The HBO series Game of Thrones is back on our screens and what better excuse to stuff yourself to brimming with medieval fare! Read on to find out how to host a Game of Thrones dinner party.
Game of Thrones is based on George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, a seven-book saga filled with tales of desire, ambition, violence and food. Lots of food. With that in mind, we've whipped up a sumptuous menu for you and your friends and some decoration ideas to create the ultimate medieval fantasy themed dinner party.
Invites
Summon your guests to a great feast with a beautiful handwritten invitation. Add a wax seal to your envelope and any other embellishments you fancy such as a quill or burnt edges. In Westoros, invitations would be sent by ravens but we suggest relying on the postal service.
Menu
The web has plenty of resources to help you devise your menu. The fantastic food blog Inn at the Crossroads has pages of recipes all inspired by Martin's books. You can also find
Game of Thrones themed food on the
Cooking Ice and Fire blog, plus there are several
Game of Thrones cookbooks
Feast of Ice and fire and
The Unofficial Game of Thrones Cookbook: From Direwolf Ale to Auroch Stew — More Than 150 Recipes from Westeros and Beyond to name a couple.
We recommend making Chinese tea eggs to serve as "dragon eggs" for a starter. These snacks are made by hard-boiling eggs, gently cracking their shells, and putting them on a slow simmer in an aromatic infusion of black tea, cinnamon, star anise and whole cloves. The tea flavours the egg, and also imparts a sepia tint that gives the egg an antique, marbled look.
Serve as an antipasto platter alongside exotic fruit such as fresh melon and half a pomegranate, to make it look as though it comes from beyond the narrow sea. Add some kangaroo prosciutto and tell your guests it is Dothraki horse.
Impress your guests with a roast suckling pig with walnut and apple stuffing fit for King Robert Baratheon for the main course.
There are plenty of recipes online for lemon cakes (Sansa's favourite) for dessert. A recipe for lemon cakes features on the official Game of Thrones production diary.
Or, if you want to make dessert a talking point, serve a delicious but grotesque-looking sweet, reminiscent of the stallion heart Daeneyrs has to eat to prove herself to the Dothraki. This dessert "heart" on the Inn at the Crossroads website is made from red velvet cake.
You could also serve up some visual puns like "Take the Black" (bean dip), "John Snow" (peas) or give everyone gift bags of purple jelly beans and call it "Tears of Lys" (the name of a poison in the novel series).
Drinks
For drinks, opt for mead if you can get it. The ancient honey wine is fairly easy to brew at home, just needing honey, water, yeast and brewing time. There is a glut of information on how to home-brew this ancient concoction, such as this
Serious Eats recipe.
An easier alternative is buy some wine and beer and change the labels to "Wines of the Arbor" and "Blood of the Dragon ale".
To get the party started, serve up some flaming Sambuca shots and rename them "Shots of Ice and Fire".
Costumes and theming
Dress up in medieval clothes and assign each of the guests a
house sigil from one of the various houses in
Game of Thrones.
Print out a map of Westoros and hang it in on your wall. Use a simple burlap cotton as a table cloth and decorate with a "crown" centrepiece made of thorns from your garden spray painted gold.
Now read: Throw a TV or movie themed dinner party with these ideas
