Fallout: The Vault Dweller's Official Cookbook by Victoria Rosenthal

I am utterly unqualified to give any kind of judgement on this book, for a couple of reasons. First, it's a cookbook, and I do basically no cooking these days. (I was an OK bachelor cook, and a similarly OK make-the-basics-for-the-kids cook when they were young, but The Wife is the main cook in this house these days, and even the secondary cook is now my second child at this point - so any skills I did have are quite atrophied.)

Second, I didn't use the book for its intended purpose: I didn't cook from it. I didn't even read it word-for-word, though I'm not sure if anyone reads cookbooks that way. I did go through all of the pages, reading big chunks of it, to get the sense of what's in it, but that's not the same thing.

So: Fallout: The Vault Dweller's Official Cookbook. A line extension from the popular series of video games - which I've been playing a lot this past decade - published in 2018, presumably as part of the promotional campaign for Fallout 76, the most recent game.

It's structured like a normal cookbook, with sections on Basics, Appetizers, Soups and Stews, Sides, Mains, Dessert, and Drinks. All of the recipes are relatively normal food, generally with ingredients commonly available to North Americans and using American measurements, with "emendations" to the names of dishes and some of the ingredients to allow them to be adapted to the post-apocalyptic Fallout world. So, for example, the recipe for Mutant Mantis Marsala uses chicken in the real directions and has a note that Vault Dwellers should substitute a different meat in the blasted wasteland.

As I said, I haven't cooked from it. But it looks entirely usable - it's not a joke or a fake, it's a real cookbook with real recipes that uses Fallout names and tells the reader how to make dishes that look like food from the Fallout world. That includes a lot of the staples of the series - details on making Nuka-Cola syrup, for example, and then using that to make a range of branded drinks. Readers can also make their own Fancy Lads Snack Cakes, Deathclaw Wellingham, and InstaMash, plus lots of other things that are not as obviously "this thing from this game" but use the names of animals and NPCs in the games  to be "a dish that this person could plausibly have made."

I don't know that we will actually cook from this book. My Wife's leisure activities do not extend to that kind of video gaming, so I'm not expecting a big groundswell of interest (from me, either - I love to play Fallout games but I'm not sure that means I want to make my own Buffout and eat it). But it is fun and full of good pictures of the recipes: it's a great, very specific cookbook that could be used to make a very amusing feast for the right gathering, or just a few random recipes to throw into the mix for some family.