Fallout Cookbook Review

This month, we greeted winter with a cookbook designed to help you face the winter when it goes nuclear. As a long time Fallout fan, I was very excited to crack into this book by Victoria Rosenthal. The previews from when it first released had me excited from the moment they landed, so I wasted no time when this arrived as a Christmas gift from a friend.
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The beauty of fandom cookbooks often lies in the references on each page. Sometimes, it can seem like a joke stretched too thin. This cookbook balances out the fan service with actual food. I want to eat the things I’m looking at. Two recipes in particular stood out to me as easy and accessible: The Blamco Mac and Cheese and ‘Radscorpion En Croute’.

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Mac and cheese is sacred. WE all have memories of a bright blue box and it’s cheese powder contents. Similarly, we all have to level up our mac and cheese game one day. Might I suggest this cookbook for the Blamco alone?  We keep a block of fontina cheese in the fridge to make this whenever we have a craving, and I spread the recipe like wildfire to my friends after the first time we made it.


I won’t blow the secret, but the spice of the thing is what makes it fabulous. We probably won’t be able to eat a mac and cheese at home without adding a little something extra beyond the cheese after trying the Blamco. The recipe yields a whole fuckload of food, so this becomes an accompaniment for lunches and dinners for another few days between my husband and I.


The radscorpion en croute is a lovely puff pastry formed into a coil and stuffed with chicken, artichoke hearts, and cheese. These too became wildly popular in my house during the month of January. They come together with minimal effort from the chef despite a relatively long cook time. If you buy store bought puff pastry, you’ve got to let it rest for almost a whole hour before you even roll up your coils. Then, it cooks for an additional fifty minutes. Still, you get twelve out of a single box of puff pastry, and they’re damn good as leftovers.

There are some good recipes here, but I don’t think I’d go out of my way to recommend it to someone who doesn’t enjoy the Fallout games. Most of the joy in the book comes from the references therein. Victoria Rosenthal did a wonderful job tailoring the recipes to the world, and the little additions made it vibrant.

That said, if you or someone you know is both an avid cook and video gamer, give this some consideration.