CULINARY CRIME CAPERS
It’s no mystery why writers dish up portions of death and food
“They ate by candlelight, the candles of all shapes and sizes flickering around the kitchen. Their plates were piled high with turkey and chestnut stuffing, candied yams and potatoes, peas and gravy. They’d all brought something to eat, except Ben, who didn’t cook. But he’d brought bottles of wine, which was even better ... . ” (From 2005’s Still Life, by Louise Penny.)
In Three Pines, the table is set — for dinner, of course, but also for murder.
Through her 11 mystery novels featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, Louise Penny has made Québécois food as crucial an ingredient as the clues scattered about like brioche crumbs.
Coinciding with the release of A Great Reckoning (Minotaur), 12th in the series, Penny has gathered recipes for dishes mentioned in each of the books into an e-cookbook called The Nature of the Feast: Recipes From the World of Three Pines. (Download the recipes at gamacheseries.com)
“I wanted you to feel what it’s like to live in Québec,” she writes in The Nature of the Feast. “And to do that I needed to make the books sensuous, to engage all your senses. So that you smell the musky wood smoke and feel the scrape of the cold against your cheeks. You hear the rustle of the leaves and see with clarity the village green. And you taste the food. That glorious Québécois cuisine.”
There’s nothing like food to — quite literally — evoke the flavour of a place, not to mention the essence of a character. When Clara and Peter Morrow hold a potluck feast in their Three Pines home, it demonstrates that they are beloved by their community but as struggling artists are too poor to pay for the meal. It sums up the generosity of their friends — and hides the duplicitous nature of one of them. It’s also a welcome pause before the next twist in the novel’s plot.
Plus it just makes for delicious reading.
Of course, Penny isn’t the only crime writer who cares about croissants as well as clues. There’s Martin Walker, whose Bruno: Chief of Police spends as much time wooing women with his homemade pâté de foie gras as he does fighting crime in the Dordogne. You can find recipes for dishes like truffle soufflé on his website, brunochiefofpolice.com. Or just read the books — Bruno delights in explaining just how to cook his favourite foods.
Similarly, Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti escapes from the crime and corruption of Venice to enjoy leisurely multi-course lunches at home with his wife Paola. In 2010, Leon’s friend Roberta Pianaro published some of the detective’s favourite dishes in Brunetti’s Cookbook, including pumpkin ravioli, roasted artichokes, baked branzino and pork ragu with porcini.
Anne Zouroudi’s Greek island mysteries, too, are all about food and what it means in a small community. She describes her investigator, Hermes Diaktoros, as an “occasional gourmand,” and writes, “He allows me to promote unashamedly what I love about Greek cuisine.”
Then there are the myriad series where the chief detective is more at home in the kitchen than a squad car: Diane Mott Davidson’s books featuring caterer Goldy Schulz, for instance, or Joanne Fluke’s baker Hannah Swensen.
Even that famously ascetic Victorian detective Sherlock Holmes fully enjoyed his chicken curries and foie gras. The genre’s popularity grew alongside a burgeoning and anxious middle class. As the Industrial Revolution elevated the lower classes into the ranks of the well-to-do, status was implied by what a newly rich family ate and, just as importantly, who was preparing it.
The fear of what a resentful servant could do to that game pie or Victoria sponge went hand in trembling hand with the fear of losing that new-found status. Murder mysteries proved to be a comforting way to channel that fear.
By the 1920s and ’30s, the socalled golden age of the mystery novel, Agatha Christie was using food to draw subtle social lines — and to bump off more than a few hapless victims. She and her contemporary Dorothy Sayers taught us all about the marzipan-like scent of cyanide and the best way to introduce arsenic into a dessert omelette.
But food was always more of an amuse-bouche in these early novels, rather than the main course.
It took two expansive gourmands, both born in the hungry 1930s, to really make a meal out of fine dining: Georges Simenon’s detective Jules Maigret, whose wife was a haute cuisine chef, and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe. Indeed, in 1973, well ahead of the current trend, Stout published a book of his detective’s favourite recipes, most of them drowning in butter and cream.
And now we have The Nature of the Feast. In her novels, Penny explores themes of betrayal doled out by our nearest and dearest, and the goodwill found at the tables of strangers who become friends. There is no better way, in the world of Three Pines, to demonstrate kindness or cruelty than by sharing a meal.
So, pass the croissants, but watch out for that deadly butter knife.
I wanted you to feel what it’s like to live in Québec. And to do that I needed to make the books sensuous, to engage all your senses.