The Economic Observer, Kyozuki/Wen Among the detective groups that are mostly strangers, there is one who is different, and that is Nero Wolff! He weighs 140 kilograms and stays at his office and residence in New York. A gourmet who drank a dozen beers a day, Wolff was stubborn about eating, refusing to eat the dish because his chef used saffron and tarragon leaves instead of sage to flavor the starlings.
Nero's creator, Rex Stott, was with Wolff as hopelessly gastronomic. So Stott decided to edit his detective Nero Wolfe's favorite recipe, especially one that appears in Too Many Chefs, in a book, what else could this cookbook be called besides the Nero Wolfe Cookbook. The cookbook has been reprinted many times and has been a favorite collection for gourmets since its first edition at Viking Press in 1973. Stott says he's cooked these recipes himself more than once.
Now another alternative detective, Yasim, also has his own cookbook, Yashim Cooks Istanbul Culinary Adventures in the Ottoman Kitchen. Yassim was an eunuch who lived in 19th-century Istanbul, and his stories focused on the periods 1836 to 1842. At that time, the kitchen of topkapi Palace, the sultan's main residence, was used to cook for 10,000 people a day. Jason Goodwin, the creator of Yassim, has published five books of Yasim's quests, not a Turk, but an Englishman, who lives in Dorset, near britain's southern coast.
Goodwin didn't want his protagonist to be a chef. But cooking turns out to be useful for plot development. "He was chopping an onion while thinking... Is the Russian woman he just visited telling the truth? "Yassim often cooks special foods. So we see yassim going up and down, going in and out of palaces, embassies, mosques, wandering the streets of Istanbul, looking for any clue, and the first thing he did when he got home was to take an onion out of the basket and start cutting it. Because cutting onions is the basis of all cooking.
In Yassim's detective story, garlic hisses in a frying pan and the skin of a leg of lamb is roasted brown. The simplest dinner menu consists of only one fish stew, and the more exciting dinners include a Tartar steak with the Assassins, an Ottoman-style wild duck, or sultan's Ramadan eggs.
Poor Yassim is often disturbed while cooking, and there is such a scene in The Tree of the Janissaries. Yassim came home after a busy day: he put the vegetables in the pot, added water from the kettle, and put the pot behind the stove. Then pour the olive oil in a heavy saucepan and add the chopped onion, some leeks and some garlic cloves. At the same time, peel the pumpkin with a sharp knife and scoop out the seeds and set aside. Carefully scoop out the orange flesh with a spoon without breaking the skin. Pour in a tablespoon of five-spice powder and cinnamon, and a spoonful of clear honey, and after a few minutes, set aside the pan and drag the soup pot over the coal fire. The soup pot was bubbling on the stove, and an aroma filled the room when there was a knock at the door. Yassim saw behind the door a young man with a silk rope wrapped around his fist. He had not come for dinner, he had come here to make sure that Yassim's investigation was over. Eventually, Yassim's dinner was ruined in the chaos. The author makes up for the regrets in the recipe book and gives a happier ending. Yassim's pumpkin soup is pleasant orange and very delicious. After the meal, it can be paired with the recipe on page 151 of the book: court fig pudding.
Detectives all have their own recipe books, probably rooted in the author, and Agatha Christie often compares creating crime stories to cooking, she says, and it's like mixing sauces, and sometimes you get all the ingredients in place. For "The Mystery of the Female Corpse in the Library," she said that I added the following ingredients to my story like a recipe: a professional tennis player, a young dancer, an artist, a girl scout, a dancer foreman, etc., and finally dedicated them all to everyone in the way that Miss Marple ordered.
Agatha loves to write about food, and the mystery of the apartment begins with a priest's lunch, where Agatha tells us that there are apple puddings on the table (wet and appetizing), cooked beef (very hard), rice puddings (half-cooked), and greens (packed in a cracked plate). For Agatha, food is still the clue to the cracking of the case, and in "Twenty-Four Black Thrushes", Poirot discovers that another regular, Mr. Gayscoin, has changed his eating habits one day, ordering "thick tomato soup, steak, loin pudding and black thornberry berries" that he never eats. Poirot felt so unusual that the man was indeed murdered.
Agatha's detectives all have their own recipes. Poirot, the great detective with many "little gray cells" in his head, likes to enjoy brioche and hot cocoa, likes knitting and gardening, and the slow-moving but quick-thinking old lady Marple likes to drink black tea. Both Miss Marple and Mr. Poirot liked to eat clotted cream, but their appetites dwarfed those of her creator, Agatha Christie.
French writer Anne Martinetti dug out a variety of recipes from Agatha's novels, especially picking out delicacies that were particularly suitable for hiding drugs. Martinetti believes that the best dark chocolate is the best vehicle for hiding the bitter taste of poison. And she would make the chocolate cake from the current Murder Notice, the famous cake "Delicious Death" made by the maid Mickey, "it's fragrant, it melts in the mouth: the cake will be poured with chocolate cream", the characters in the book say that it is worth eating such a cake to die. As a result, I really finished eating and died. Martinetti is a unique cookbook in the cookbook genre, where she specializes in crime foods and is the author of Cream and Punishment: Agatha. Christie's DeliciousNess".
However, domestic readers are more familiar with her "Paris on the Plate" with a Chinese translation. The book also gives multiple detective recipes. Take, for example, the Mog Street Murders. In 1846, the story was rewritten by an anonymous author and published in a French newspaper. Does the book mention Parisian cuisine? Only apples are mentioned, and since Mr. Doberman can deduce from the inference of selling apples to a series of thoughts that flashed in his partner's mind, and thus derived the inference that the shoemaker was too short to play a tragic role, it is most natural that the book "Paris on the Plate" gives a recipe for apple pie on Mog Street based on a basket of apples on the top of his head.
In addition, according to the book "Yasen Ropin the Thief": he ordered a soup, some vegetables and a liter of wine, and "Paris on the Plate" gave Yasen Ropin's recipe for red bean soup. And in "The Case of the Yellow House", a classic murder in the secret room, the young journalist Rudda Biye has to solve the problem of who killed Stangjessen and how to escape from the enclosed yellow room. However, in the process of solving the case, he also personally made a plate of fried egg cakes.
The biggest contributor to French detective fiction was the Billy writer Georges Simnon, who not only wrote the most and had the most influence, but also really brought French detective fiction to the world. In 1931, Simnon first published the novel "Pial of Latvian" featuring Detective Megre under his real name, and Megré became his cash cow ever since. The charm of Megre's novel lies in Inspector Megre himself. He was tall and had broad shoulders. Smoke like Simnon. He likes to drink, often entering the bar at 10 o'clock in the morning, and Megre likes to eat, and he is very fat.
Megre and his wife met through cake at a party, and Mrs. Megre took care of her husband like a toddler, cooking for him with care, and if he went to solve the case at noon and missed lunch with foie gras, there would surely be a dinner of tarragon chicken waiting for him. In Megre and the Headless Corpse (1955), Inspector Megre had to say goodbye to the white sauce stew his wife had cooked for him and go to the Canal Saint-Martin to investigate a corpse.
Anna Martinetti's detective food book also includes "Dear Watson: Sherlock Holmes Recipes", Sherlock Holmes, as a big star in the detective world, naturally has many people studying his recipes, such as "Sherlock Holmes's Diet and Life Research" by Etsuko Sekiya, a member of the Japanese Sherlock Holmes Club.
When there is no case, Holmes also enjoys good food, especially breakfast, and many stories begin with the great detective sitting at the breakfast table in front of a polished silver coffee pot, "laughing while pouring coffee", and Mrs. Hudson, the housekeeper of 221b Baker Street, prepares a sumptuous breakfast for Holmes and Watson: loins, fish and egg risotto, ham and eggs, and even curry chicken. In Black Peter, Holmes invites a policeman to breakfast with him, apologetically saying, "I'm afraid the scrambled eggs are cold." ”
While enjoying the food, Holmes was by no means a glutton, saying he wanted something very simple: a few slices of bread and a clean collar. Because of his profession, the regular three meals a day are not related to Holmes, and he often eats some cold beef with a glass of beer, or listens to canned and peaches. Like all workaholics, he eats sandwiches most often, and in The Jewel thief's Trail, he cuts a slice of beef from a sideboard, stuffs it between two slices of bread, and casually puts it in his pocket, and begins his adventure.
Holmes was no stranger to the food peddled on the streets of London, and his investigation required him to mingle with the three religions of the world's most cosmopolitan city. Street vendors at the time sold coffee, lemonade, ginger wine, roasted sweet potatoes, hot pea porridge, sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwich pie, fruit pies, and more. In The Bohemian Scandal, Holmes disguises himself as a groom and helps groom the horses. "They paid me two pennies and a mix of wine (a mixture of dark beer and spirits or a mixture of two beers). Two pipes filled with shredded tobacco."
After a headache-inducing case, Holmes was most keen to enjoy a sumptuous dinner at the famous Simpson Riverfront Restaurant. It's mentioned in The Dying Detective and The Dignitaries, with Watson calling it our restaurant on Riverfront Road, known for London's finest roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Here Watson "watched the crowds flowing on the embankment."
Occasionally, Holmes cooks himself, which is the most comfortable moment in all stories. In Four Signatures, he complains that Watson never realized that the other side of his specialty is the Housekeeper, and he invites Assalney Jones of Scotland Yard to dinner "to be ready in half an hour, and I prepared oysters and a pair of grouse, and some specially selected white wine." Watson, you don't know, I'm still a master of family governance. ”
Perhaps the best food story is The Sapphire Case, where a precious gem is hidden in the belly of a big fat goose at Christmas. The background of this story is left to a rich imagination, the whole story is full of warm Christmas atmosphere, London's cold air and warm fire dripping with oil poultry, families enjoy barbecued fat geese as a Christmas dinner. When you think of Sherlock Holmes, your mind is not a pipe or cocaine, but a fat goose, cold beef, brandy, espresso.