The Witcher Official Cookbook is a charming culinary journey across the Continent

Enjoying delicious foods by the fire, basking in the smell of mulling wine and slow-roasting stew…the holidays are always a great time for trying out new recipes. And what better way to do that than with a new cookbook?

This marks the release of The Witcher Official Cookbook: Provisions, Fare and Culinary Tales from Travels Across the Continent. This new cookbook continues in the tradition of other tie-in cookbooks like the Song of Ice and Fire adjacent book A Feast of Ice and Fire, except instead of Westeros, now you can sample dishes from across the Continent of The Witcher.

Anita Sarna and Karolina Krupecka of the Witcher Kitchen blog have truly outdone themselves with this book. I’ve had a chance to sit down with The Witcher Official Cookbook and am inordinately excited to tell you about it.

The Witcher Official Cookbook review

I’ll be honest, this is my first time reviewing a cookbook. Where do I start? The recipes? The presentation? The story? (Yes, there is a story in this cookbook—we’ll get there.)

I suppose we should start with some background information. The Witcher Official Cookbook is primarily tied into the video games by CD Projekt Red. The regions and many of the dishes will be familiar to those who have played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, from Beauclair to Novgrad and the Skellige Isles. But it also does have plenty of ties to Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels as well, making it a wonderful companion piece no matter your particular Witcher affinities. Sapkowski himself provides the foreward for the book. His usual wit is present, as well as insights into the various dishes which have appeared in his Witcher stories.

I mentioned above that this cookbook has a story, and I have to immediately gush about it. The Witcher Official Cookbook is like no cookbook I’ve ever laid hands on; it has an in-world narrator, similar to the approach George R.R. Martin took with his encyclopedia The World of Ice and Fire. This narrator has a fun backstory, and the premise of the book is that they’re going on a journey across the Continent while collecting various recipes. Each region has its own journal entry-style introduction. Every single recipe has a bit of narration, which is impressive and must add up to at least a novella’s worth of actual writing. The writing itself is great, filled with character and delectable descriptions.

This makes navigating the cookbook a total joy. Each page contains fun little nods to Sapkowski’s characters and stories, or to beloved locations from the video games (some of which you can actually visit to find the game-relevant foods). I was literally grinning half the time I was reading this book, which…it’s a cookbook. That’s just not something you expect when you pick one up. But man did this make me excited to go to the kitchen, not just for the cooking, but for the chance to take in all the fun little anecdotes and stories about The Witcher world within its pages.

The Witcher Official Cookbook is a sizable compendium of recipes built to last

No matter how good the narration might be, at the end of the day you buy a cookbook for the food. There are more than 70 recipes in The Witcher Official Cookbook, ranging from hearty fare to salads, seafood, drinks, soups, and roast duck fit for a duchess. As someone who’s spent quite a lot of time with cookbooks over the years, I can say with confidence that this one is worth the price tag for the amount of recipes in it. Even going at it with gusto, I expect it’ll be quite some time before I’ve managed to try out everything in this cookbook.

The recipes are also very detailed, capturing a spirit of doing things from scratch the way someone in The Witcher world might. This means that for recipes like Temerian Sourdough Multiseed Bread, the book walks you through creating things like sourdough starter well enough that even a total novice to the art of baking can follow along.

That’s not to say that all of the recipes in The Witcher Official Cookbook are simple, however; far from it. While recipes like Kaer Morhen Fried Mushroom Salad are rather straightforward, others like the The Pheansatry’s Beef Stew from shining Beauclair might take a bit more patience to master. This isn’t a beginner cookbook, but it is an accessible cookbook, with a broad enough variety of recipes that it can accommodate different skill levels. Personally, I love that, because the more time you spend with it the more you can grow into the more complicated recipes.

The authors also make an admirable effort to stay true to The Witcher’s European roots. This might make some ingredients a little harder to find depending on where you live, but that seems like a pretty fair tradeoff for being able to create a meal that looks and tastes like something people in Velen or Skellige would actually eat.

I’d be remiss not to touch on the art and photography. The pictures in this book are gorgeous. Many cookbooks have great pictures of their meals, but all the tiny details in The Witcher Official Cookbook make it obvious that this was a passion project. The lighting and atmosphere are immersive; each recipe is even paired with place settings and imagery that feels world-accurate to where it might be served or who might be eating it, from peasants living in a bog to merchants and nobility. There is also artwork throughout as well, which adds a nice bit of variety to the visual presentation of the book.

Lastly, since this is a cookbook I think it’s fair to touch on the actual construction of the book itself. After all, this needs to be something you can bring into the kitchen without fear of it falling apart. From the limited time I’ve spent with it, my impression is that The Witcher Official Cookbook is very sturdy. It’s a slipcase-free hardcover with thick pages and a good spine. Whether you’re using it in your home kitchen or tossing it in a satchel for a long journey, I’d expect this treasure trove of witchery recipes to hold up.

Verdict

The Witcher Official Cookbook: Provisions, Fare, and Culinary Tales from Travels Across the Continent is a charming and essential addition for any Witcher fan’s kitchen. With its highly detailed and thought-out recipes, it provides options to make savory meals themed to any region on the Continent. Some of them may be a bit intimidating, but the authors made a clear effort to keep their “made-from-scratch” approach as accessible as possible. When you add in the wonderful narration, lavish artwork and mouth-watering photographs peppered throughout, it’s not only a fun recipe book, but just a fun book in general. I’ve been using themed cookbooks like this one for years, and I honestly can’t recall the last time one got me so excited. I can’t recommend The Witcher Official Cookbook enough for any fan of the franchise who also likes to get their hands dirty in the kitchen.

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