm sweet gel covered in chocolate, my personal favourite.
And then there’s the modern attempt by some chocolatiers to cash in on childhood nostalgia for Fry’s while seeming posher and more grown up. This is typically a small amount of very soft, very sweet gel, covered in a lot of expensive chocolate.
I love stories with food in them. I don’t get the love of Turkish Delight either when I was kid I thought is was a kind of Toffee .
The Redwall series always had great descriptions of food in them because the author Brian Jacques made an effort to add them. He said he found it odd fantasy novels never talked about food or characters eating. I like cookbooks associated with various series I’ve read. Star Wars, DS9, Doctor Who and the SFWA have cookbooks too. I enjoyed the Outlander one too.
I’ll have to check out your Blog too. Now I want to go bake something.
I actually like Applets and Cotlets, but only certain flavors and it has to be fresh. Their Turkish delight is okay, better than most I’ve had in the US, but nothing like what can be bought in/from the Middle East. Most Turkish delight available in the US is vile.