The stories of J.R.R. Tolkien tell of a wide-reaching fantasy world filled with brave heroes, magical creatures, and great evil. Adaptations of Tolkien’s work and interpretations of his world of Middle-Earth are typically filled with action fare, but there’s a far more peaceful corner of his lore that can be found in the Shire. Players will soon get to explore that world with the upcoming Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of The Rings Game from Private Division and Weta Workshop.
Part of living the peaceful Hobbit life means being a master of meal prep. Cooking plays a major role in this life sim and Shacknews recently had a chance to test our culinary skills in our hands-on preview. To learn more about what it means to make connections through cooking, I had a chance to chat with Lead Writer Darren Ormandy and Principal Game Designer Sam McAlpine.
Shacknews: Let me go ahead and start off by asking about some background about cooking in Tales of the Shire. Tell me about the role of cooking and meal prep in Hobbit society in general.
Darren Ormandy, Lead Writer: Food is the center of the universe. I think when you’re reading Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, the descriptions of food that Tolkien gives us where he talks about how these wonderful dishes, it’s actually mouthwatering.
The best example of that is, the beginning of both The Hobbit and The Lord the Rings begin with big meals. You’ve got the unexpected arrival of the dwarves in The Hobbit, Bilbo’s birthday party in The Lord of the Rings, and again, the food is really well-described. The enjoyment, the bonding, the coming together of people as they all eat and celebrate or hold a party. Things are discussed, stories are told, and seeing it felt very, very intrinsic to that.
Obviously, creating a game set in the Shire where we want joy to be such a strong part of the experience, cooking felt like a great place to really focus our Hobbit activities. And, of course, it then brings in so many other aspects of life in Tales of the Shire, such as foraging for food, growing your own food, or trading for food. It brings all those different elements together rather beautifully.
Shacknews: How did you go about researching this topic? How did you research the role of food in Hobbit relations and how did that help with designing the game’s cooking mechanics?
Ormandy: Well, I ate a lot! (laughs)
One of the things that we got quite inspired by was the food in the books. For a start, that’s a great place to go. We’re looking to the books as the inspiration for our version of the Shire, for the Hobbits, and for Hobbit life. The books are so rich with material. There’s lots of great meal descriptions after the first bite, so that’s a great point of inspiration.
Then we also looked at Tolkien’s life. He spent most of his life dining in Oxford colleges, and there’s certain menus and food there. There’s his childhood, where he grew up in the late 1800s, in the end of the Victorian period, so we looked at things like Victorian cookbooks and recipe books throughout history, some old historical recipe books.
But, also, Sam (McAlpine) and the design team really sort of reach into their own creativity, as well, and looked at the multiplicity of forageables and items you can grow in your own garden, stuff like that, and put together some absolutely delicious meals from that position, because it’s very much set in reality. It’s like our world, just a world in a different period of time. We’re able to really draw on things that already exist in the world and put together meals for both the Hobbits and for the people that are playing the game.
Shacknews: What were some particular Hobbit dishes that caught your eye while you were doing your research?
Sam McAlpine, Principal Game Designer: In the Hobbit, we had lots of chapters actually named after food. We wanted to make sure that we bring in not just the meals that were talked about, because I didn’t go into a huge detail in terms of like the types of pies and that sort of thing. I wanted to bring a little bit more coziness into it. We tried to take the inspiration for the different types of meals and put our own cozy spin on it to make it feel more more like a wholesome, cozy experience.
Shacknews: In terms of both the game and in Hobbit society as a whole, how do farming and cooking go hand in hand?
Ormandy: Well, they eat pretty much everything they grow. It’s all part of that astral, countrysides, cozy escape. I think, also, we look at it from our own point of view. We’re very lucky. We live in a very beautiful country here in New Zealand and we’re very blessed from that point of view. But, we still live in a very urban society and I think we all have that attraction to going back to a time when you could grow your own food,. I mean, the popularity of things like farmers markets and organic farming. Tolkien was enormously ahead of his time when he was writing in the 1940s about stuff that really has only become part of strong public debate and opinion in the last 20 years or so. It was about respect for the natural environment.
So, the idea of going out, growing your own food, and then being able to take it and turn it into a meal that you share with friends just hit so many good buttons. It feels perfect for Tolkien, it feels perfect for a cozy game environment, and it feels perfect for the sort of life that we’d like to escape to. People that want to play Tales of the Shire are going to be playing it because they want that sense of enrichment and reward that comes from living and celebrating a simple life, even though I think in the real world, as we’ve probably all found out at one point or another, actually growing your own crops is actually quite hard. You’re rather grateful for the fact that there’s big farming out there.
Nevertheless, the idea that that can be something that we can escape into an experience through Tales of the Shire, I think, is really charming. So, yeah, we wanted it to feel like it was all part of that, like an ecosystem, with cooking at the heart of it.
Shacknews: How did you ultimately land on the current cooking interface? What makes this the ideal way to prepare dishes and also prepare different kinds of dishes?
McAlpine: We really wanted you to feel like you’re a Hobbit in the Shire. A big part of that is that we want to make it feel like you’re cooking with food. We want to make it feel like you’re putting all that love into the food that you’re going to be sharing with your friends. We didn’t want it to be just selecting things from a menu, we wanted you to actually be engaging with the process of cooking. That meant doing things like chopping up your food, frying it in a frying pan, and getting the balance of both the texture and the flavors within your food.
Shacknews: In what ways does the game encourage players to experiment with their cooking? I’d imagine that different preparation styles or different ingredients can turn something like a fish that you caught out in the pond into something totally different.
McAlpine: There’s a couple of drivers for that. One is the cravings system in the game. Hobbits are always thinking about food and, as a result, they have cravings for different things. Imagine it’s the first day of winter and Orlo’s watching the snow outside falling down, and he’s just like craving a nice, hot, hearty vegetable pie. Maybe he’s craving a spicy version of that. The player’s goal is to prepare that meal for Orlo, which means that they need to start thinking about how they’re going to make this pie spicy. They might add black pepper into into the mix, that sort of thing.
And there are different types of vegetables (players) might be using. Because it’s Wednesday night, we might have access to things like cauliflower and they want to make sure that it’s a well-balanced meal. So, they might need to chop it up really fine and cook it for a while to make a well-balanced, smooth, tender mixture for the pot.
Shacknews: You’ve sort of touched on it previously and it’s somewhat explained at the start of the game, but talk about how preparing the right meal can help players improve their relationships with their neighbors.
McAlpine: The main thing that will help improve your relationship with your neighbors and friends is how delicious the food is.
The deliciousness of the food comes from three things: the quality of the ingredients and making sure you’re growing the best ingredients in your garden, and foraging and fishing; making sure that you’re balancing the flavors of the dish, so making sure the flavors that you’re putting together in that dish work well together, something sweet and sour; and then also making sure that the texture on the dish is correct for that particular dish, so you don’t want to have a smooth, tender salad, because that doesn’t really taste very good. You might want to have like a chunky tender stew. That will definitely taste better than a smooth, crispy stew. It’s all about how you’re preparing the ingredients to create the most delicious thing for your neighbors.
Shacknews: Will your neighbors give you advice or even offer ingredients to help you prepare better meals or prepare different meals?
McAlpine: Yes! Your guests that you’re inviting to your shared meal, whether it’s like a second breakfast or a dinner, they will give you hints about what they’re craving. They might send you a poem about how they’re craving something sweet. You can definitely find out what types of meals they are craving. It’s about balancing the craving with the most delicious version that you can possibly make.
Ormandy: I just want to add a little bit about the poems that Sam referred to. Our inspiration for that was Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger, the founders of (Weta Workshop). When they were looking at the development of the game, they said that when they were younger, they had more elderly relatives that had all these little poems, little sorts of riddles for sweet things, or putting honey on peas, and that sort of thing. We thought that was absolutely charming. It felt very Hobbit-y in its own way. We were able to find a combination, really of finding ones that already existed in traditions, especially in Britain, but also elsewhere around the world, and then also made up our own ditties as well. It was just a lovely bit of DNA from the whole of Weta Workshop.
Shacknews: What sorts of culinary possibilities await players later in the game? Do players discover new ingredients and new meals to prepare the longer the game goes on?
McAlpine: As the player progresses through the game, they’re going to be discovering new recipes. Most of these recipes come from their neighbors. As you become better friends with the Hobbits around you, they start giving you recipes for you to learn. We also have different ingredients and seasonings for the players to discover. The game is very seasonal, so as you go through the seasons, you discover different ingredients and seasonings.
Shacknews: That’s interesting. Tell me about some of the different dishes that you prepare throughout the different seasons.
McAlpine: For example, in summer, the Hobbits are obviously wanting things that are more summery, so things like salads, cakes, that sort of thing, which they can enjoy in the sun. Whereas if you go into autumn, we have things like pumpkins in the garden that you’re growing. There’s a lot of stuffed pumpkins, roasts, and roast vegetables. As you come into winter, you’ll see smaller things like pies and hot types of things like that. Then, in spring, we have the end of the cold season and coming into summer, so we have a combination of different ingredients from winter and summer. We have our carrots from autumn, parsnips from winter, and we have like our strawberries and rhubarb from summer. It’s like a blend as you cycle through the different seasons of the game.
Shacknews: Last question for me, what’s your favorite dish to prepare in Tales of the Shire?
McAlpine: That’s a tricky question. I personally like the baked brie cheese with jam. The reason why I like that one is that the cheese isn’t something that you can buy. You need to actually trade with other NPCs to get the various types of cheeses. The jam itself is something that you get to make, so you can make a spicy apricot jam, strawberry jam, or blackberry jam. There’s lots of different types of jams you can bring into this. And then of course, you’ve got the nuts, like walnuts and hazelnuts. There’s lots of different combinations you can put together for this particular dish. And I think baked brie cheese with jam is just a particularly delicious-looking dish as well.
Ormandy: Anything involving fish, because I really enjoy the fishing game. We’ve got a whole range of menus that involve fish. When you go out for the reward of catching a fish, catching the right fish, and then getting it back home and creating a dish around that is something I find very rewarding. Always look forward to doing that.
Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game is coming to PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch on March 25.
