Here's what real dishes from Skyrim look like in real life

Virtual food in games usually exists just to top off a health bar or tweak character stats. But spend enough time staring at the texture details on plates in Skyrim, and sooner or later a very real curiosity kicks in about what lavender bread or Black-Briar mead actually taste like.

That curiosity is exactly what the official Elder Scrolls cookbook set out to satisfy, and by the looks of it, it did the job well.

The book in question is The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook, published by Insight Editions in 2019. Authors Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Rachel Ann Koski adapted dozens of recipes from the series into real ingredients meant for a regular home kitchen.

A recent example of how that works in practice came from two friends who spent an entire day cooking and brewing their way through the book, then posted the results along with photos of every dish.

Among the dishes were honey lavender bread, chicken dumplings with a creamy filling of chicken, carrot, and leek, plus Black-Briar mead, named after the family that owns the largest meadery in Skyrim, based in Riften.

Special mention goes to the spiced wine, a nod to the character Sam Guevenne from the "A Night to Remember" quest – the disguise worn by the Daedric Prince Sanguine. All the recipes ended up being a pretty faithful match for what shows up on screen in the game, right down to the shape of the dumpling dough.

The riskiest item on the menu was, predictably, skooma. In Skyrim lore it's an illegal drug made from moon sugar and brewed by the Khajiit, but the cookbook version is far tamer – a vodka-based cocktail with dried fruit and sugar.

The problem is that the finished drink doesn't taste like alcohol at all, even though it's still full-strength vodka, so dosage is something to watch out for – a warning echoed more than once in the comments by people who already got burned by this recipe.

The cherry on top was something the book never actually included – a recipe for a wheel of cheese. For anyone who has clocked hundreds of hours in Skyrim, that detail has long since become its own meme, since useless cheese wedges scattered across every house and tavern practically serve as an unofficial symbol of pointless loot in the game.

The community took the missing recipe as a funny but slightly annoying oversight.