It was a bitter day, and pale sunlight the color of weak tea slanted through the window.
She was curled up in the den, a tangle of lap rugs over her chair. As she read, the wind moaned in the crannies of the creaky old house until suddenly, there it was again . . . that haunting, maddening drip, drip, drip.
”Gad,” she thought frantically, ”what can it be?”
Elementary, my dear reader. Det. Edward X. Delaney merely had popped off the page for a quick ”wet” sandwich of Brisling sardines, tomato, onions and mayo, eaten messily over the sink.
Had it been a ”sizzle, sizzle, sizzle,” you could have bet Monsieur Pamplemousse had left a sentence long enough to fry fat sausages over a portable burner.
The culinary images in gastronomic mystery novels seem so real at times that you can almost feel the cold milk sliding down your gullet, and the warm chocolate chip cookie oozing over your tongue.
Although the genre isn`t crowded, there are several writers who specialize in dinner as much as death. Their sleuths range from little old ladies who bake green tomato pies to rough, tough private eyes who sip Cristal Champagne in their off hours.
Literary feast
Now is a good time to invite yourself to this literary feast.
If you choose a mystery such as ”Too Many Cooks,” however, you`d better stock up on snacks. Otherwise, by the end of the first chapter, you`ll be chewing the type off the page.
Try to get through this passage without a Ho-Ho as author Rex Stout`s portly detective, Nero Wolfe, defends American cuisine:
”Have you eaten a planked porterhouse steak, two inches thick, surrendering hot red juice under the knife, garnished with American parsley and slices of fresh limes, encompassed with mashed potatoes which melt on the tongue, and escorted by thick slices of fresh mushrooms faintly underdone? … ”The gastronome`s heaven is France, granted. But he would do well, on his way there, to make a detour hereabouts.”
If you`re interested in succulent mystery fiction, you`d do well to detour hereabouts too. Most of the mystery stories that deal with food are set in the United States. (The English writers think of food primarily as a weapon.)
Gourmet cooks in U.S. mysteries often are male. In most contemporary detective fiction, women don`t go near a stove. The new feminist private eyes such as Sara Paretsky`s V.I. Warshawski and Sue Grafton`s Kinsey Millhone are hard-bitten professionals on the job, helpless slobs at home.
In contrast, Robert B. Parker`s dreamy Spenser makes midnight feasts of smoked turkey and sliced avocado drizzled with honey-mustard dressing for his lucky girlfriend, psychologist Susan Silverman, who can`t even make toast.
Most of the food sleuths are gourmets along the lines of Nero Wolfe or Spenser, but there are exceptions. Lawrence Sanders` Det. Delaney specializes in weird but wondrous sandwiches, and Virginia Rich`s Eugenia Potter, a kindly widow who detects as a hobby, is a country cook.
Some of the books are just an excuse to talk about food. In the frothy M. Pamplemousse books by Michael Bond, the main character is a French restaurant critic whose detecting adventures are merely literary devices to move him from one meal to the next.
But in other books, such as those by Parker and Sanders, food is a side dish.
Still, the appetite of the authors is likely to show up in unexpected places. Sanders not only writes about Delaney`s sandwiches, but describes large ears as ”drooping slices of veal.” Stout proclaims a corpse ”dead as a sausage,” and Dorothy Cannell, author of ”The Thin Woman,” mentions
”ripe olive eyes” and ”strawberry lips.”
The descriptions of food and people are so toothsome at times that you`ll wish you had recipes. That can be arranged.
The descriptions of Spenser`s meals and Delaney`s sandwiches are detailed enough to provide a good cook with a blueprint for getting them to the table. For those who need more coaching, Virginia Rich provides recipes in the text and in the back of her three mysteries featuring Mrs. Potter.
Before he died, Stout collaborated with editors at Viking Press on the
”Nero Wolfe Cookbook,” which features recipes for many of the dishes mentioned in his 46 books.
Even such an ascetic sleuth as Sherlock Holmes has his own cookbook.
”Dining with Sherlock Holmes,” by Frederic H. Sonnenschmidt and Julia Carlson Rosenblatt, is a compendium of recipes for dishes Holmes and Watson might have encountered in 1895 England.
Here are recipes from these books.
NANTUCKET CRANBERRY CUP PUDDINGS
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 25 minutes
Yield: 12 servings
This New England delicacy comes from ”The Nantucket Diet Murders” by Virginia Rich.
Puddings:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
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2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
2/3 cup milk
1 egg
3 tablespoons butter, melted
2 cups fresh or frozen cranberries
Sauce:
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup whipping cream
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
Brandy to taste
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease 12 muffin cups.
2. For the puddings, sift flour, sugar and baking powder into a bowl. Stir in milk, egg, melted butter and cranberries. Pour batter into muffin cups. Bake until set, 20 to 25 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, for sauce, heat sugar, cream and butter in top of double boiler until butter melts and sugar is dissolved. Stir in brandy. Serve warm sauce over hot puddings.
SCRIMSHAW INN RUM PIE
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 10 minutes
Chilling time: Several hours
Yield: One 9-inch pie
This recipe also comes from ”The Nantucket Diet Murders” by Virginia Rich.
1 1/4 cups plus 6 tablespoons whole milk
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 large egg yolks
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons dark rum
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 baked, 9-inch graham cracker pie shell
Whipped cream, grated chocolate for garnish
1. Combine 1 1/4 cups of the milk, sugar and salt in a large saucepan. Cook and stir over medium heat until mixture comes to a boil. Beat together remaining 6 tablespoons milk, flour, cornstarch and egg yolks in a medium bowl. Add hot milk mixture to yolk mixture in a thin stream, whisking constantly to prevent eggs from curdling.
2. Return mixture to saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until thick. Do not boil. Cool slightly; beat in butter, rum and vanilla. Pour into pie shell. Refrigerate until cold. Top with whipped cream and grated chocolate before serving.
CHICKEN WITH MUSHROOMS AND TARRAGON
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 25 minutes
Yield: 4 servings
In Rex Stout`s ”Too Many Cooks” this dish is served at the Kanawha Spa dinner. It appears in Stout`s ”Nero Wolfe Cookbook.”
2 whole chicken breasts, boned, skinned, split
1/4 teaspoon each: salt, white pepper
5 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon minced shallots
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1/2 pound mushrooms, sliced
1 teaspoon chopped fresh tarragon or 1/2 teaspoon dried
1/4 cup each: chicken broth, white wine
1 cup whipping cream
Lemon juice to taste
1. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Sprinkle chicken breasts with salt and pepper.
2. Heat butter in a heavy, lidded ovenproof pan or casserole until it foams. Stir in shallots and cook 1 minute. Add mushrooms and tarragon; cook 2 minutes (do not allow to brown). Add chicken and turn it over so both sides are coated with butter. Place a piece of buttered wax paper cut to fit the pan, buttered-side down, over chicken. Cover the pan and bake until meat is just cooked through, about 10 minutes.
3. Remove chicken and mushrooms to a platter and keep warm. Pour broth and wine into the pan. Boil over high heat until syrupy, scraping up bits sticking to bottom of pan. Add cream and boil, stirring, until sauce thickens. Add more salt and pepper, if needed, and drops of lemon juice to taste. Pour sauce over chicken and serve immediately.