Discworld · Cookbook
The Joye of Snacks
A Lady
A cookery book by Nanny Ogg, published anonymously as "A Lady", in which almost every recipe turns out to be about something other than food.
Included partly because it is funny and partly because it is a useful hard case for the catalogue’s readability rule.
The Joye of Snacks has not been published in our world. What has been published is Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook — a real book, in Nanny’s voice, with real recipes and a great deal of advice on weddings and funerals. It is adjacent to the fictional book. It is not the fictional book. A looser catalogue would file this under “real-world edition exists” and quietly mislead every reader who went looking.
So the entry rates it Quoted and puts the real volume in Editions in our world with the distinction spelled out. This is the same discipline the Necronomicon entry needs and for the opposite reason: there, real books borrow the title without the contents; here, a real book carries the voice without being the work. Both cases break a badge system. Neither breaks a sentence.
As for the book itself — Pratchett is doing his very old joke about the gap between what respectable people will publish and what they will read, and Nanny Ogg is the perfect instrument for it, being entirely without shame and entirely without a contract.
On the readability rating. Recipe titles and a few passages are quoted in Maskerade, mostly for the reaction they produce in whoever is reading them aloud.
In-world history
Written by Gytha Ogg of Lancre and submitted anonymously. The publisher paid her a token sum and kept the rest, on the reasonable assumption that an elderly witch from the mountains would not turn up in person. Its recipes — Strawberry Wobbler among them — are not, on inspection, entirely culinary.
Why it matters
The reason Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg go to Ankh-Morpork at all. Nanny signed away the rights for a flat few dollars, the book sold enormously, and the trip to extract her fair share from the publisher is the engine of the novel's plot.
Appearances
- Maskerade (1995) — Terry Pratchett Nanny Ogg's cookbook, published anonymously and rather too popular
Editions in our world
- Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan (Doubleday, 1999) A companion volume rather than a facsimile: a real cookery book in Nanny Ogg's voice, with genuine recipes and notes on etiquette. Not the same book as The Joye of Snacks, which remains unpublished in our world.
Connected volumes
- Related to The Necrotelicomnicon · Discworld
Catalogue record
- Category
- Cookbook
- World
- Discworld
- First appearance
- Maskerade, 1995
- Readability
- Quoted
Sources
- Terry Pratchett, Maskerade (Gollancz, 1995).
- Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, Nanny Ogg's Cookbook (Doubleday, 1999).
Added by house · last checked 2026-08-05