You Can Now Make 'The Sims' Favorite French Toast in the Real World

Food serves its purpose in video games as a life source; a standard healing method to keep you in the fight. But considering the modern nerd, many gamers have reproduced plenty of virtual reality snacks over the years to help kitchen savvy dweebs make all the cakes, steaks, and cocktails from every conceivable place in virtual reality. There's a good chance that many of the virtual items have never been reproduced for dinner party's because it's more fun to look at them online. But one writer and photographer, Holly Green, has created a cookbook called Fry Scores, inspired by decade-spanning titles for every day dishes you can make in your own kitchen. The heart of the cookbook is grounded in convenient, real-world approaches to dishes from the virtual world without sacrificing the dorkiness.

"Around the time that I came up with the idea for the cookbook, there were a couple things floating around on Tumblr," says Green. "Many people recreate things they've seen in video games. I remember seeing a recipe for sweet rolls from Elder Scrolls. There were a couple of small blogs, but they were doing really obscure, impractical kind of stuff." Shortly after writing out a list of video games that made her hungry, the idea emerged to pursue a cookbook, but one more sensible than the unregulated fantasia of geeky food blogs.

"I wanted it to be more accessible," says Green. "Sure, it's cute when you want to eat that ice cream bar from Kingdom Hearts that tastes like sea salt, but are people going to have the equipment to make that all the time, let alone want to eat it? It just felt like, maybe not."

Fry Scores has 24 recipes that are all inspired by the likes of Skyrim and Minecraft, but could also be presented at your next dinner party without any context. The roast chicken from Castle Crashers, apple pie from Fable II, and deviled eggs from Fallout 3 aren't dishes that can be exclusively found in alleyway crates from Streets of Rage 2.

There are options for the ambitious, or at least weird. Like Yeto's Soup from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which incorporates pumpkin, sockeye salmon and goat cheese, and one of the few recipes from video game land that's required to beat a dungeon. And then there's the cult Sinner's Sandwich, a menacing marriage of turkey, jam, and corn flakes from the even cultier Deadly Premonition. "Sinner's Sandwich is one of the ones where I had the basic ingredients, but I had to do a little bit of the guess work," says Green. "I knew there was strawberry jam. I knew there was turkey. But, they don't specify the cereal. I had to look at the in-game renders, and to me, it looks like your basic Corn Flakes. But there's a couple things you can try, like Rice Chex and Captain Crunch, which work pretty good."

And just because practicality is on the menu doesn't mean Green doesn't incorporate some odd details in some of the more conventional dishes in the cookbook. The Burger Time recipe includes a pickle and a fried egg, a revenge on goons from the game who chased you around ladders and lettuce. The Sims-inspired French Toast can be baked in the oven, not just a pan, because that's how the animation does it.

The game that makes me the hungriest, Muramasa: The Deamon Blade, has made the cut, a title that Green says was requested a lot. She chose the humble onigiri, a common snack in Japan but a treat most Western gamers likely have no idea how to actually put together. This is joined by pork katsu (Cooking Mama) and daigaku imo (Persona 4) as traditional Japanese dishes replicated in the games made by their industry, but by no means harder to make anywhere else. The food, that is.

"This was not just about the novelty," says Green, "I wanted to provide advice so people could cook for themselves, and have recipes that were accessible to everybody. On top of that, not only were the recipes close to my heart, but I've literally been making and adapting some of them for decades."

Green says she knows a lot of game players and press who are as much real-world wizards behind skillets as they are in Gauntlet, but she's also met a lot of game fans that are clueless in the kitchen.

While I'll continue to appreciate the vividly illustrated dishes in Muramasa: The Deamon Blade, the same video game that has waxed New Nordic after it told me to cook a sweet potato by burning it in a pile of leaves, I think I'll stick to simpler recipes from Holly's book when I'm trying to survive in the real world.