House Stark Direwolf Pies

"It was too far to make out the banners clearly, but even through the drifting fog she could see that they were white, with a dark smudge in their center that could only be the direwolf of Stark, grey upon its icy field. When she saw it with her own eyes, Catelyn reined up her horse and bowed her head in thanks."

- Catelyn VIII, A Game of Thrones

This adorable mini personal pie was the meat course of my Season 7 Game of Thrones Party. For this event, I made each course resemble the banners of one of the Great Houses of Westeros. For some Houses, like Tully or Baratheon, I could serve the actual emblem. This approach was a dead end for House Stark, since wolfmeat is not widely available...

I instead chose to recreate the direwolf shape. I ordered a Stark cookie cutter from Etsy however USPS lost it and it didn't arrive on time! As a back-up plan, I ordered a full-sized wolf (well, coyote) cookie cutter from Amazon and used just the head portion to cut the dough.

Because wolves are carnivores, it seemed appropriate to make the Stark course a meat course, so I used my cookie cutter to shape a pie crust for a meat pie. I'd previously made Inn At The Crossroads' Beef and Bacon pie and liked it; the dried fruits are an unusual touch that tastes medieval. I can imagine much of the fare at Winterfell incorporating preserved fruits and vegetables due to its short growing season, so it seemed like a great starting point for a recipe. I made a few changes to the original medieval-inspired recipe. For example, soy sauce is an excellent way to add depth to a recipe but wouldn't have been available to medieval Britons.

Ingredients

House Baratheon Venison Meat Loaf & Mustard Sauce

The visitors poured through the castle gates in a river of gold and silver and polished steel, three hundred strong, a pride of bannermen and knights, of sworn swords and freeriders. Over their heads a dozen golden banners whipped back and forth in the northern wind, emblazoned with the crowned stag of Baratheon.

- Eddard I, A Game of Thrones

This venison dish was served as the Baratheon course for my Season 7 Game of Thrones party. Each of the nine courses was inspired by the heraldry of one of the Great Houses of Westeros. Game meats feature heavily in Westeros feasts, and Robert Baratheon was particularly fond of hunting, so it seemed fitting to represent the Baratheon crowned stag with venison.

Even though deer roam wild around my neighborhood, the only venison my local grocer stocks is ground. For last year's Game of Thrones party,  I incorporated ground venison into a Highgarden-themed venison stew, which was delicious. This year I decided to mix it up a bit, and make a meatloaf. Meatloaf can be a disappointing venture, sometimes turning out too dry or bland. Fortunately, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has done some very thorough research on perfecting meatloaf so I started with that recipe. Because venison can be so lean, rather than replacing the beef with venison at a 1:1 ratio, I increased the quantity of pork slightly and increased the amount of gelatin. The texture turned out to be just about perfect.

I contrasted the dark brown of the meatloaf with a golden mustard cream sauce. I wouldn't have immediately thought to pair mustard and venison together, however I'd tried the combination this summer at Le Square in Montreal and found it delicious.

Ingredients

House Tully Trout and Rainbow Carrots

From the sandstone walls of the castle, soldiers and servants shouted down her name, and Robb's, and "Winterfell!" From every rampart waved the banner of House Tully: a leaping trout, silver, against a rippling blue-and-red field. It was a stirring sight, yet it did not lift her heart. She wondered if indeed her heart would ever lift again. Oh, Ned …

- Catelyn XI, A Game of Thrones

This fish dish served as the seafood course for my Season 7 Game of Thrones Feast. Each of the courses were designed to look like the banners of one of the Great Houses of Westeros. 

The Tully course seemed at first to be straightforward. There's a trout on the banner, so naturally a trout should be the centerpiece of the dish, right? A culinary representation of the Tully colors, red and blue, proved a little more tricky. There are not a lot of blue foods, and even fewer that I'd want to pair with fish. (A savory blueberry sauce, perhaps?) Since butterfly pea blossoms make an appearance in the poultry course, I decided to go with blue carrots for with the fish. I mixed these with red carrots, which my local grocery store had just started stocking.

I precooked the carrots to soften them so they can roast alongside the fish. I steamed the carrots rather than boiling them since the color leaches out easily and I wanted to retain as much blue as possible. In general, be careful to keep the blue carrots away from anything you don't want to be blue - that includes red carrots and favorite white tea towels.

The trout recipe is adapted from Inn At The Crossroad's Trout Wrapped In Bacon - also, appropriately, a Riverlands meal. I first made this a few years ago and haven't cooked trout any other way since. I stopped including the bacon long ago since I find it doesn't add much, and adapted a few other elements along the way. 

Ingredients

House Arryn Chicken with Butterfly Pea Blossom Sauce

"The dwarf had been whetting the edge of his axe and making some mordant jest when Bronn spotted the banner the riders carried before them, the moon-and-falcon of House Arryn, sky-blue and white. Catelyn had never seen a more welcome sight."

- Catelyn VI, A Game of Thrones

I made this Vale-themed entree for my Game of Thrones Season 7 Party. For each course, I tried to craft a dish that both visually and thematically represented one of the Great Houses of Westeros. House Arryn was one of the more challenging sigils to translate into something edible. Blue is not a color you eat often (although I've cooked blue food a remarkable number of times). I considered doing something like a blueberry cheese cake, but even blueberries are more purple than blue. I wanted to incorporate the falcon imagery into the dish too, which suggested some sort of fowl course.

My mindless browsing of reddit's mead forum fortuitously showed me the power of butterfly pea blossoms, which mead makers use to naturally dye their brews a beautiful bright blue. I played around with it for a bit to figure out the best way to incorporate this into a savory sauce. 

The color is strong, but pH sensitive - acid like lemon juice will turn the dye purple. Mixing the tea from the flowers into an opaque white medium helps make the vibrant color more apparent. A cream sauce seemed like a good starting point. I tried making a mushroom cream sauce, but the grey of the mushroom muddied the sky blue of the blossoms to produce a rather unappetizing indigo mess. I concluded I needed an even whiter base sauce.

I decided to go with a roasted garlic sauce. The blossoms themselves have a very mild vegetable flavor, so roasted garlic rounds out the sauce nicely by packing a lot of flavor without changing the color much. I added in a roux to thicken the roasted garlic and cream sauce. The result was very tasty, and, importantly, very blue.

For the falcon part of the sigil, I went with chicken. Because I was prepping and serving nine different courses at my Game of Thrones dinner party, I wanted a way of cooking the chicken that required the least possible oven space and monitoring. I therefore chose to sous-vide the chicken, and quickly browned the chicken in a skillet before serving.

The sauce can easily be adapted for whatever method of cooking chicken you like best, or even alternative protein sources! I had a few vegetarian guests over, and I served the sauce with cloud eggs. Eggs match the avian theme of the Arryn sigil, while clouds are a nod towards the Eyrie's high perch. 

Ingredients

Sweet Cakes Soaked With Honey

Catelyn still remembered the innkeep, a fat woman named Masha Heddle who chewed sourleaf night and day and seemed to have an endless supply of smiles and sweet cakes for the children. The sweet cakes had been soaked with honey, rich and heavy on the tongue, but how Catelyn had dreaded those smiles.

- A Game of Thrones, Catelyn V, George R.R. Martin

My re-read of A Game of Thrones last year added many new recipes ideas to my "to-do" list. This one topped the list, because who doesn't love honey? I poked around various medieval recipe sites to see if "sweet cakes" referred to any sort of dish in particular, but this might have been a George R.R. Martin creation. In the end, I selected this recipe from the Receipt Book of Sarah Longe, a beautifully penned cookbook dated to around 1610, because "sugar cakes" seemed to be about as close to "sweet cakes" as I could get.

Game of Thrones Season 6 Finale Party: A Feast at Highgarden

“The war had not touched the fabled bounty of Highgarden. While singers sang & tumblers tumbled, they began with pears poached in wine, and went onto tiny savory fish rolled in salt and cooked crisp, and capons stuffed with onions and mushrooms. There were great loaves of brown bread, mounds of turnips and sweetcorn and pease, immense hams and roast geese and trenchers dripping full of venison stewed with beer and barley. For the sweet, servants brought down trays of pastries from the castle kitchens, cream swans, spun-sugar unicorns, lemon cakes in the shape of roses, spiced honey biscuits and blackberry tarts, apple crisps & wheels of buttery cheese.”

– A Clash of Kings

This elaborate feast greets Catelyn Stark as she meets with Renly Baratheon on behalf of Robb Stark (The King in the North!) at Bitterbridge. It also served as my source material for my third annual Game of Thrones season finale dinner party.

Sansa's Favorite Lemon Cakes

Later came sweetbreads and pigeon pie and baked apples fragrant with cinnamon and lemon cakes frosted in sugar, but by then Sansa was so stuffed that she could not manage more than two little lemon cakes, as much as she loved them. She was wondering whether she might attempt a third when the king began to shout.
- Sansa III, A Game of Thrones

Lemon cakes pop up regularly in A Song of Ice and Fire - particularly in Sansa's chapters! Despite their prevalence, there aren't any precise details about their usual appearance or ingredients.