All products featured on Bon Appétit are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Our hero Link traipses over the rocky Sky Islands high above the kingdom of Hyrule in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo’s latest installment in the epic video game series. The knight will quickly learn to ascend through ceilings and hillsides, rewind time, and fuse objects and weapons. He’ll acquire cold weather garb and armor. But for now, our shirtless, still-weak hero enters a cave, where his sole defense from the cold is sautéing spicy peppers on a cooking pot.
It’s one of many delightful scenes from the video game that everybody at your work is probably discussing, the follow-up to 2017’s top-selling Breath of the Wild (BOTW), another game with a cooking element. You may have heard about Link’s ability to build vehicles or fuse a monster eyeball to an arrow for better accuracy, part of the action-adventure game where Link journeys through Hyrule to defeat an ultimate evil. He overcomes trials and helps characters solve problems. But for home cooks like me, the latest version of Zelda is also an encapsulation of the joy of cooking. As part of Link’s journey, he must collect ingredients and cook to survive. But I most relish the details in the game that make us pause and take in the everyday delights of preparing a hot meal—even when there may be far bigger challenges in the game (and in life).
As the peppers sizzle and dance around the pot to a cheerful percussion of clanging cookware that starts up whenever he cooks in the game, Link hums along—briefly forgetting that he is moments from freezing to death in the cave. A short, dramatic musical interlude and a sparkly poof of steam from the pot announce the meal is ready, and he cheers over his sautéed peppers as a caption explains its benefits: health restoration! Ten minutes of cold resistance! Meanwhile, I savor the enticing in-game descriptor: “The spiciness of the pepper has been broken by the heat for a sweeter taste.”
Tears upgrades a style of gaming called open-world gaming, which encourages players to explore an immersive landscape with quests, beasts, and tools to help players get around and defeat enemies. The game likewise takes its cooking elements very seriously. It offers an entire reference cookbook of ingredient combinations for dishes and elixirs to satisfy those of us who prefer guidance over improvisational cooking. Link can also conjure single-use pots to cook on the go, rather than having to batch-cook a bunch of recipes anytime he stumbles across a cooking fire, as was the case in BOTW. In the last version of Zelda, sometimes cooking got so tedious I found myself half-assing it. (Anyone who’s batch-cooked for the week on a Sunday can probably relate.)
Besides changes in the cooking game-play itself, Tears is full of delightful foods, several of them new—sparking giddiness not unlike how I feel when discovering a new-to-me ingredient at the market. As Link traverses the immersive Hyrule in Tears, he accrues monster parts (only edible when cooked into elixirs) and meat by vanquishing foes. He also collects ingredients like edible herbs and flowers, rock salt, eggs, Glowing Cave Fish, “rich-scented” Hearty Truffles, and tomatoes that are described as Hylian, named for the doomed kingdom Link is on a mission to save. (“Full of nutrition, and kind of trendy lately,” the last one’s descriptor quips.) Golden Apples are a “rare, very sweet fruit” that seem to have an “extra sparkle,” while eating Razorshrooms will “foster your competitive spirit.” Every ingredient offers benefits like stamina restoration, stealth, or defense, which almost always improve when mixed and heated up.
As in real kitchens, certain experiments are triumphs: Fish plus a random green yields stamina-boosting, “fragrant” Steamed Fish. Tossing a Sticky Frog in with a monster wing yields a Sticky Elixir that helps him scale a slippery cliff in the rain. Yet other times Link improvises with, say, a Hearty Lizard and Fortified Pumpkin; suddenly, we hear glasses break and smoke rises from the pot, indicating we’ve made the dreaded Dubious Food. Depicted as a pixelated blob “because it’s too gross to look at,” and issuing “a bizarre smell,” we’re told eating it won’t hurt us—“probably.”
In Tears, Link might have to find milk, meat, and eggs for a Hylian’s special fried rice, or help a villager invent cheese again (long story) with a brand-new pizza recipe as his reward for learning to make cheese. Following these colorful, winding detours remind me why I keep cooking. After all, who hasn’t followed a long, strange food-related quest? Or made real-life Dubious Food on occasion—the sort we shovel in with little reward beyond sustenance and the newfound knowledge that this particular ingredient combo doesn’t work?
But then we stumble upon a trendy tomato or stamina-boosting allium, and our curiosity is piqued all over again. Maybe we even briefly forget that the world feels like it’s crumbling around us. Would those ingredients work together? Conjure a pot and find out.
