ecosophia | Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back To The Kitchen...

Since before the final volumes of The Weird of Hali saw print, I've had people asking me about the recipes for some of the dishes that are cooked and served by characters in the novels. (No, nobody's asked about Owen Merrill's cheap college meal of dollar store ramen, frozen vegetables, and a sliced hot dog, but that one's pretty self-explanatory.) One of the basic rules of the writing trade is that you pay attention to what your readers want to hear about, and so once the novels themselves were done, I considered the possibility of a cookbook.

Fortunately I had help. Characters are a novelist's imaginary friends -- well, at least mine are -- and so it was the easiest thing in the world to hand over the project to Brecken Kendall, the protagonist of The Shoggoth Concerto and The Nyogtha Variations, who loves to cook when she's not pursuing her career as a composer of neo-Baroque music. She duly dictated a cookbook which contains most of the dishes featured in my tentacle novels, from cheese polenta all the way to exotica such as authentic pirate salmagundi (she got the recipe for that from Toby Gilman, of course).

I should probably mention that all the recipes in this book are real, and none calls for ingredients you can't get this side of the plateau of Leng. Since Brecken and I share the conviction that food should be cheap, tasty, filling, and not especially complicated to make, this is also not the kind of cookbook that's meant to permit members of the overprivileged classes to show off how much money and leisure they have by wasting a lot of both turning out desperately precious yuppie chow. It's geared toward people (like Brecken, and in my younger days, me) who don't have a lot of money or a lot of time to spare, and still want to eat well.

So if you're wondering what to feed the shoggoth who's unexpectedly shown up in your kitchenette, or simply want to have plenty of tasty meals to serve and eat while you're waiting for Great Cthulhu to rise from the sea, here you go. The current release date is August 18, and you can order your copy in advance here.

Current Mood: hungry

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

snaegl

I have a great weakness for fictional cookbooks...looking forward to this one! (Any chance octopus makes an appearance? Or would that be frowned upon given that the tentacled ones are the good guys?)

From:

ecosophia

The Innsmouth seafood chowder recipe can include any kind of seafood, including octopus -- it all depends on what you can get from your Deep One neighbors!

From:

cutekitten

I don’t remember the title or authors, but some years ago two Game of Thrones fans worked up recipes for EVERY SINGLE DISH mentioned in the books, and published a cookbook.

What with bug-eating becoming fashionable, I should try to come up with a recipe for Mrs. General Nuisance ‘s fried grasshopper seasoning. It could be the next American food fad! The big thing right now seems to be sea salt and kosher salt. I know sea salt has magical properties , but I’ve been cooking with plain old Morton for about 45 years and it seems fine. (My Church has always used whatever salt is available to make holy water.). Is there any culinary reason for using sea salt, or is it just the current fashion?

From:

ecosophia

I dunno. Sara and I use uniodized sea salt because (a) she gets sick when she eats too much iodine, and (b) I like the effect the micronutrients have on my health -- sea salt contains more than just plain old sodium chloride.

But the fried grasshopper seasoning sounds good. I've had fried grasshhoppers -- they were kind of like potato chips.

From:

jpc2

Fried Scorpions taste like canned shoestring potatoes. Had some in Beijing years ago. Only got to have two of the farm raised things.

John - Coop Janitor

From:

cutekitten

I kind of like the canned shoestring potatoes, although I haven’t seen them for years. Around here, at least, you see cans of fried onions and of fried chow mein noodles instead.

From:

cutekitten

The only problem is the drumsticks are too small.

I’ll try sea salt next time we need a can of salt.

From: (Anonymous)

Great stuff! I was asking myself what pirate salmagundi might be since I read A Voyage to Hyperborea. Really looking forward to this one 🙂

Greetings,
Nachtgurke

From:

ecosophia

It's really good. I've come to think that some sailors chose a life of piracy because the food was so much better!

From:

degringolade

You know, Salmagundi was the only food that intrigued me in your whole series, All the rest I can wing. Maybe, just maybe, as a advertising teaser' you could publish it here to get use consumers interested in buying your book.

(as a disclaimer, I am just fishing for a free recipe, as I currently own eighteen of your books and I am considered a good cook, I do not need another damn cookbook in my kitchen bookshelf) but your description did intrigue me and all the recipes on the web left me cold)

From:

ecosophia

Nope. If I agreed to your request, I'd have people asking for other recipes, too. Remember that you don't have to put this bok in your kitchen. ;-)

From:

cutekitten

I thought Salma Gundi was a movie star. 😳😊

From: (Anonymous)

Worth trying. But only the Kindle version.

From: (Anonymous)

The only two dishes from the Weird of Hali that I remember are cheese polenta and the salmagundi. Cheese polenta from sheer repetition, and the pirate salmagundi as the only dish I couldn't imagine actually eating.

So if you gave away the salmagundi recipe for free I wouldn't want the book nearly as much :)

I'll also say that I've never wished so much for a fictional thing to be real (including my Moosecarbuncles acceptance letter at age 11) as shoggoths - in relation to human society they fill the same ecological niches as rats, racoons, roaches and ants, and probably eat bed bugs too, and yet they respect personal boundaries and you can have a conversation with one.

From:

ritaer

Are you familiar with British writer Angela Carter's review of Lovecraft, "The Hidden Child"? It was originally published in _New Society_ in 1975 and reprinted in _Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings_ Penguin, 1977. She comments that in horror fiction of this type: "Evil _is_ . . . It is not what men _do_. Evil is an abstraction, something like mathematics. It may be studied in arcane law. It can concretize and become objective, like a theorem; then an unfortunate can accidently stumble on it." And, "Some of the consolatory quality of the tale of supernatural terror lies in this; that it removes evil from the realm of human practice and gives it the status of a visitation from another realm of being. It is an affliction It is a possession." She is also rather amusing on the resemblance between the squamous products of evil in Lovecraftian mythos and the products of male sexual excitement, referring to the old Dutch family in "The Lurking Fear" as having "reverted to their own seminal fluid in three generations." On the lack of truly erotic elements she remarks on the lack of nubile women and remarks: "Fond as he [Lovecraft] was of tentacles, he never--being a fine, old-fashioned, New England gentleman--allowed them to sully the flesh of a white woman."

Just happened across this and thought you and other readers might enjoy.

Rita

From:

ecosophia

Funny -- especially given that it was written by the author of Heroes and Villains. (If you're not familiar with it, that's the archetypal 1970s postapocalyptic schlockfest in which civilized heroine gets raped by savage tribal leader, falls in love with him, and bears his child...)

From:

cutekitten

And by that late date she should have been aware that Lovecraft sullied the white flesh of Mrs. Lovecraft, and that to the end of her days, Mrs. Lovecraft stated she enjoyed the sullying.

I’ve been sullied myself now and then. I need a T-shirt: I GOT SULLIED AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS SHIRT AND A VERY LARGE SONKITTEN. (If Sonkitten were an actual cat, he’d be one of those 25-pound Maine Coon tomcats that overhang the edges of their pictures , where their owners are gamely struggling to hold them up.)

From: (Anonymous)

This is hilarious!

-Dylan

From:

claire_58

Please tell me it will be spiral bound!

From:

ecosophia

I'm sorry to say, no, it'll be ordinary paperback binding. If there are still copy shops where you live, however, you can take it there, have them trim off the bound edge, punch the pages, and put in a spiral binding for a few bucks.

From: (Anonymous)

Does it contain any discussion of de-industrial cooking methods like woodfire or rocket stoves, hayboxes, and solar cookers?

From:

ecosophia

Nope. Those didn't feature in the stories, so I saved that for a future deindustrial cookbook.

From: (Anonymous)

Put me down as a reader who wants one of those books

From: (Anonymous)

And the authorial credits on the cover are great :D

"Brecken Kendall... edited by John Michael Greer"

- Cicada Grove

From:

ecosophia

I couldn't resist. ;-)

From:

cutekitten

Just wait till he and Brecken start arguing about who gets paid for it.

From: (Anonymous)

That's a fantastic cover.

Jon

From:

ecosophia

I was very happy with it. Generally the Haliverse covers have been great.

From:

degringolade

The covers are great. Except for the Seal of Yueh Lao. I still can't figure that one out.

From: (Anonymous)

Actually, every time I come across Owens ramen I remember that I should by decent soy-sauce again, having misplaced mine during a move.
I really hope it's got the sauces that the Innsmouth fishdishes are dipped in, these made me curious.
Btw: I really enjoyed how you tried to describe the insulting coffee in the barque with every time a new phrase!
Another btw: I'm hoping that the salmagundi has ginger, because the one and only time I went in a live roleplaying sailingtrip (lots of pirates and other half-squids) they had a curry with ginger as first meal because it's supposed to help with sea-sickness, which for me it did.

Emily07