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When stumbling about the Vatican in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, I came across a simple recipe for the simple pasta dish Cacio e Pepe. It's an oddly personal recipe addressed to someone's granddaughter and is filled with all sorts of unusual but funny Italian instructions, such as adding "enough pecorino to kill a donkey". Given how it was written, I assumed this was included in the game as a joke, but after gathering even more recipes and realizing that each one had an entire ingredients list on the back, I knew I had to try cooking some of these dishes myself.
Functional recipes are a rare treat in video games and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle doesn’t disappoint, featuring 11 full recipes covering dishes from Italy, Egypt, China, Siam, and Iraq – a veritable smorgasbord of culinary delights. But the proof is in the pudding, as they say, so I’ve put the writers at MachineGames to the test by trying out three of the recipes to see if they cut the mustard in… Indiana Jones and the Recipe for Disaster.
Risotto ai funghi
Of the three recipes Indy can nab in the Vatican, Giovanni's risotto ai funghi felt like the best place for Act I of this eating experience. I've made risottos before, so it would serve as a nice way to ease myself into this challenge. Or so I thought.
While the recipe's ingredients were exactly what you'd expect from a mushroom risotto (although the recipe does not specify that you should use arborio/risotto rice), the major issue was that it called for chanterelle mushrooms. It turns out these are difficult to find in UK supermarkets and aren't cheap – there was no way I was going to forage for my own either.
"No matter!", I thought. I figured I could just buy whatever slightly exotic mushroom variety I find and can add the dried porcini mushrooms necessary for the stock, despite the fact the recipe doesn't explicitly mention adding them to the risotto itself. These exotic mushrooms turned out to be shiitake mushrooms which I tenuously justified as an acceptable Great Circle-themed substitute due to the Japanese air raid that threatens Indy and Gina in Shanghai.
The risotto recipe itself was easy to follow, and in the end, I had a rich and earthy risotto with a bit of acidity from the white wine and funkiness from the masses of grated parmesan. Delicious enough that even my risotto-disliking dad said it was "excellent". A resounding success and a good start to my Indiana Jones and the Great Circle recipe testing. Until I woke up the next day.
Punished for my hubris in ignoring the recipe and adding the porcini mushrooms, I came down with food poisoning the following morning. That's my theory anyway. I reckon I may have got unlucky and ate a dodgy mushroom that hadn't rehydrated properly, though it's possible that something else entirely unrelated did me in. Either way, this could have potentially been avoided had I followed the recipe exactly – do as MachineGames says, not as I do!
Ful medames
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review: "The best adventure Indy has embarked on in over 30 years"
Since I was now in very unfamiliar territory with Egyptian cuisine, and needed a proper win after my illness, I chose the ful medames recipe – a kind of bean stew enjoyed all over the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East – for its simplicity and easy shortcuts. The main one being that tinned fava beans would let me get this dish done in minutes rather than hours. Like the chanterelle mushrooms, these proved elusive, so I had to settle for tinned broad beans, which are actually fava beans at an earlier and fresher stage in their life – close enough!
With that, the bulk of the Great Circle's ful medames recipe can be summarized as: "put things in a pot to make beans taste delicious". The punchy lemon, garlic, and cumin mixed nicely with the more fatty and starchy beans and lashings of olive oil, making for a hearty meal.
The recipe also calls for a secret ingredient – a mix of pastirma cured meat and tahini – but I'm not sure this added much. Though I admit I had to use pastrami as I couldn't find pastirma in a small quantity, so maybe I set myself up for disappointment.
However, adding a flatbread to scoop the beans like an edible spoon was a much better idea, adding something extra to such a simple but satisfying dish. I can completely understand why this was, and seemingly still is, a popular breakfast dish in Egypt – perfect for providing the energy you need to stop the Nazis reconstructing the Great Circle.
Thot man pla
The final act of this gastronomical globetrot was making thot man pla, a Thai fish cake dish with a sweet and spicy dipping sauce. It stood out as something a little challenging but achievable, and given my previous failures with sourcing ingredients, I also wanted it to be as accurate as possible.
I failed at the first hurdle. "Catch a good bounty of clown featherback fish", the recipe says, and I can't fish. In my defense, clown featherbacks do not exist in UK waters and, according to some of the modern recipes I checked, any kind of white fish is acceptable, so I went for cod. I even managed to get holy basil, a herb I had never heard of before and will probably never use again.
Gathering ingredients wasn't even the hardest part about making thot man pla. The main issue is that the recipe's ingredients list bafflingly uses deciliters for some items, which is not only a unit of measure I had never seen before, but also one for volume and not mass. What does 1.5 deciliters of green beans look like? Thankfully, my guess of 150 grams seemed about right.
After the measurements debacle, the recipe was actually very easy, largely thanks to my food processor. Blitz the fish, add in all the other bits, and blitz some more, then form the mix into small patties – I made seven, but I reckon you could get 10 out of this recipe. Next, blend the garlic, chilli, and other ingredients for the dip and let it all simmer a little in a pan while you fry the fish cakes. You'll be left with fragrant, spicy, and salty fish cakes that are complemented well by the sweet, sour, and spicy dip, which was the surprise star of the recipe for me and makes this my favourite dish of the bunch.
Despite a rough start and a slightly tricky end to the challenge, perhaps my Recipe for Disaster should be a Recipe for Success. All three of these Indiana Jones and the Great Circle recipes were excellent and I could definitely see myself cooking any of them again. Thanks to the unique ingredients, unconventional measurements, or lack of specific instructions, each recipes' quirks also presented interesting challenges to overcome and made the recipes feel even more authentic to me. It's clear they haven't been rigorously kitchen-tested and certainly weren't written with an international audience in mind.
Instead, all 11 recipes have been crafted by the writers at MachineGames to not only be functional and edible, but also to fit naturally into the world of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, whether they're translated from ancient tablets or are family recipes passed to a granddaughter or nephew. They're such a small part of the game but are a worthwhile inclusion and worth pursuing as a player, helping to show off a little bit of the cultures that are threatened by Voss and his fascist cronies, and it's something you just can't get from any of the Indiana Jones movies. Food poisoning and all.
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