I Cooked from Recipes from the World of Tolkien and It Turns Out That Hobbits Also Love Beans and Cornbread

From my November 2024 trip to Hobbiton!

Recipes from the World of Tolkien: Inspired By the Legends by Robert Tuesley Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reading this book inspired my sudden revelation about how many cuisines are centered around beans plus flatbread. I grew up in Arkansas eating pinto beans with cornbread (and here I am today in Indiana with a pot of beans in the crock pot right this second!), which isn’t exactly a flatbread but I think it’s close enough to count. When I moved to Texas for college I found bean burritos, and black beans and refried beans and corn and flour tortillas. And then I learned about lentils with injera or naan, and falafel with chickpeas, and the tragedy that is beans on toast, and those are all the cuisines I know but I’m sure there are plenty more delicious bean/bread combos out there for me to discover.

All that to say that my favorite set of recipes in this book is a bean dish paired with a cornbread dish!

Sitting down at the hobbits' breakfast table, waiting for my beans and cornbread to be served.

I really liked how the recipes here were mainly British-forward or British-inspired, but with a lot more flavor than I’ve come to expect from British cuisine. I’ve made the Smoky Stewed Beans three times, and it is a super easy one-pot recipe that uses canned beans and tomatoes, tomato paste, stock, and then a bunch of flavorful ingredients like red onion, red wine vinegar, smoked paprika, and mustard powder. It serves two with plenty of leftovers, which is perfect because it tastes better the next day, and it also works with frozen peppers and spinach tossed in to beef it up.

Every time I’ve made it I’ve made the Lembas Bread to go with it. Calling cornbread Lembas Bread kind of feels like an abomination, but the author has read the Silmarillion and I have not, and they say that Lembas was originally made literally from corn. So, cheesy herbed cornbread it is!

I actually think the Lembas Bread, especially when paired with the Smoky Stewed Beans, would be even more delicious with even more cheese and herbs, so that’s what I plan to do next time.

The Green Dragon! I didn't try their mushroom and leek pie, but it was definitely delicious.

From this book I’ve also made Beorn’s Honey Cakes, Farmer Maggot’s Wild Mushrooms, the Prancing Pony’s Potato and Garlic Soup, and the Green Dragon’s Mushroom and Leek Pie. I’m not a good cook so I need simple instructions and simple ingredients, which this book for the most part has. Only the potato soup was disappointing, but that is definitely my fault, because 1) I did not understand that “floury” potatoes are different from whatever potatoes I apparently used that gave the soup a kind of gluey texture, and 2) I added too much salt.

See? Not a good cook!

If this book was meant to be an “official” cookbook for the Tolkien books I’d have more issues with it, because there were barely any shot-by-shot remake-esque recipes or recipes you could see reflected in the actual texts. But for most recipes other than Cram or that elusive Lembas Bread, there are plenty of other resources for that sort of cooking. For Father’s Day this year, the kids and I did a “There and Snack Again”-themed Taste the Movie experience for my partner, keyed to the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Rings, and all I had to do was click through a couple of webpages to find a blog post that listed every food shown on screen and its timestamp. And if I’d wanted to get fancy and have a proper feast with book-accurate foods prepared using boring muggle ingredients, I’d just click a couple more times and have my pick!

I am at the Green Dragon drinking ale and leaning casually against a mantle.

But anyway, these recipes aren’t really meant to be book-accurate, as far as I can tell. They’re meant to be “from the world” of Tolkien, and “inspired by” the legends. So basically British cuisine with more flavor. Which is actually really useful, because although I would have liked to have had an authentically book-accurate Lembas Bread recipe, I’ll actually make this particular Lembas Bread on the regular, not just during a LOTR movie marathon.

P.S. View all my reviews

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!