Eating like Harry Potter
This past week, my friend and I decided to try out a recipe from the Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook by Dinah Bucholz. After much back-and-forth, we decided on Bangers and Mash with Fudge for dessert. This blog is just for fun and is not a recipe blog. Check out the Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook for the recipes.
Bangers and Mash are mentioned in Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix when Dumbledore’s army meets for the first time.
To start, we made the mashed potatoes, which we made by combining six boiled and soft potatoes with salt, pepper, butter, and milk. After a lot of mashing, we were left with tasty potatoes.
Next, we got started on the onion gravy. For this, we needed to cook down our yellow onion in vegetable oil and then add flour, chicken broth, and salt.
While the onion gravy was cooking, we started on the bangers. The bangers are a combination of ground pork, breadcrumbs, lemon zest, salt, nutmeg, sage, marjoram, thyme, black pepper, and egg yolks. Once you combine all that together, you cook it in butter until cooked and browned.
We plated on some beautiful Gryffindor plates and dug in.
For our dessert, we chose homemade fudge. Fudge is mentioned a few times throughout the books, but most notably it was given to Harry Potter by Mrs. Weasley for Christmas in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This is one of the first times Harry receives a gift and is an emotional scene in the book.
To make the fudge we combined milk, sugar, corn syrup, butter, heavy cream, salt, and cream of tarter. We then let it cook with a candy thermometer in it until it reached 238 degrees.
We then let the mixture cool down, added vanilla, and then stirred it for 10 minutes (this was a major arm workout). After that, we just had to let it cool in the pan!
This was a super fun way to get a meal and be more immersed in a book. I definitely recommend checking out your favorite book’s cookbook. They have them for Game of Thrones, Wizard of Oz, and many more. Some books include recipes as well, and I definitely plan to do a blog on that in the future.