Frey pie



Frey pie is a special dish of meat pie which Arya Stark made and served to Walder Frey.

Ingredients

 * Pie crust mix (flour, butter, etc.)
 * Lame Lothar Frey
 * Black Walder Rivers

Season 6
After training with the Faceless Men in Braavos, Arya Stark heads to Westeros to kill more enemies on her revenge list. She makes her way to the Twins, seat of House Frey, and the same location where her mother, brother, and most of the Stark armies were massacred in the Red Wedding - an unthinkable violation of Guest right which Lord Walder was outright proud of. Arya infiltrates the castle by disguising herself as a servant girl, using one of the magic shapeshifter masks she acquired from the Faceless Men to totally alter her appearance. Late in the evening, Lord Walder is left alone in the main feast hall of the castle, save only for the serving girl who brings him more meat pies to eat. Walder becomes increasingly confused at why his two sons Lame Lothar and Black Walder (his chief enforcers among his many children) have not arrived yet, as they should have been there by midday. A lone servant girl, bringing him another meat pie, politely says that Lothar and Black Walder are indeed there. He looks around the hall and doesn't see them, but the servant girl again insists that his two sons are already there. As she indicates the pie in front of him, the bewildered Lord Walder peels back the crust - to reveal a human finger. The servant girl says that his sons weren't easy to carve up into the pie (after she killed them), especially Black Walder.

She then pulls off her shapeshifter face-mask to reveal her true identity, and announces to him that she is Arya Stark - and she wants the last thing he sees to be a Stark smiling down at him as he dies. The elderly Walder weakly turns to flee but Arya easily pushes him back down and slits his throat, then watches smiling as he chokes to death on his own blood - dying in the same room in which he watched as her mother Catelyn had her throat slit during the Red Wedding.

In the books
Arya Stark feeding Walder Frey his own sons to him baked in a pie in the TV series is a reference to a larger subplot in the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, the infamous "Frey pie" incident, which takes place in the North and doesn't involve Arya.

Wyman Manderly - who actually appears in the same episode as this - grudgingly had to feign peace with the Lannisters and their Frey allies, but was planning to betray them. A large contingent of Frey soldiers in the books accompany the Boltons into the North to help them grind down the surviving lords. Three of them (Rhaegar Frey, Symond Frey, and Jared Frey) are sent as envoys to White Harbor, returning the bones of Ser Wendel Manderly, who was murdered at the Red Wedding, but disappear soon afterwards. When he secretly meets Davos Seaworth, Wyman reveals he is plotting against the Boltons and Freys, wanting vengeance for the death of his son, but was unable to act as his other son Ser Wylis Manderly was a hostage. Later, during Ramsay Bolton's wedding feast at Winterfell, Wyman gleefully serves the remaining Freys three large meat pies, and to assure them that it isn't poisoned he happily eats large portion of all three himself. Wyman enjoys the pie so much that he needlessly takes a second helping, even after he already convinced the Freys it wasn't poisoned. When they ask Lord Manderly where the three missing Freys are, he says that they are actually quite close - heavily implying that they were cooked into the pie.

Lame Lothar is still alive in the current novels, as are the two other sons Black Walder Frey and Walder Rivers who were condensed into "Black Walder Rivers" in the TV version. Lord Walder has about a dozen sons who are major recurring characters in the novels but the TV version essentially condensed all of their actions into these two characters (it's mentioned that there are dozens of other sons and grandsons but they exist in the background of the TV series).

In the novels, after the Freys take Riverrun several of Lord Walder's more prominent sons are given possession of the castle - but several newly hired servants who are observed in Jaime's POV narration match the physical description of members of the Brotherhood Without Banners, hinting that the Brotherhood is going to orchestrate it's own reverse-Red Wedding, to ambush and kill the Freys inside Riverrun. When she eventually returns to Westeros, Arya Stark may indeed link up with the Brotherhood again and help them take revenge on the Freys: obviously, certain scenes have been condensed and moved around, but it is unclear how large of a condensation it is that Arya will personally kill Walder Frey (for all anyone knows, she may in fact personally kill him in the next book).

Feeding Lord Walder a pie containing his own sons, in both books and TV series, may be an in-universe reference to the legend of the Rat Cook, which Bran Stark brought up in Season 3. The Rat Cook was a member of the Night's Watch who felt insulted by a visiting king, so he broke Guest right by killing the king's sons and feeding them back to him cooked into a pie. For this the gods cursed him by turning him into a rat, doomed to eat his own young. In the TV version Bran brings this up right after the Red Wedding, insisting that violation of guest right (as Walder Frey did) is the one thing above all others that the gods will punish. In the books, Wyman actually refers to the legend explicitly: when he serves the meat pies to the Freys at Winterfell, he says that the musicians should really play a song about the Rat Cook.

Unlike the Freys, Wyman did not break guest right when he killed the three Freys, through strict adherence to the exact wording of the right. As the Freys left White Harbor, Wyman specifically noted to Davos that he was giving them guest gifts as they departed - an extra part of the ritual sometimes used, to signify that the time during which a person is considered a guest in the host's home has specifically come to an end. Apparently, Wyman just waited until the Frey envoys were no longer his "guests", then had his men ambush them a few hours later on the highway - with the formal protection of guest right officially over, the Manderlys weren't breaking any rules by killing them at that point.

Shakespeare reference
Out of universe, the "Frey pie" incident with Lord Manderly from the novels may be a reference to the infamous climax of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, in which Titus avenges himself on Tamora by killing her sons Chiron and Demetrius (who raped and mutilated his daughter and brought about the death of two of his sons) and feeds them back to her baked into a meat pie ("WHY THERE THEY ARE!! BOTH BAKED IN THAT PIE!! WHEREON THEIR MOTHER DAINTILY HATH FED!!...") The version in the TV series is even more similar to the scene in the play, in that after revealing the contents of the pie Arya kills Walder Frey with a knife, just as after Titus reveals the contents of his pie to Tamora he stabs her dead as well (in the novel, Manderly only hinted at the pies' contents and he didn't kill anyone immediately afterwards).

How to make your own Frey pie
The fansite InnAtTheCrossroads.com is run by two fans who wanted to as much as possible recreate the Food and Drink mentioned in the novels. They achieved such success that they eventually produced the official tie-in cookbook A Feast of Ice and Fire (2012), which even featured a Forward written by [{George R.R. Martin]] himself.

When it came to the infamous Frey pie, it was actually quite easy for them to come up with an official recipe, as the fifth novel gives a detailed description of all the vegetables and seasonings in it:


 * "stuffed to bursting with carrots, onions, turnips, parsnips, mushrooms, and chunks of seasoned pork swimming in a savory brown gravy..."

Wyman Manderly told everyone that the meat in it was just pork - so all the InnAtTheCrossroads.com team had to do was put actual pork into their recipe.

For the full recipe, see their online page for "Lord Manderly's Pie".

(There is no guarantee that their pork-based recipe remotely tastes like what the actual Frey pies are supposed to taste like, in-universe, but their recipe will make an edible pie).