Location, Location, Location: Winterfell

Before delving too deeply into the tasty treats, it's important to figure out just "where" everything is, and accordingly, what ingredients are available.  Exceptions will be made when a particular food is explicitly mentioned in the text.

So let's start with our very first two locations: The North and Winterfell.

GRRM has acknowledged that the inspiration for the Wall is indeed Hadrian's Wall.  Of course.  What else could it be? A giant wall built by the civilized empire to keep out the barbarians to the North.

However, as you can see, Hadrian's Wall, though heavily fortified in its day, is hardly the imposing Wall of the Night's Watch.  More likely, Hadrian's Wall was focused on a. preventing simple cattle thievery (it's hard to drive cattle over a wall...even a short 10 footer) b. Customs and Taxation; and c. sheer Roman "look at what we can do, because we're ROME!"

Obviously that's not the stuff of fantasy epics, so with some imagineering, we get this:

The real Hadrian's Wall would not have been nearly as impressive to pee off of.

So, having settled that the Wall is Hadrian's Wall, applying historical parallels, that makes the North Scotland.  A fairly easy leap.  Hadrian's wall divided the Scottish Highlands from the Lowlands, and the Highland Scots retained the Gaelic language (perhaps the "Old Tongue") and many of the more "barbarian" attributes of the Gaelic Celts.

Plus: Exhibit A

I understand there are some who argue, quite literally, that the Seven Kingdoms are the Heptarchy, or the Biblical Seven Kingdoms.  But that's just silly.

The North = Scotland.  Stand by for hearty stews and trenchers!

Let's Start at the Very...Start?

So, I have finished book five, watched all episodes of season two...twice.  And what to do, what to do until season three next year, or book six sometime before my yet to be born children reach adulthood. (GRRM will NOT be confined by publishing deadlines!)

One of the things I have enjoyed most about the books are the mouth watering descriptions of food.  Food, glorious food.  I thought it would be fun and interesting to do a culinary romp through the worlds of Ice and Fire, thus the genesis of this blog.

A few ground rules as they were:

1. Dishes will appear largely in the order in which they appear in the books, with support where applicable.
2. I will attempt to keep ingredients as close to historically accurate as possible, which should be good for folks on raw food type diets.  The men of the Night's Watch did not have high fructose anything, thank you very much.
3. I will try to keep to "locally available ingedients".  To do so, I will be drawing parallells between various locations in the books and their real world counterparts.  These locations will be announced as I decide what they are.

So this is it, my intro post.  Look forward to trenchers and more trenchers full of...well...stuff.

PS...does anyone else think that Westeros looks an awful lot like Kalimdor in this map?