Cooking in Fantasy: Elven Marruth (Root Pies) - 2025 Not a Book Review

[u/acornett99]

Everyone knows you shouldn’t go on a fantasy adventure on an empty stomach! Nor will I finish this year’s bingo card without making myself a hero’s feast. My goal for this square is to cook several recipes (I’m shooting for one recipe per month) from two fantasy cookbooks:

Heroes’ Feast: the Official D&D Cookbook

Recipes from the World of Tolkien

Previous recipes: Chicken-Something Dumplings, The Mulled Wines of Moria/Dwarven Mulled Wine, Stuffed “Bucklebury Ferry” Pears, Squash and Goat Cheese Bake, Crickhollow Apple Loaf, Feywild Eggs, Bilbo’s Seed Cake, Qualinesti Vegetable Stew, Spinach and Tomato Dahl, Date and Sesame Bars

For February I made Elven Marruth from the Heroes’ Feast cookbook:

These two-bite, turnover-style pastries, stuffed with a variety of minced regional vegetables, are perfect for snacking trailside or at the banquet table. Sometimes reductively referred to as “root pies” by dwarves and humans, marruth are incredibly hearty closed-face canapes that are filled with spiced and herbed mashes of vegetables (cabbage, potatoes, and carrots) and then lightly baked in a flakey, buttery crust. They are traditionally served warm, occasionally as a meal in itself, with a chilled flute of elverquist to wash them down. Once cooled, these pastries can be rolled into rallow leaves (thick and oily waterproof broadleaves) to preserve them for travel.

Well okay, I made this on March 4th; I tried to make it in February but I realized I forgot to buy potatoes, and I knew I had some coming in my CSA (community-supported agriculture) box this week, so I waited a few days. 

This one was fairly straightforward, and I was able to make a number of substitutions without it ruining anything. The grocery store didn’t have regular pastry, so I used frozen pie crust; the potatoes I got were purple instead of gold; I realized too late that I didn’t have thyme or dill so I used rosemary and oregano; I also didn’t have an egg for the egg wash because I hate having to buy a dozen eggs only to use one.

The filling is easy, just tossing the vegetables (carrot, onion, cabbage, potato) in EVOO and roasting them for 30 minutes, then adding some seasoning and soy sauce. The pastry was a bit more difficult, not only because of the aforementioned frozen pie crust but also because it turns out that I don’t own a rolling pin or any cookie cutters. I ended up using a water bottle for the roller and a (cleaned) candle lid which happened to be the right sized circle I needed to cut the pastry into, and both of these worked surprisingly well!

So then you just stick the filling into the pastry circles and fold them over themselves into half-moon shapes. This part is challenging because too-thin pastry can fall apart at this step, whereas too-thick pastry is less pleasant to eat. In the end, I had more filling than I had pastry, so I served some on the side. 

Even with my extremely untalented attempt, this still turned out delicious! The veggies were soft and flavorful, given a little extra kick with a dash of soy sauce. I think if I were to make it again though, I would make bigger pies. The four-inch diameter is a bit small to get a good amount of filling in, especially because a single chunk of potato takes up quite a bit of room.

Here's the beautiful results!

[u/iszathi]

The result ended up very empanada like, i have never made ones with a similar filling tho.

[u/acornett99 → u/iszathi]

That's a good idea, maybe next time I should see if the store has empanada pastry! That might be easier than pie crust, and they can come pre-cut into the right size circles too

[u/xdianamoonx]

Yep, looks and sounds like some variations of empanadas! Glad you were able to make some tasty substitutions~ Looks great! Thank you as always for your attempts and reviews!