The idea of a pop culture cookbook is nothing new – 50 years ago, you could pick up The Partridge Family Cookbook or whip up some frontier foods that could have been eaten in the Little House on the Prairie. But as fans have gotten more passionate about all sorts of pop culture, this ultra-niche cookbook genre has only expanded.

Take, for example, the Tomb Raider cookbook, which is based on a nearly 20-year-old video game franchise with a massive following. The main character Lara Croft doesn’t actually cook in the game, but that didn’t dissuade Seattle author Tara Theoharis.

“We actually made it into a travel guide and focused on recipes from every single location she has been in all of her games,” she said.

Theoharis has penned a slew of pop culture cookbooks, including the official Minecraft cookbook, the official Pixar cookbook and her newest, A RomCom Cookbook, which she says was tricky because often memorable foods from romantic comedies are not supposed to be delicious.

“The blue soup is a great example,” she said, referring to a soup in the movie “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” where blue twine accidentally colors the dish.

“It’s a really good potato leek soup and if you want to add that blue food coloring to turn it blue, you want to add that piece of string to kind of signify where it’s from, you are welcome to do so,” Theoharis said. “But if you’re just looking for a great potato leek soup recipe, you can use it that way too.”

For Portland author Chelsea Cole, her foray into pop culture cookbooks came by accident.

“I was six months pregnant with my son and just scrolling on my couch and my cousin posted about her Sims cookbook. And I was like, ‘What? Like The Sims computer game?’ I mean, I loved The Sims back in the day, but like, why is there a cookbook?”

That took Cole down a rabbit hole of fan cookbooks, and she quickly noticed that there was a fan cookbook for almost everything, except “I was looking through all these and noticed there wasn’t an ACOTAR cookbook.”

ACOTAR, for the uninitiated, is shorthand for A Court of Thorns and Roses, the fantasy romance series by author Sarah J. Maas. The series has sold over 13 million copies, and on TikTok, #acotar has 8.9 billion views. So when Cole saw there wasn’t already a cookbook dedicated to the franchise, she knew she had to get busy.

“I’m seeing like a Game of Thrones cookbook, a Minecraft cookbook and I’m sure that those sell well,” she said, “But the audience for those is not quite as excited to buy a cookbook, probably, as an ACOTAR audience.”

Cole started with a reread of the whole series, using a search function on her Kindle to pinpoint certain scenes.

“That helped a ton because I would be like, ‘I think I remember this scene with chocolate cookies,’ and I could search the whole series that way,” she said.

The cookbook is about 40% recipes inspired by holidays, scenes, and characters in the series and 60% recipes of food that is directly mentioned – including an unnamed soup served before a pivotal scene in the second ACOTAR book, “A Court of Mist and Fury.”

“So I polled everyone I knew and said, ‘What kind of soup did you think it was?’ And I got three responses – it was either beef and vegetable, tomato soup or chicken noodle,” Cole said. “I have to be honest, it is the recipe I am most nervous about getting feedback from because I’m sure people will have very strong feelings.”

At the beginning of the month, “A Feast of Thorns and Roses” was released to an excited group of Portland ACOTAR readers and foodies. And yes, they had thoughts on what type of soup they thought it would be.

One book launch attendee said minestrone, another potato soup. Ali Murphy first said she thought it was a vegetable soup, but then clarified with a laugh, “I was thinking it was a weird broth with some floating vegetables in it.”

And Murphy is the target audience for a cookbook like this.

“I love a theme, I love a dinner party, I like cooking,” she said. “Between book clubs, and my friends and all the people who are reading this series, I think that it would be super fun to host something and make some of the things out of the cookbook.”

But pop-culture cookbooks are not just passion projects for superfans. They’re also big business.

“Insight makes a lot of pop culture cookbooks,” said Tara Theoharis. “It’s definitely a large part of their publishing library.”

Theoharis explained that some publishers will bring potential cookbook ideas to her, but she has to be selective about what she chooses.

“I will only take on the ones that I am a huge fan of, that I understand the memes and the Easter eggs, and I know the language that those fans are using because I want it to be as authentic as possible.”

And in being selective, she gets to have the definitive last word on the recipes.

“For me, when I was writing the Pixar cookbook, I was like, ‘My recipes are canon,‘” she said, “They are a part of the Pixar universe. I’m making the official Pizza Planet pizza and the official Ratatouille and it felt really special.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/04/05/pop-culture-cookbooks-pacific-northwest-authors-feast-of-thorns-and-roses/