There was a place in Brighton a few years back that used to do a drink called London Fog. If you’ve never come across it, it’s a sort of Earl Grey latte, really – tea with a lot of hot, foamy milk, and something else, some glittering flavour, that I struggled to identify. The place closed down just as I was getting into them, London Fogs. I looked up a range of unsatisfactory online recipes, and then bodged together a few London Fog concepts of my own, all of which were completely undrinkable in thrillingly different ways. Then I found this cookbook a few weeks ago – Destiny: The Official Cookbook. Page 171. London Fog. Honey and almond milk. It’s good. Actually, it’s great!
The London Fog is a favourite of Devrim Kay, who I once met in the European Dead Zone. I remember him crouched in the church, maybe in a sniper spot up in the tower, and I remember him talking about getting the kettle on once missions were done. He laid the Britishness on a bit thick, I had thought, and so does Destiny: The Official Cookbook in its own way. It’s a quantities thing – after following the recipe I had enough London Fog to see me through a week. But a good egg, Devrim. It was nice to think about him again.
Destiny is one of those mega-budget successes that I can still find it hard not to feel a bit of sympathy for. A gajillion-seller, sure, but it must have really sucked when the first thing that anybody got to see of the game was not concept art or a bit of story, but Activision’s cold-eyed business plan: release dates, Q4s and whatnot stretching out for a decade. Destiny came to us initially as a product rather than a work of planet-hopping imagination. To put it another way, we got the recipe rather than the taste. Except that’s unfair to recipes, which can often be brilliant bits of micro-literature by themselves, while business plans never are.
Now, in our office, whatever that word means in 2020, it feels like Destiny is something that is thought about more than it’s actively played, although I might be wrong. It is thought about with great fondness and a lot of appreciation anyway. Bungie knows action, knows how to make multiplayer sing. That’s the standard feeling. But there’s also something about the wilful, sometimes silly, sometimes arcane game that Destiny actually is that creates a sense of endearment. Remember those Grimoire things? Telling the complex story of a new universe in baseball cards. It should never have worked, and nobody would have planned something like that from scratch, but when the Grimoire cards were gone, people missed them. Destiny’s the gazillion-seller that is also pleasantly, frustratingly odd.
And so turning it into a cookbook kind of makes sense? It helps that Destiny: The Official Cookbook is written by somebody who is really good at this stuff. Victoria Rosenthal runs a blog called Pixelated Provisions, recreating consumables found in game – I clicked over a few days ago and the place was wriggling with Bugsnax – and also works for NASA, I gather. That first part probably explains why the Destiny book is filled with things I actually want to make, and why when I do make them they’re delivered via clearly written instructions with an obvious eye to the way people actually do things in home kitchens. Warning: this is an American cookbook, so expect cups and Fahrenheit and talk of broilers and scallions. But it’s generous: plenty of vegetarian stuff, and notes on adapting things for gluten- or lactose-free diets. Also Fahrenheit conversion and cups and broilers and scallions and all that jazz are a good fit for Destiny, a game in which players regularly converse in a wonderfully impenetrable language about Light levels and Engrams.