Food and Detective Fiction

Cooking for Cold, Damp Weather

Squash, red pepper, and chicken soup.

The soup!

"Beloved by the British, this rich,
protein-filled dish is traditionally
made with a mashed-potato crust."
-- Epicurious

For dinner tonight, I made soup. I used chopped onion, cubed squash, most of a jar of red peppers, spices, and chicken broth. After browning onions, spices, and squash in butter, I added stock & peppers and simmered the pot until the squash was soft. Then I set aside around 2/3 of the vegetables and pureed the rest with my immersion blender. I put back the reserved vegetables and added chopped up meat from last night's roast chicken. Roasting meat in the oven, simmering soup on the stove -- good choices for cold nights.

I garnished the soup bowls with rings of fresh bell pepper, Greek yogurt, and parsley. And I served those little Trader Joe's gluten-free crackers which are good even if you don't have anything against gluten.

Earlier this week, I cooked lamb shanks in the slow cooker. Bloggers all around have been writing about slow cooker dishes this week: obviously this is the time of year when you want your house to fill with the aromatic steam that this wonderful device produces, whether you're making filling for enchiladas or sloppy Joes, a simmered roast beef, pulled pork, or a meat-and-vegetable stew.

After the lamb slow-cooked overnight until it fell off the bones, I chilled it and skimmed the fat. That evening we ate the resulting lamb stew by itself. The next time around, I made it into shepherd's pie -- with a mound of mashed potatoes in the center (see photo). There are lots of ways to make shepherd's pie -- with beef or lamb, with various vegetables, spiced to taste. Some say the beef version should be called "cottage pie." With lamb, it's an English favorite that links to my reading project featuring detective fiction by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

Last night we dined on Dover sole filet with white wine and mushroom sauce.

In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Lord Peter Wimsey eats sole on two occasions. It's mentioned in the other Dorothy Sayers book I read recently, Whose Body. Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, a lover of subtle flavors, is also known to eat sole occasionally.

The cookbooks based on English detective fiction that I've been reading recently offer lots of recipes for sole in various sauces. Having my mind on these detectives, I made my own favorite filet of sole recipe last night. The sole filets -- which I bought from the freezer case at Trader Joe's -- were so thin I could almost see through them, meaning they would cook in just a couple of minutes. To avoid overcooking this delicate fish, I made the sauce first, and then laid the filets on top of the sauce just long enough to cook them.

"You and Miss Holland and Miss Megan will feel much better after coffee and eggs and bacon. Murder is a nasty business on an empty stomach." (The Moving Finger: Kindle Locations 7850-7851)

Murder is always a nasty business, though in Agatha Christie there's rarely a graphic description of the horrors. In The Moving Finger, details of the murders are even less emphasized than usual. The real mystery here is about the writer of a series of anonymous letters that almost all the central characters in the village receive. Each letter contains an accusation of moral wrongdoing, especially of adultery or illicit relationships; though the villagers don't find these accusations credible, they repeatedly say "Where there's smoke there's fire." In a way, it's amazing that the effect of these essentially deranged accusations have such a strong impact.

Attempts by the characters in the book to understand the nastiness of the person who composed the letters is particularly fascinating. All three of the following explanations were advanced prior to the murders:

The village doctor's explanation: "... the anonymous letter pest arises from one of two causes. Either it’s particular— directed at one particular person or set of people, that is to say it’s motivated, it’s someone who’s got a definite grudge (or thinks they have) and who chooses a particularly nasty and underhand way of working it off. It’s mean and disgusting but it’s not necessarily crazy, and it’s usually fairly easy to trace the writer— a discharged servant, a jealous woman— and so on. But if it’s general, and not particular, then it’s more serious. The letters are sent indiscriminately and serve the purpose of working off some frustration in the writer’s mind. As I say, it’s definitely pathological. And the craze grows." (Kindle Locations 6422-6428).

The narrator, Mr. Jerry Burton, a recently transplanted Londoner in the village says: "As I say, they’ve got a screw loose. It satisfies some urge, I suppose. If you’ve been snubbed, or ignored, or frustrated, and your life’s pretty drab and empty, I suppose you get a sense of power from stabbing in the dark at people who are happy and enjoying themselves." (Kindle Locations 6695-6697)

The village vicar's wife speculates: "Blind hatred… yes, blind hatred. But even a blind man might stab to the heart by pure chance… And what would happen then, Mr Burton?" (Kindle Locations 7017-7018)

Almost at the end, the vicar and his wife call in Miss Jane Marple, whose insight allows the capture of the perpetrator. Like most Agatha Christie novels, it's well-plotted, and I won't give away the ending. And like most Agatha Christie novels, there are lots of food scenes, but if I quoted them, it might begin to be repetitive -- for all my blog posts about Agatha Christie including this one, click here.

Attempt to understand trolls from this site.

Each of the efforts to understand the anonymous culprit seemed to me to have a strange resonance with something that's much more recently emerged in our society: comments by anonymous trolls on the Internet! Mean, disgusting, not necessarily crazy, result of frustration at a snub, needing a sense of power, blind hatred... all these motives clearly drive many of the venomous voices that permeate current social media and anonymous sites that encourage nastiness. To quote the Washington Post:

"In 2010, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts argued that anonymous comments sections 'have become havens for a level of crudity, bigotry, meanness, factual inaccuracy and plain nastiness that shocks the tattered remnants of our propriety.' In 2012, Buzzfeed’s John Herrman concluded his informal study of online discussion forums by describing YouTube’s anonymous comments section as 'the room with the million monkeys and the million typewriters, but they haven’t even gotten half-way though Hamlet yet because they’re too busy pitching feces at one another.'" -- source: "It's time to end anonymous comments," August 19, 2014.

There are also tons of efforts to explain what makes all those anonymous trolls tick -- it's entertaining that Agatha Christie seems to have had a theory about them so long ago!

Herbed scrambled eggs for breakfast, from Jeanine Larmoth, Murder on the Menu, prepared by me (the cook)
served by me (the butler), consumed by me & Len (residents of our fine mansion).
No mysteries here for the moment, unless you count the question of how the stock market will do today.

Here's the recipe I used. Yes, I meant to include Kippers, which I bought yesterday. But ...

Alas, when I looked at the package, I realized that somehow  -- although I bought them yesterday --
these kippers were 6 years out-of-date. I was afraid to open them, and will take them back to Whole Foods!

Note: the scrambled eggs were very good. But I'm afraid we didn't come near to reproducing the atmosphere described by Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. I'll try again to make something from one of my mystery cookbooks!

Next step: watch more TV dramatizations of these mystery stories. I was amused at one scene that I already watched in "Hickory Dickory Dock."  Poirot (played by David Suchet) was having his usual Continental breakfast with his houseguest Inspector Japp, who says "I say Poirot, don't you have any bacon and eggs?"

"Mr. Parker was a bachelor, and occupied a Georgian but inconvenient flat... for which he paid a pound a week. His exertions in the cause of civilization were rewarded, not by the gift of diamond rings from empresses or munificent cheques from grateful Prime Ministers, but by a modest, though sufficient, salary, drawn from the pockets of the British taxpayers. He awoke, after a long day of arduous and inconclusive labor, to the smell of burnt porridge." (Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body, Pocket Book edition, p. 65)

It's easy to see how much Parker, the plain-clothes detective, differs from the very aristocratic Lord Peter Wimsey, star of the Dorothy Sayers mystery series. Lord Peter's wealth and privilege allow him to regard detecting as an amusing hobby. He enjoys life in a luxurious flat with an attentive personal servant, his valet Bunter. He can even afford to support Bunter's hobby of photographing crime scenes, buying Bunter cameras and darkroom equipment and leaving the valet's time free to develop his photos, though of course always photos of use to himself. In contrast, Parker can barely afford a decent breakfast.

While Parker is getting ready to eat his porridge -- clumsily prepared by his daily char woman Mrs. Munns -- he contemplates the "sordid absurdity of the human form." Before he gets to the porridge, though, he receives a phone call. It's Bunter with the message: "His lordship says he'd be very glad, sir, if you could make it convenient to step round to breakfast."

Sayers continues: "If the odour of kidneys and bacon had been wafted along the wire, Parker could not have experienced a more vivid sense of consolation." Parker's anticipation highlights difference between an aristocratic and a lower-middle class breakfast. Parker hurried to Lord Peter's flat, viciously saying to Mrs. Munns who was making bad tea: "You can take the porridge home for the family." On the social ladder in an English mystery story, there's always someone lower down. And when Parker arrived at Lord Peter's house, "Mr. Bunter served him with glorious food, incomparable coffee, and the Daily Mail before a blazing fire of wood and coal." (p. 65-66)

The culinary contrast between the social levels of the two detectives had come up the previous day while Parker was continuing his analysis of a complex murder and disappearance and eating "a plate of ham sandwiches and a bottle of Bass." Leaving Parker at work on the case, Lord Peter went to a restaurant named Windham's to meet a friend. I suspect that Sayers believes her readers will recognize this dining establishment; obviously I don't. The menu there clearly doesn't tend towards ham sandwiches and Bass! Lunch at Windham's, in fact, is consommé Polonais; a filet of sole; "the Montrachet '08" about which Lord Peter complains; and a salmis of game, which he declares "not bad." He also complains about a bit of cork in the wine glass. The Montrachet by the way, is from 1908 -- this mystery takes place in 1923! (p. 56-57)

Lord Peter's lifestyle, as portrayed in these small food scenes and throughout the book, might now, nearly 100 years later, be seen as immature and irresponsible. His nonchalance about work led me to suspect that he was very young -- but I now know that in Whose Body he was around 32 years old, just still without mature responsibilities! Moreover, in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (which I wrote about here) he was in his late thirties.

Food characterizes yet another random possible witness: "The Indian Colonel on the first floor was loud but unexpectedly friendly," Parker reports to Lord Peter as they are finishing breakfast. "He gave me Indian curry for supper and some very good whiskey." (p.68)

Monty Python's Cheese Shop didn't have any named cheeses either.

As Whose Body continues, Lord Peter again suffers for the sake of his detecting hobby when he has to eat in Salisbury in a dining establishment not at all up to his standards. "As he sat sadly consuming that impassive pale substance known to the English as 'cheese' unqualified (for there are cheeses which go openly by their names, as Stilton, Camembert, Gruyère, Wensleydale or Gorgonzola, but 'cheese' is cheese and everywhere the same), he inquired of the waiter [about a person of interest in his case]" (p. 80) Reminds me of the Monty Python cheese shop episode.

The most extreme example of food in relation to class concerns the missing man in Parker and Lord Peter's case: Sir Reuben Levy, a Jewish businessman. Levy is married to a woman once known to Lord Peter's mother, the Dowager Duchess. Needless to say, the wife's long-ago marriage to a Jew had caused quite a bit of objection among the antisemitic upper class to which she belonged. The Dowager Duchess speaks of this couple at some length:

"I used to know her quite well, you know, dear, ... when she was a girl. Christine Ford, she was then, and I remember so well the dreadful trouble there was about her marrying a Jew. That was before he made his money.... she fell in love with this Mr. Levy and eloped with him. ... I'm sure some Jews are very good people, and personally I'd much rather they believed something, though of course it must be very inconvenient, what with not working on Saturdays and circumcising the poor little babies and everything depending on the new moon and that funny kind of meat they have with such a slang-sounding name, and never being able to have bacon for breakfast." (p. 42-43)

Clearly Sayers, like her contemporary Agatha Christie, has a lot of casual antipathy towards Jews, based on half-truths and general prejudice -- and absolutely incorporates food stereotypes into the mix. I really wonder what she was referring to by "that funny kind of meat they have with such a slang-sounding name." I looked around on the web, and this passage is often quoted but the funny kind of meat is never explained.

From the rest of Sayers' portrayal of the character of Sir Reuben Levy, I would say that the Dowager Duchess reflects the author's own attitudes towards Jews -- purportedly well-meaning, badly-informed, and carelessly prejudiced. Agatha Christie can be even worse. Quite a lot has already been written about the prejudices reflected in these two famous mystery authors, but I'll end my say-so here. I wonder, as a Jew, why I tolerate their outdated bigotry instead of finding some other mysteries to read, or instead of watching the cleaned-up TV versions!