Kate White - The Mystery Writers of America Cookbook: Wickedly Good Meals and Desserts to Die For

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

IN LAMB TO THE SLAUGHTER, ROALD DAHLS WICKEDLY delicious 1953 crime short story, a housewife named Mary Maloney listens one evening in dazed horror as her police detective husband announces that hes leaving her. He doesnt give a reason, but its clear theres another woman. In a moment of sudden fury, Mary grabs the frozen leg of lamb she had planned to roast for dinner and bashes her husband over the head with it, killing him instantly.

But now what? she wonders. She certainly doesnt want to go to the gallows for her crime. So Mary sticks the leg of lamb in the oven and, in order to give herself an alibi, sneaks out the back door and goes food shopping. Once she returns home, she calls the police, reporting that shes found her husband murdered. Soon his fellow detectives descend on the scene to investigate, and they observe that their former colleague has been killed by a blow on the back of the head administered with a heavy blunt instrument. But theres no sign of it anywhere in the apartment.

Finally the lamb is roasted. Mary takes it from the oven and offers slices to the detectives, who devour it eagerly. To them, she is above suspicion, and they remain stumped by the crime scene. If only, they say, there were a murder weapon to inspect. Get the weapon, and youve got the man, one of them announces. Unfortunately, theyve just eaten it.

This may be the single best culinary plot twist in all of mystery writing. But there are plenty of other fabulous ones, as well as countless scenes that mix food and murder. Authors from Arthur Conan Doyle to Dorothy Sayers to Scott Turow have killed off characters with food or drinks laced with poison. Agatha Christie used poison to fell a character in over half of her mystery novels.

But food isnt used just as a weapon. It defines character. As the nineteenth-century French lawyer and gastronomic essayist Jean Brillat-Savarin stated, Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are. Thats especially true for the iconic sleuths in mysteries series. We cant think of Miss Marple without her scones and tea (over the course of 12 novels and 20 short stories, she reportedly drank 143 cups of tea), Kinsey Millhone without her peanut butter and pickle sandwich, Jack Reacher without his pots of coffee, Alex Coop Cooper without her Dewars on the rocks, or Nero Wolfe without the outrageous dishes his personal cook, Fritz, makes for himsuch as squabs marinated in cream and creole fritters with cheese sauce.

Considering how intertwined food and murder are in fiction, Mystery Writers of America (MWA) decided that it would be a crime not to celebrate this idea, and thus weve created a cookbook especially for mystery fans. It features more than one hundred recipes from many of the top mystery writers in the world, including Mary Higgins Clark, Harlan Coben, Nelson DeMille, Charlaine Harris, and James Patterson. Theres even one from Richard Castle, the fictional mystery author on the ABC show Castle .