Concerning Food, Drink, and Pipeweed

There was hot soup, cold meats, a blackberry tart, new loaves, slabs of butter, and half a ripe cheese: good plain food, as good as the Shire could show, and homelike enough to dispel the last of Sam’s misgivings (already much relieved by the excellence of the beer).

—From JRR Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring

If there’s one thing hobbits are experts on, it’s food and drink. Not fancy food and drink, mind you, because hobbits like good plain food—but plenty of it. Many of the rooms branching out from Bag End’s central passageway are larders, and both Bilbo and later Frodo kept them well stocked. After receiving the Unexpected Party, which saw thirteen dwarves and one wizard sitting in his front parlor waiting for dinner to be served, Bilbo was always on the alert for guests. Frodo, having his own circle of friends, knew from experience that a lot of food is necessary in order to be considered a polite host.

However, hobbits aren’t the only creatures in Middle-earth concerned with food and drink. Long, rich traditions exist among dwarves, elves, men, and even other creatures (Ents, for instance, know a thing or two about drinks). Let’s consider some elements of this rich culinary tradition and what lessons they may hold for adventurers and travelers.

Hobbits

As earlier mentioned, hobbits eschew fancy foods prepared in rich sauces with exotic garnishes. They like plain food, and they serve it warm from the oven.

Meats

Hobbits raise pigs, cows, and sheep, but cattle are more often used for milk and sheep for wool than as meat sources. However, it’s by no means unusual for hobbits to sit down to a hearty meal of roast beef, stewed to perfection with some herbs, salt, and potatoes. Roast mutton, too, makes a regular appearance in hobbit households, as well as bacon and sausages. There’s a brief mention of cold chicken in The Hobbit, and hobbits are fond of eggs, so there must be chickens somewhere.

Two things that are off the hobbit diet are lamb and veal, so if you stop by the Floating Log or the Green Dragon for some evening sustenance, don’t expect to see those dishes on the menu.

Hobbits are experienced hunters; many are capable with bows, and just about any hobbit has skill throwing rocks (and darts and quoits and anything else that requires some skill to throw). The result is that hobbits are well supplied with game, including deer, pheasant, pigeon, boar (rather rare in the Shire), and fox (lean, and not especially good to eat, but palatable in a period of famine).

Dried Meat

Hobbits are skilled at all sorts of meat preparation, including drying meat into jerky as provender for journeys. They don’t make jerky a lot, since hobbits don’t take journeys all that much, but every now and then when some adventurous party of halflings takes it into their heads to ride out to Bree for a couple of nights, it’s handy to take along a few strips of dried meat.

Hobbits also know how to dry fruits for journeys and how to preserve them (see the next page).

Vegetables

In our world, the closest cousins to hobbits are Englishmen from the 1930s and 1940s. Therefore, it’s a given that all hobbit vegetables are cooked only one way: boiled to extinction. It’s a pity, really, because hobbits are expert gardeners and grow wonderful, flavorful produce. However, they are wont to toss shelled peas into a pot of boiling water, add a pinch of salt, and leave them to boil for half an hour. The resulting dull, gray mass can be shoveled down a hobbit’s well-muscled throat in vast quantities.

Cheese

Hobbits are expert cheese makers, and in most hobbit holes, as well as inns along the Road, the weary traveler can find everything from bleu cheese to ripe cheddar. Cheese is usually served with the main meal, not as a separate dish, and can be taken on long journeys, as long as it is left in its rind and wrapped in leaves to keep it from drying out. Hobbits have been known to add such ingredients to their cheeses as beer, horseradish, and port wine, but as a rule they prefer simple cheeses to more complex ones.

Fruits

Hobbits adore fruit, both raw and cooked. In the year 1420, after the scouring of the Shire to remove the servants of the wizard Saruman, hobbit children “sat on the lawns under the plum-trees and ate, until they had made piles of stones like small pyramids or the heaped skulls of a conqueror, and then they moved on.” A strange, ghastly image to accompany gluttony, but there you are.

In addition to gorging themselves on plums, apricots, apples, pears, and peaches, hobbits enjoy strawberries in cream, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries, as well as rare fruits such as quince and persimmons that are scarcely found elsewhere in Middle-earth. Hobbits are adept at baking, creating an array of pies, tarts, scones, and fruit-laden biscuits. Fruit is also the basis of some hobbit wines and liqueurs.

Fruit is an essential part of the supplies of any traveler, and there are no better apples than those found in the orchards of the Shire.

Mushrooms

These are the quintessential hobbit food; as a lad, Frodo Baggins ranges over the Shire in search of them, venturing onto the lands of Farmer Maggot, with dismal consequences (for Frodo, that is). Mushrooms come in many varieties, and hobbits learn at an early age to distinguish between those that are good to eat and those best left alone. They can be cooked into such concoctions as mushroom and bacon pie (enough to feed a farmhouse full of hungry hobbits, and that’s really saying something) and baked mushroom tart. Hobbits have even been known to eat them raw or with a little butter.

Butter, Cream, Jam, and Milk

Speaking of butter, churns are always busy around the Shire, turning out butter and cream. Butter can be wrapped in leaves and stored in a cool place, but it must be used relatively quickly. For this reason, the traveler is advised to forgo butter on his or her bread and to be contented with jam made from berries or quince.

There’s plenty of milk, but alas, like butter, it spoils easily and should be drunk soon after it’s produced. For the traveler, stick to ale or wine—or water, in a pinch.

Baking and Pickling

Hobbits bake constantly; this is necessary, given how much they eat. Bilbo was an experienced baker who produced tarts, pies (both meat and fruit varieties), and cakes (especially seed-cake). Some bakers among hobbits produce their wares for inns, but most hobbits bake what’s necessary for their home consumption. Consequently, many fields of wheat and corn flourish throughout the Shire, and the miller of Hobbiton is a significant personage in the community.

Like all communities not possessed of refrigeration, the hobbits of the Shire are skilled at pickling and preserving in heavy stone crocks. They pickle not only cucumbers but vegetables of all kinds, including tomatoes, onions, beans, and beets.

What to Expect if You Invite a Hobbit to Dinner

Don’t plan on having leftovers. Hobbits will eat until there’s nothing left. They sail through the main meal, polish off dessert, and sit back for coffee and after-dinner drinks while “filling up the corners” with any odd scraps and bits of food within reach. Hobbits aren’t picky about food, so long as there’s plenty of it and it keeps coming.

Dwarves

Dwarves have much the same tastes as hobbits and agree with hobbits that meals are best when they are large and frequent. However, dwarves, much more than hobbits, are prepared to subsist on shortened rations for a long time. They take great pride in their ability to endure long, hard marches with little food or drink. Because of their keen ability to handle fire, dwarves are skilled at cooking (another trait they share with hobbits).

Camping Out With Dwarves

Particularly because of their skill in kindling and maintaining fires (even in the worst conditions) and their tendency to make long journeys on tight rations, dwarves are skilled at outdoor cookery. Give them a few rabbits, hares, and possibly a small sheep, and they can make a meal fit for a king—or even a hungry hobbit. Hobbits are good at cooking, too, but only if the meat has been prepared by the butcher and the vegetables have been picked and washed. Dwarves, however, enjoy the down-and-dirty aspects of cooking, from gutting and skinning an animal to plucking a fowl and cutting it up for roasting. The chief lesson here is that hobbits may be more food-centric, but dwarves make the best cooks.

Cram

For their long journeys, many of which take them to lands and places where food is scarce, dwarves have developed a kind of travel cracker called cram. It lasts practically forever and can be eaten raw, cooked, or dipped in a little wine or water to soften it. Unfortunately, it tastes like compacted sawdust, and even dwarves admit that a steady diet of cram can’t be reasonably endured for more than a few weeks. (It does, however, keep you regular if you eat it constantly.) However, cram contains enough nutrients to keep an adult dwarf on his feet for a long day of marching and fighting.

Dwarf Ale

Dwarves and hobbits seem to have simultaneously developed the art of brewing ale—at any rate, both claim a long pedigree for their practices, so we can assume they were both doing it at about the same time. Dwarf ale tends to be stronger than the varieties hobbits brew (perhaps because the dwarves’ greater body mass can absorb the alcohol). Hobbits, however, create a greater variety of drinks. Not all dwarves like ale; Thorin, for example, drinks red wine when visiting Bilbo, although this seems to be a matter of status as well as taste.

When drinking dwarf ale, drink carefully and slowly. A dwarf, when going strong, is fully capable of drinking you under the table in ten minutes flat. Don’t worry if your dwarf companion is ordering his fourth pint while you’re still working on your first. There’s no rush. Savor the ale going down, and there will be less chance of it coming back up.

Elves

Elves, befitting their ethereal nature, are less attached to food and drink than the other races of Middle-earth. Although they have been known to eat meat, their diet is largely vegetarian—one can imagine elf tofu and other meatless dishes making an appearance at Galadriel’s table.

Elf Feasts

The feast given by Elrond Halfelven at Rivendell to celebrate the arrival of Frodo and his companions certainly seems substantial enough. Frodo spends a long time concentrating on his plate before he bothers to look up at his surroundings, so we can assume that Elrond has supplied his guests with food to their liking. At the same time, Elrond himself and his companions don’t need much in the way of food.

If you have the good fortune to attend an elf feast, rest assured you will receive a plentiful supply of food that’s to your taste. But don’t be rude and turn your nose up at roasted acorns or sautéed tree sprouts, or some other sylvan fare. You might actually like it.

Eating on the Road

It so happens that Frodo, Pippin, and Sam have an opportunity to sample elven road food when they leave the Shire. Upon encountering Gildor and some of his companions, the hobbits are invited to take part in a feast in the forest late at night. The food includes “bread, surpassing the savour of a fair white loaf to one who is starving; and fruits sweet as wildberries and richer than the tended fruits of gardens.” Not bad for a pick-up meal with a few extra guests. As magical beings, elves don’t seem to worry about keeping anything fresh. However, if you get food for a journey from the elves, don’t expect it to stay good forever. Eat the bread immediately and it will taste almost as good as it did the night before. Leave it for a few days, and you’ll find yourself eating ordinary bread, with just a hint of elvish magic.

Lembas, Elvish Waybread

The elves have their own version of dwarvish cram: lembas. In appearance it’s similar to cram. However, it’s far tastier and more nutritious, and it stays good pretty well forever. As an added advantage, orcs (and Gollum) don’t like its taste or smell, so they’re not likely to eat up your supplies if you’re captured (although if you’re captured by orcs, food is likely to be the least of your problems).

WAYBREAD BLUEBERRY TART

If, by some chance, you happen to come across a large supply of lembas, consider using it as the basis of other cooking. Here’s a quick recipe for Waybread Blueberry Tart:

Crust:

2 cups lembas, crumbled

1⁄2 cup shortening

Filling:

11⁄2 cup blueberries, rinsed

1⁄2 cup brown sugar

1⁄4 pound butter

1⁄3 cup blueberry jam

Mix the lembas with the shortening until thick. Press into the bottom of a tart pan. Bake over an open fire until firm (30 minutes, moving to avoid scorching) or in a closed oven at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.

Mix blueberries with jam, and fill tart. Sprinkle lightly with brown sugar and dot with butter. Return to fire or oven and bake until done

Guaranteed to keep the biggest man, elf, or dwarf on his feet for two days. Guaranteed to keep a hobbit on his feet and away from the dinner table for three hours.

Men

Humans have varying tastes in food, depending on where they’re from. In the south, near Gondor, foods tend to be more heavily spiced than in the north. This difference reflects the trade between Gondor and other lands such as Rhûn and Harad.

Rangers such as Aragorn are skilled hunters, and meat is an important part of their diets. If you fall in with a party of men, expect a lot of venison (or possibly mutton) roasted on a spit. You’ll also find dried fruit, nuts, and cheese. If you eat in one of the higher houses in Minas Tirith, you’ll be offered wine and white cakes, along with other well-prepared fare.

Wines of Minas Tirith

Wines in the south of Middle-earth are stronger and earthier than the wines of the north. Southerners prefer red to white and spicy to bland. Minas Tirith is well known for its cellars, and the people of the city are wine connoisseurs of some note. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by the White City for a wine tasting. You won’t be sorry.

Dining With the Beornings

Beorn, the huge man (possibly part giant) who keeps open the passes of Mirkwood, is a vegetarian, subsisting mostly on clotted cream, bread, and honey. He evidently doesn’t object to the eating of flesh, as he gives the dwarves bows before they set out on their trek through the forest. But he himself doesn’t eat it. There isn’t word on whether this custom has passed to his descendants, but one presumes they keep up his custom of maintaining bee fields, filled with giant bees as big as hobbits.

If you happen to stop by the house of the Beornings to take afternoon tea, don’t baffle and offend your host by asking for the pork pies and sausages. Just eat your cream and honey and bread, and enjoy it.

Ents

Ents deserve a special mention because of the remarkable qualities of their drink. Ents don’t eat—or at least no one’s ever recorded the sighting of such a thing. But they drink a variety of drinks. Some Ent beverages are like wine and can intoxicate the unwary. Others are like a liquid meal, more satisfying and filling than sitting at board for hours with solid food. Ents, it must be presumed, brew the drinks themselves through some semimagical process. On hobbits, at least, these drinks have a considerable effect, making even fully mature hobbits grow between four and six inches in a matter of several weeks.

How to Drink With the Ents

Keeping in mind that Ents are at least twice (and possibly three times) as tall as you, the first rule is to be polite. Nothing angers an Ent more than someone who’s rude—except perhaps someone who’s careless with an axe. Second, drink slowly. Third, plan to order new clothes and shoes in a larger size.

Meals in the Shire

In Middle-earth, hobbits are the people most concerned with food and drink and the proper times for each. Since food is one of the centerpieces of their culture, they have elaborate rituals concerning it. (Other people have rituals, too—for instance, the people of Gondor, before each meal, face the West for a moment of silence in tribute to Elvenhome.)

First Breakfast

The hobbit day starts with breakfast, usually at about eight o’clock in the morning. A typical hobbit breakfast will include:

First breakfast serves to wake up the hobbit and make sure he’s ready to face the long day ahead—a day of possibly laboring in the fields to grow more food to sustain him in his quest to grow more food.

After breakfast, there’s the washing up; water has to be hauled from the well and heated, and dishes need to be scrubbed and set to dry in the rack. This is wearing work, and afterwards the typical hobbit needs some sustenance.

Second Breakfast

Second breakfast, usually taken at 10:30 a.m., can be eaten on the front lawn on nice days or possibly in the dining room by an open window. It includes:

After that’s been consumed and a pipe or two smoked, it’s time to clean up the second set of breakfast dishes. At this point, it’s time for Morning Tea, or Elevenses.

Elevenses

This is a light snack, intended to keep a hardworking hobbit going for a bit until lunchtime. It includes:

Elevenses shouldn’t take very long—from 11 to possibly 11:45 a.m., leaving a decent interval between the end of this meal and luncheon, which should be served at about 12:30. (Note that in Gondor, Elevenses is sometimes referred to as Nuncheon and is partaken by Knights of the City who have risen with first light and haven’t eaten since the previous evening’s meal. Very few hobbits ever become Knights of the City. Only one, in fact, and he complained a lot about the irregularity of meals.)

Luncheon

This is a significant meal, but it’s often taken at a nearby pub, since the hobbit is exhausted from his morning efforts of cooking first breakfast, second breakfast, and elevenses. A hobbit lunch consists of:

This is accompanied by the after-luncheon pipe (see page 17) and a short nap to recover his strength.

Tea

Teatime in the Shire is practically a religion. Bilbo, when he first goes away with the dwarves, is shocked to discover himself in places where people have never even heard of teatime.

No hobbit is ever really happy unless he or she is within calling distance of a tea kettle. (Bilbo, on the first part of his journey, keeps imagining himself back in his hole with the kettle just beginning to sing on the hob.) But tea consists of much more than the beverage alone. We can form a proper idea of it from the tea Bilbo is forced to give the dwarves and Gandalf when they appear on his doorstep at Bag End:

(Note that Bilbo doesn’t have any difficulty in supplying this enormous amount of food to the party; it’s just that the suddenness of it surprises him. It empties out his larders—a good thing, considering that he’s going to be out of town for the next year.)

Tea lasts from about 4 p.m. until 6 p.m. After that, there’s time for cleaning up and then, later, supper.

Supper

After the enormous tea, supper is a light meal. Nothing too strenuous this late at night. It includes:

And so, to bed. This list doesn’t include late-night snacks and sudden fits of midnight munchies, to which many hobbits are subject.

Food for the Average Hobbit

If, by chance, you find yourself with a hobbit houseguest, you’ll have to change your food purchasing habits. Here is the minimum of what you’ll need for a hobbit for a seven-day week:

If the hobbit is young, say, still in his or her tweens—increase these amounts by half.

Pipeweed

Pipeweed is the one pleasure that hobbits claim exclusively for themselves. Indeed, although Gandalf, Aragorn, and Gimli all smoke, they all seem to agree that pipeweed is grown exclusively in the Shire; even Saruman, when he wants to smoke, has to send away for Longbottom Leaf, rather than try to grow his own.

It so happens we know quite a bit about pipeweed, since Meriadoc Brandybuck wrote a short essay on the subject in the introduction to Herblore of the Shire.

True Pipeweed

The first true pipeweed of the Shire was grown by Tobold Hornblower in 1070 (Shire Reckoning), about 350 years before the War of the Ring. So hobbits had had a considerable amount of time to practice smoking. Tobold almost certainly got the plant from a hillside near Bree, so pipeweed had its actual origin outside the Shire. However, it’s the hobbits of the Fourth Farthings who perfected it and cultivated it to its current state.

Meriadoc notes that pipeweed actually grows in the south, around Gondor, but the people of Minas Tirith don’t know what to do with it and “esteem it only for the fragrance of its flowers.” (The people of Minas Tirith are generally ignorant of the powers of various herbs, as witnessed by their ignorance regarding the medicinal properties of kingsfoil in the aftermath of the Battle of the Pelinnor Fields.)

Varieties of Leaf

The only pipeweed we know much about is Longbottom Leaf, made by the Hornblower family. However, as with beer, each district in the Shire has its own favored pipeweed that it swears by. Meriadoc and Pippin smoke Longbottom Leaf because that’s what they find in the ruins of Isengard (part of Saruman’s personal stock, despite his sneers at Gandalf for letting the weed of the halflings cloud his judgment.) One thing we can be reasonably sure of is that pipeweed, belonging as it does to the genus nicotiana, is addictive. Certainly Gimli becomes much less grumpy when Merry and Pippin provide him with some leaf and a pipe to go along with it.

Preparing Pipeweed

Pipeweed, after harvesting, should be dried by laying the leaves out in the sun. These are then crumbled and stored in leather pouches for smoking. The quality of pipeweed can be discerned by touch as well as smell. Connoisseurs are even able to make a reasonable guess from touch and smell as to the year of the harvest.

Pipes

The best pipes are baked clay or wood. Wooden pipes, after carving, must be tempered and cured. In general, the longer you smoke a pipe, the better the flavor it will produce, as the layers of pipe smoke are infused into the wood or clay. Clay pipes are considered best by some, but they’re easily broken. If you plan to do a lot of traveling that consists of crawling around dark tunnels or climbing fir trees to escape goblins and wolves, a wooden pipe is probably a better choice.

Smoke Rings

Hobbits and wizards (or, at least, one wizard) love to blow smoke rings. In fact, Meriadoc refers to smoking as an “art,” and one imagines that Gandalf would agree. The wizard not only blows magical smoke rings in Bilbo’s house during the Unexpected Party, he spends valuable time in Beorn’s hall blowing smoke rings and sending them chasing one another, dodging around pillars and so on, while Bilbo and the dwarves are stamping with impatience for some news about the intentions of their host. Bilbo has some skill at smoke rings, though there’s no sign he passed this ability on to his nephew.

If you want to impress a wizard, try blowing a few smoke rings. At the very least, it’ll distract him long enough for you to think up a better strategy.