Category: recipes

The past few weeks, I’ve been playing a lot of Fallout 4. It started out as an excuse to boom headshot slavers and raiders, but then I got into the settlement system.

Like.

Way into the settlement system.

If architecture is politics, then my Sole Survivor’s “wherever we go, we build a common house, a shared kitchen, a garden, a library, a place to drink, and a place to dance” is my own socialism in stone (well, in concrete, wood, and metal). My imagination exploded unbidden, conjuring emerald cities from grains of wasteland sand and the Minutemen reformed into something like a bastard cross between a Roman legion and the Civilian Conservation Corps, a force proud to “eat Super Mutants and shit roads.” Each Minuteman armed not just with a laser musket, but a flare gun and a shovel. As they plant gardens, lay rail tracks, dig wells, and clear out ghoul nests, they’d need something to eat.

And I thought about how all my Fallout characters enjoy mirelurk cakes (despite how many of them keep kosher) and the intriguing fruits of the in-game cook stations…some of which, despite my best efforts, I wanted to try. After retaking the Castle from the sea monster and declaring a clam cake jamboree the likes of which Boston has never seen to celebrate, I knew what I had to do.

Hence, the “shovelhead supper,” “the dinner that beat the Brotherhood of Steel.” Mirelurk cakes, shipped from Boston alongside the Gwinnett stout, razorgrain grill biscuits, and vegetable stew from whatever gardens and farms you just helped plant, protect, and harvest.

With Melissa’s (very bemused, non-gamer) friend flew in for dinner, I kind of had to. Just for the look on her face.

Without further ado, your own shovelhead supper – and I’m listing these in order of preparation, so the mirelurk cakes (and homemade aioli) themselves come at the end.

This meal comes in five parts, so if you’d like to jump to the individual recipes, here they are in order of preparation:

• Razorgrain biscuits
• Vegetable soup
• Homemade mayonnaise
• Mirelurk cakes
• Homemade aioli

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Razorgrain Biscuits

(Although they don’t show up in Fallout 4’s cook-stations and campfires, something like these have to exist, since you can also make noodle soup and dumplings. There’s razorgrain, there’s water, there’s sourdough starters, there’s Dutch ovens and cast iron pans, somebody in the Commonwealth has made biscuits! Next time, might experiment with sourdough stout biscuits for lore reasons – after all, the Double Eight Flyer from Vault 88 station brings in razorgrain and Gwinnett stout every morning at 5am, might as well make use.)

Ingredients

• One cup flour
• 1 ½ teaspoon baking powder (this is the cheat – although by the time the rails extend all the way to the Capital Wasteland, the Commonwealth might have chemical plants up and running to manufacture the stuff)
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons oil
• 1/3 can of Guinness stout
• Juice of one lemon (or equivalent amount vinegar)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 450*.
2. In large glass bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, salt, oil, stout, and lemon juice/vinegar until just combined. Not too mixed or the results will be dense.
3. Spread flour on flat surface, pour out dough, sprinkle more flour on top, fold. Do this a few times. Don’t work the dough too much.
4. Lay down greasepaper on an oven pan and drop palmfuls of dough onto it.
5. Bake for about twenty minutes or until they start to brown.

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Vegetable Soup

(Cheap, plentiful, simple. Even Melissa’s non-gamer friend agreed this restores +55 HP. In game, just some dirty water, tatos, and corn, and you’re good to go. I’ve subbed in canned tomatoes for the “tato” fruits, but if you wanna smash your own garden tomatoes you go right on ahead.)

(Special thanks to the Unofficial Vault Cookbook for this recipe)

Ingredients

• Five medium carrots, diced
• One large onion, diced
• Three stalks celery, diced
• Three to six cloves garlic, minced
• Two cups vegetable broth (or “dirty water”)
• Two cans tomatoes
• Two to three corn cobs
• Mixed mushrooms (glowing mushrooms and brain fungus, if you can find them)
• Three medium potatoes, diced in half-inch or one-inch dice
• Italian seasoning mix and one bay leaf (my substitute for “scrub plant”)
• Salt
• Pepper (or minced peppers)

Method

1. Set your mise en scene and start chopping vegetables. Work with a buddy. Have a glass. Sing. You’ll be here awhile.
2. Special note: Shuck the corn, chop off the ends, cut the cob into two-to-three inch sections, and carve the corn off the cob in chunks – you should get four or five flattish chunks of corn from each section, as well as a bunch of loose kernels.
3. Once all the vegetables are chopped, set a Dutch oven or stew pot on the burner and heat some cooking oil.
4. When the oil is hot, throw in the onion, carrot, celery, and mushrooms. As the onions are turning translucent, add the garlic.
5. About a minute after you’ve added the garlic, pour in the vegetable broth, tomatoes (liquid included), corn kernels and chunks, and potatoes.
6. Add the seasonings and bay leaf.
7. Let boil, bring down to a simmer. Taste every ten minutes, adding salt and pepper as needed. Should be done in forty minutes to an hour.

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Homemade Mayonnaise

(I made homemade both for lore reasons [have you ever seen butter or mayo anywhere in the Wasteland? Thought not!] and because homemade mayonnaise is simple to make and inexplicably impressive to guests. This is probably close to what “Marjorie” makes.)

Ingredients

• two large eggs
• one cup oil, as neutral as possible (in-game, I imagine this is one of the edible gun-cleaning oils [that actually exist!], I used canola)
• juice of one lemon (or equivalent amount of white vinegar)
• sea salt

Method

1. Set your mise en scene – then leave it for half an hour. Seriously, you want everything room temperature for this.
2. Separate the yolk for one of the eggs and deposit in large glass mixing bowl, along with the whole other egg.
3. Add in the acid (either the vinegar or lemon juice) and a sprinkle of sea salt. Mix well.
4. Keep mixing for your life, add the oil in drop.
5. By.
6. Drop.
7. Make sure the oil mixes in and does not separate.
8. When the mayonnaise forms ribbons behind your spoon/spatula, stop adding oil. If you’ve made this ahead of time, go ahead and refrigerate it for a bit – it’ll last for three days in there.

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Mirelurk Cakes

(the piece de resistance of the Minutemen’s main meal, as literally adapted from the Fallout 3 easter egg in Anchorage Memorial.)

1 bucket mirelurk meat
12 eggs, mixed up
1 loaf bread, stale and crumbled
1 bottle mayonnaise (see Marjorie for mayo)
1 branch scrub plant, dried and crushed
2 fists of salt
Oil (for pan)

Remove any shell from mirelurk. In bucket, toss together bread, egg, scrub and mayo until moistened, but do not over mix. Add any available spices for taste

Ball up 25-30 cakes, 1/2 to 3/4 inches thick. Place in freezer until they firm up. Sprinkle batch with salt.

In a heavy pan, fry cakes in oil, turning once until both sides are brown

The original fallout 3 recipe

Ingredients

• Two or three cans clam meat (shells and bullets removed)
• Cooking oil
• Green onions and thyme (or whatever local herbs are available)
• One large egg (chicken will do in a pinch)
• Sea salt
• One or two slices sourdough bread, crumbled (when we make this again, we’re making the biscuits ahead of time and crumbling one or two of them in for additional authenticity)
• Pepper (or carefully minced peppers)
• Mayonnaise

Method

1. Set out mise en scene, make the mayonnaise, crumble the bread, mince the green onions.
2. In a large bowl, crack the egg, add pepper, salt, green onions, half the crumbs, and 1/3 cup mayonnaise.
3. Drain the crab meat and toss it in. Mix, but not too well – you want a little bit of everything in each bite, not a homogenous mass. If it’s too dry, add in the egg white from the mayonnaise.
4. Refrigerate half an hour or so – this is a great time to make the aioli for dipping.
5. Spread the other half the crumbs on a flat surface or large plate.
6. Shape the crab cakes into patties about the size of your palm. You should get a dozen or two dozen patties this way.
7. Coat each patty in the spread bread crumbs and set aside.
8. Heat up enough oil to just coat the bottom of your cast iron pan.
9. Fry the mirelurk cakes in batches (or all at once, if you have a hilariously oversized cast iron pan that needs two burners, like we do). Turn once, cook until both sides are brown and the middle is cooked through.

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Homemade Aioli

(this is more garlic mayonnaise than a true aioli, but it can be quickly and easily assembled from the remaining homemade mayonnaise and really brings the mirelurk cakes to a new level. Lorewise, I like to imagine my [former housewife] Sole Survivor started whipping it up for the jamboree and it became a Minuteman tradition to imitate the General.)

Ingredients

• The remaining homemade mayonnaise
• Mustard (1/2 teaspoon dry mustard or one teaspoon Dijon mustard – given some of the other things that survived 200 years after the Great War, I have to imagine both wild mustards out on the East Coast and tins of powdered mustard in bakery basements can be found)
• Garlic, minced (at least three cloves)

Method

1. Take the remaining mayonnaise.
2. Gently mix in garlic and mustard to taste.

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Pour the vegetable soup into a bowl (a tin Army surplus mess kit for authenticity), set the mirelurk cakes on a plate and drizzle with the aioli, serve with one or two biscuits for dipping and an Ice-Cold Nuka Cola or Ice-Cold Gwinnett (Guiness) Stout. Guaranteed rad free! Swap tales of killing a deathclaw with your bare hands.

This is the first installment of an occasional feature we’re calling “Earth-Adapted Recipes,” featuring our attempts to cook and eat dishes from various geeky sources – not just Dune, Redwall, and A Song of Ice and Fire. Some of them will even be from my own books! Hope you enjoy.

Recipe to be found in my newsletter and on Patreon.

We’ve instituted a new tradition around chez Mathieu – on Saturdays, your resident Shabbos goy (me) prepares lunch. This means that both my wife and daughter can rest on their holiest of holy days, and as a Quaker, I find cooking no less holy than anything else. Last Saturday, I looked around the contents of our fridge and freezer as Melissa asked, “so, what do you have in mind for that Trader Joe’s seafood mix?” It was already two weeks old and would need to be all-dressed to serve.

Then I said “…what if I served it ancient Roman style?”

I popped open a copy of Apicius and prepared a marinade (because at the end of the day, I still learned to cook out of a wok, marinade the meat in the cooking sauce, and add vegetables “in order”). I waited an hour, chopping vegetables and doing dishes in a desultory manner, turned on the flame, hoped for the best, and half an hour after “le feu vive!” I had a meal worthy of Augustus’ table on my own. Even Lyra loved it – though Lyra loves Papa’s cooking generally.

It doesn’t look like much (most European food didn’t before the Columbian Exchange), but it tasted amazing. It was sweet, peppery, rich, filling, and rustic. Bread and oleogarum and wine, and the beautiful, beautiful seafood stew.

Ingredients:

The fish marinade

• 1 Trader Joe’s seafood medley
• About a cup of Sangiovese (cheap)
• Olive oil
• Lea & Perrin’s Worcestershire sauce (or South Asian fish sauce)
• Dry sherry vinegar
• Salt
• Pepper
• 1 clove shallot
• Italian spices (terragon, oregano, marjoram, thyme, and rosemary)

The rest:

• 1 onion
• 3 stalks celery (reserve leaves)
• Chicken (or fish) stock (about three cups, ideally homemade)
• Can of Great Northern or other white beans

The sides:

• Homemade sourdough bread
• Oleogarum (oil & Worcestershire
• The Sangiovese

Instructions

1. Prepare the marinade – pour some oil, a few splashes of wine, and two drizzles of Worcestershire sauce into a largeish glass bowl. If you’re using south Asian fish sauce instead, make it one drizzle. Mince a shallot clove and throw it in. Add sherry vinegar, salt, black pepper, and Italian spices to taste.
2. Take out the frozen seafood mix and run under cool water until everything is separated and at least half-thawed. Add to the bowl of marinade, cover, shake, and store for at least one hour – longer is better.
3. Chop an onion roughly and three celery stalks into half-inch lengths (reserving the leaves). Drain and wash the beans. Slice your sourdough bread and prepare an oleogarum for the table.Oleogarum was a common “mother sauce” and condiment at Roman table – pour a splash of olive oil into a wide bowl (for dipping) and add two drizzles of Worchestershire sauce (or one drizzle of Asian fish sauce) and sprinkle in some salt and black pepper.
4. When ready, remove the seafood and marinade and any stock you have from the fridge (I’m the kind of person who saves chicken bones and makes stock when the chicken is starting to look dodgy, I happened to have some homemade on hand).
5. Heat a little olive oil in a deep saucepan (the one you make pasta in) on medium heat and add the onions. Stir fry until they’re pearlescent but not brown, then pour in a ladle-full of stock. Let that come to a boil and add the marinade, but not the seafood. Throw in the beans and the celery. Cook until everything is warm, melded, and cooked through – about ten minutes – stirring occasionally.
6. Add the seafood back in and cook for two or three minutes or until everything is opaque. Turn off the stove.
7. Serve the mare cibus apicianum in a big communal bowl on the table with the ladle in, reserving a regular soup (or salad) bowl for each person. Place the oleogarum where everyone can reach it.
8. Serve with the sliced sourdough bread and the Sangiovese and water (of course wine and water, what are we, barbarians?).
9. A suitably-educated baby or toddler can eat the crumb of the bread and the bits of the dish if they’re chopped small enough for their teeth. Mine certainly enjoyed Papa’s cuisine.