Anyone who has spent a lot of time in the fantasy video-game world of The Elder Scrolls will have wondered what some of the food and drink on the tables of Balmora, Skingrad and Whiterun would actually taste like in real life. How do kwama eggs taste, or horker meat? Why are slaughterfish and mudcrabs staples of a Tamriel diet? What about the meads served at Jorrvaskr in Whiterun or the Thirsk mead hall in Solstheim? What is it about skooma and moon-sugar that turns Khajiit from pussycats into ravenous tigers? How did the meme-ascendant sweetroll become so ubiquitous as an ice-breaker between the guards of Whiterun and milk-drinkers? For my part, I've always wanted to know what snowberries might taste like when plucked fresh from the snow-swept peaks at the Throat of the World.

Of course, in the real world you can't raid a Morrowind kwama mine to gather some eggs from the queen (picking up an unlikely ebony cuirass from a sunken chest along the way), or scout along the northern coast near Winterhold to pick off horkers as they lounge in the icy surf of the Sea of Ghosts. But what Chelsea Monroe-Cassel has done in her official Elder Scrolls cookbook is take inspiration from Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim (mainly Skyrim) to create real-world facsimiles, many of which look appealingly simple even to a lazy n'wah like myself, who is as hopeless in the kitchen as Lydia is when she's stood in a doorway.

From simple recipes like braided bread and mudcrab dip to snowberry crostatas, kwama egg quiche and the ambitious horker loaf, this is an impressive achievement by Monroe-Cassel. There are of course a lot of obvious, regular substitutes for the fantastical meals (normal crab meat for mudcrab, fish for slaughterfish, eggs for kwama eggs, etc.) but some, like skooma and the horker loaf, require an effort of creativity that Monroe-Cassel meets surprisingly well. There are, naturally, some minor disappointments: for all the varieties of mead, I still don't know how sujamma from Morrowind tastes, whilst snowberries, which I always imagined as tasting ice-cold but with a zesty kick, are basically just cranberries.

That said, the book manages to be impressively diverse whilst remaining accessible and reasonable (thankfully, skeever recipes are absent, and eating a Daedra heart might be going too far, had it been included). It's not my area, but I don't see why this book couldn't be a respectable addition to the recipe-book genre, fantasy trappings or not. (I'm still awaiting the mead-hall start-up in the restaurant industry.) With this storied tome in front of you, and mortar and pestle to hand, there's plenty of opportunity to craft Restore Health and Regenerate Stamina concoctions. Fortify Magicka effects are unconfirmed, perhaps for legal reasons. ( )