World of Warcraft: The Official Cookbook by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel

Trump. Politics. North Korea. Who gives a shit about any of that when we can use a book to RECREATE FOOD FROM A SHITTY ONLINE VIDEO GAME?

This is a nice cover and all but I can't escape the surreal realization that a chicken died so we could have a WoW cookbook.

Okay so normally I'm reviewing some asshole's book about Trump or Hillary or something but my girlfriend got me the officially licensed World of Warcraft cookbook for Christmas. Two things you may not know about me is that I love to cook and I hate video games, so it was only natural that my girlfriend confuse me with a mixed gift. I'd be asking myself if I should hate the book for being about World of Warcraft or embrace it for its culinary aspects if I wasn't too busy poising the question of what the point of reviewing this product is.

Okay fine so I admit that I was slightly intrigued, if only in curious inquiry, as to what this book entailed. Obviously it's a "fan product" for WoW players, so any review of it is inherently a bit pointless. No one really buys this book because it's a good cookbook, they buy it because it tells them what temperature to heat oil to in order to fry the perfect fried ogre dick or whatever. The subject of the book is clever, it's all about recreating in-game dishes that exist for players to consume in World of Warcraft, but how does it measure up to being a decent product?

The answer is, honestly: pretty good. The book is colorful, the photographs of the food are really well composed, the pages are heavy-duty gloss plastic pages so thick and durable you could chop a finger off on one of them. In fact, my one biggest complaint is that the book doesn't really feel or look like an actual cookbook at all. Because it's technically not a "real" cookbook, it's just a compendium of collected recipes laid out into an organized format that is categorized by food type, along with full-color photos of finished dishes and extensive indexing of each entry that merely happens to be printed in a book. It's more like a book of cooking, if you will. 

I certainly wouldn't want to keep a book like this in my kitchen, where it'd get all stained and fucked up and where the other cookbooks would make fun of it and bully it and tell it to go back to the bookshelf with all the "other novels". If this book and my Betty Crocker binder-bound 2,000 recipe tome were in prison together, the WoW cookbook would be the Betty Crocker cookbook's bitch. The Betty Crocker cookbook would make the WoW cookbook eat a Snickers candy bar out of its asshole. The Betty Crocker cookbook would sell the WoW cookbook's ass to a Better Homes and Garden's cookbook for a cigarette. And then the Better Homes and Garden's cookbook would make the WoW cookbook eat a Snickers candy bar out of its ass. The WoW cookbook would eat a lot of Snickers from assholes, to say the very least.

As for the recipes themselves, they range from "Pretty Okay" to "Chelsea Monroe-Cassel You Can't Make An Entire Entry Just Cooking A Steak You Can't Do That They Have Laws About That Chelsea Monroe-Cassel You Can Be Arrested For This". Like I said before, what this book really comes down to is that it's a fan piece for fans. It's serviceable as a cookbook and you can have fun with it, recreating all the same dishes your virtual avatar dined upon as you tried in vain to repress the crippling realization that you were wasting the small amount of time you have on this planet by forcing a cartoon elf to eat a bunch of bread.

For instance, one entry in the book is for a recipe that is essentially just a cinnamon bun that you make look like a claw to emulate the appearance of a WoW treat. Another is an entry for a recipe that is just a gingerbread-variation cookie but cut to resemble how the cookie appears in game. These recipes aren't useless or bad, but the book doesn't contain anything that's ultra original or can't be found in non-WoW-ified versions in any other cookbook. WoW fans and general nerd types will probably appreciate the book regardless of all of this, but it really puts the book into the category of "fan merchandise" and less in the category of "cookbook". 

The point isn't to give us new or imaginative recipes, but merely to find the closest real world takes on virtual WoW food. But to the book's credit, it serves this purpose well. It's a sturdy product and even if 35 dollars is asking a bit much for a cookbook with only pretty basic recipes, you have to remember it's a licensed product (for comparison, my Betty Crocker book has almost 2,000 recipes and was 50 bucks, the WoW cookbook is only around 200 recipes for 35 smackaroonies). It's not something that should be kept in a kitchen, rather it's more for fan shrines or a bookshelf. The cover of the book is very smooth with reflective gloss accents, something that would go to shit if you stored it in a kitchen where steam and fry grease were able to assault it on a normal basis.

So, my final verdict is that it's a cute product. It's durable and well made but really won't hold up in a kitchen environment. I would be nervous just cracking the thing open to keep by me while cooking from it. The recipes are simple but it's fun to see fake video game food made with real ingredients and I'll give the author credit on some imaginative substitution work in some of the recipes. As an actual cook book it's recipes aren't the best written, but they're legible and can easily be followed. If you like World of Warcraft and you don't mind spending a little extra money on a cookbook, then go ahead and buy it. 

POINTLESS NUMERICAL SCORE:

7/10

It's good for what it is.

POINTLESS NUMERICAL SCORE (ADJUSTED TO ACCOUNT FOR THE FACT THAT DEEP FRIED CANDY BAR ISN'T IN THE BOOK):

0/10

Did you think I wouldn't notice, Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, you fucking fiend?