That was fast.
Right, so.
The wedding feast began with a thin leek
soup…Leek soup. Okay. There are ways this could be incredibly delicious. If I was making leek soup in the real world and present day, I’d be using either potato or cauliflower to help give the soup its creamy texture. Lacking potato or cauliflower, you’d want your leek soup to be in a stock like this:
She served it in a trencher hollowed out of a stale loaf. It was
thick with leeks, carrots, barley, and turnips white and yellow, along
with clams and chunks of cod and crabmeat, swimming in a stock of
heavy cream and butter.– Davos I, ADWD
Yeah, exactly that much cream and butter. That soup ought to be thick. Not thin. The fact that it’s thin means the Freys skimped on the dairy products and basically had their cooks chuck a bunch of chopped leeks in a pot of water. Maybe they added a dash of cream afterwards, who knows. Effort!
…followed by a salad of green beans, onions, and beets, river pike poached in almond milk…
This probably tasted fine. It is, however, a very plain preparation of fish and salad, lacking in seasoning, richness, novel ingredients or flavour combinations, or any sort of display of cooking skill. It’s the medieval version of inviting your boss over for dinner and serving them meatloaf and three veg, not because you’ve got a killer meatloaf recipe, but because mince was on special at the supermarket. And the green beans needed using up anyway.
…mounds of mashed turnips that were cold before they reached the table…
Again we have the issue of plain veg. Okay, well, the meal probably needs bulking out, it’s not a bad thing to serve mashed turnips to accompany a more impressive dish.
But here these vegetables which should be served hot, are served cold. Timing errors happen in a busy kitchen. In context of the rest of the feast, this doesn’t look like a timing error, but speaks to the fact that the Freys just don’t care about serving a good meal here.
…jellied calves’ brains…
From the relative lack of mentions of offal in other impressive feasts, I’m assuming that Westerosi nobility isn’t super into it. In which case, having offal on the menu at all for this sort of occasion is a bit dubious, and making it one of the centrepieces of the meal isn’t a great idea unless your cooks can knock it out of the park.
Brains are well-regarded in some cuisines. The recipes and general advice I have for cooking brains all involve either poaching or frying, primarily to preserve a creamy texture. That’s what brains have going for them. Texture. Jellying the brains? Yeah, no, not so much, ‘cause then you’ve got jelly texture distracting from brain texture, and not enough contrast between the two to provide a striking effect. That’s a preparation geared more to preserving edibility and using every part of the cow, rather than enhancing the natural qualities of the ingredient. You can do it well (thank you, Inn at the Crossroads), if you’ve got a good recipe that allows other flavours to shine, but this does not sound like it was. Not at all.
…and a leche of stringy beef.
A leche in this context is a fair bit like a terrine, with milk and eggs (and spices, sugar, wine, etc etc; it’s a versatile sort of dish). So it’s yet another jellyish room temp bit of meat, thanks Freys. It’s also clear from the word “stringy” alone that their cooks used inferior beef in a way that only highlights how low quality the meat really is.
Suffice to say, if I’ve got a gristly piece of beef and couldn’t be bothered processing it in any way, just about the last thing I’d put it in would be a terrine.
It was poor fare to set before a king…
…or before any guest at all, actually. But again, why waste good food on dead people?
An excellent example of how even GRRM’s food porn has meaning.
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