Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
What do Marvel characters eat?
Pop culture cookbooks have answers — and rapt audiences
Chelsea Monroe-Cassel is currently developing a recipe for a dish whose traditional version she’ll never be able to taste, and whose place of origin she’ll never be able to visit: Plomeek soup, a staple on the fictional planet Vulcan. In writing “The Star Trek Cookbook,” out next March, she has spent hours watching old episodes and movies from her home in West Windsor, Vermont, trying to deduce what might be in the reddish soup.
“We know shockingly little about Vulcan cuisine, given how much of a fan favorite Spock is,” she said. Some people believe that Vulcans are vegetarian, as their strong morals and fear of their own capacity for violence would mean they avoid food that requires slaughtering. But do those arguments hold up, she wondered, in a universe where meat can be replicated with machines?
The result: “A cold gazpacho with tomato and strawberry and a little bit of balsamic.”
Monroe-Cassel, 36, has dedicated her career to bringing to life the food of her favorite television shows, movies and games. She has written “A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook,” “The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook,” “Firefly: The Big Damn Cookbook” and “World of Warcraft: The Official Cookbook.” Together they have sold more than 250,000 copies. She is not a trained chef, but she is hugely enthusiastic about pop culture food. For fans like her, “it is a big way, a new and tangible way, of connecting with a world that they love,” she said.
“Video games are a form of escapism and books are a form of escapism,” she added, “and I think this is a form of escapism that appeals to extra senses.”
This genre has existed since at least the 1970s, with titles like “The Dark Shadows Cookbook,” “The Partridge Family Cookbook” and “The Little House Cookbook” from “Little House on the Prairie.” Of late, these books have grown significantly in popularity and scale. They’ve found a mainstream audience and contain recipes that many people actually want to cook.
As streaming platforms have made media both more accessible and social, fans have turned their fascination into full-on lifestyles. Monroe-Cassel, for one, was just an enthusiast of the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series with a blog called The Inn at the Crossroads before she started writing these cookbooks. Others visit the “Star Wars” theme park, pose on the Central Perk couch from “Friends” and cosplay as Moira Rose from “Schitt’s Creek.”
“My generation, to know what people are interested in, you went through their record collection or their library,” said Charles Miers, 62, the publisher of Rizzoli New York. “Now you ask them what TV show they are watching.”
While early pop culture cookbooks were more like novelties, titles like the 2002 “Sopranos Family Cookbook,” which sold more than 142,000 copies, and 2010’s “The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook,” with more than 1 million books sold, showed this could be a genre in its own right. Major publishers like Penguin Random House have dedicated teams for pop culture books, which can be officially licensed from the franchise or unofficial. The cookbooks span subject matter both expected (“Bob’s Burgers,” “Ratatouille”) and eyebrow-raising (“The Walking Dead,” “Hannibal”).
As fan cultures have deepened, these cookbooks have evolved too. Less prevalent are the ones that simply name recipes after characters. Today’s pop culture cookbooks are heavily researched tomes about their fictional worlds. They consider climates and character motivations. They fill in gaps in the narrative. Authors pore over every element — down to the props in recipe photos — so fans can feel fully immersed.
When chef and writer Nyanyika Banda started working on the upcoming “The Official Wakanda Cookbook” based on Marvel’s Black Panther comics, she knew Marvel’s rabid fan base would expect a high level of detail.
“If we had written this book 15 years ago, you probably could have gotten away with including a lot of things from the entire continent of Africa without giving explanation to why they existed,” said Banda, 39. “There is this need for people coming up with these recipes to know what they are talking about” in terms of both the comics and African foodways.
Banda considered the role that colonialism played in adding a Western influence to certain African dishes, and how to explain that influence when they included those foods in the book — since Wakanda is supposed to be isolated from the rest of the world. (Banda found a solution in referencing more recent comics about Wakanda opening itself up to outsiders.)
This approach is a far cry from the early books in the genre, which place little emphasis on compelling recipes and complex storytelling.
Author Dinah Bucholz’s proposal for “The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook” was fished out of a slush pile at Adams Media and sold so well that it inspired a larger investment into these sorts of titles, said Brendan O’Neill, the editor-in-chief of Adams.
He said the company chooses pop culture properties for cookbooks based on depth, not breadth, of the fandom.
“People may love a series like ‘Survivor,’ ” he said, “but there is a bit of a disconnect between that and a cultural phenomenon and fan engagement you see on ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘The Simpsons’ where this universe exists.”
Bucholz said that fantasy series like “Harry Potter” and “Game of Thrones” lend themselves well to cookbooks because the food descriptions tend to be fairly detailed. “The authors clearly enjoyed writing about food,” she said. “They wrote about it with so much relish. It is such a major part of the characters’ lives.”
O’Neill said the demographic for these books tends to be amateur cooks in their 20s to 40s. But it’s unclear what percentage of them are actually cooking anything.
“I think a lot of people buy the books because they are just fans and collectors,” said Jennifer
Sims, 47, a senior editor at Insight Editions. “Then you have the other half who like cooking and just will make one weekly meal from this particular book, or they will throw a viewing party.”