Nero Wolfe's Lemon Sponge Cake #recipe by Maya Corrigan

Photo by Kim Davis
https://cinnamonsugarandalittlebitofmurder.com

Today I'm sharing a recipe from the first ever mystery book with recipes--Rex Stout's Too Many Cooks, published in 1938. Not all editions of the book came with recipes appended, and no other books by Stout contained recipes. But Stout's characters, the food-obsessed Nero Wolfe and his gourmet chef Fritz, discuss food and cooking in the 30+ books of the series. 

The recipes from Too Many Cooks were also included in a book-shaped box distributed during Rex Stout's book tour. You can read more about this keepsake recipe box in an earlier post I wrote. One such box plays a role in my latest book, Bake Offed.

The souvenir recipe box from Rex Stout's book tour

I adapted this recipe from the one in The Nero Wolfe Cookbook (1973) by Rex Stout, who was as much food lover as his character. The original recipe specifies using an ungreased tube pan, sometimes called an angel food pan. Angel food and sponge cakes don't contain any leavening. The air whipped into the egg whites makes them rise. The batter will cling to the sides of a straight-sided tube pan, causing the rest of the batter to rise. This might not happen in a Bundt pan with fluted sides.

Note: The lemon glaze was not part of Stout's original recipe. 

Ingredients

6 eggs, separated, using 6 egg whites and 5 yolks
1 cup sugar, sifted twice
1/2 lemon (1 tablespoon lemon juice plus the grated rind from half the lemon)
1 cup flour, sifted twice
1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

Separate the eggs.
Beat 6 egg whites until stiff and beat in 1/2 cup sugar.
In a separate bowl, beat 5 egg yolks until thick.

Mix in the lemon juice and rind. Beat in the remaining 1/2 cup sugar.

Combine the two egg mixtures. Sift the flour with salt. Fold it into the batter.

Pour the batter into an ungreased tube pan. Cut through the batter with a knife a few times to break up any air bubbles.

Bake for 1 hour.

Turn the pan upside down on a rack and let it stand until no longer warm. 

Loosen the edges of the cake and let it drop out of the pan.

For the lemon glaze

1 cup powdered sugar

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

Whisk the sugar and the lemon juice in a bowl until you have a smooth glaze to drizzle over the cake. Add more lemon juice as needed to thin the glaze. Drizzle over the cake after it has cooled completely.

When Kim Davis reviewed Bake Offed on her blog, she also made the Nero Wolfe's sponge cake. She takes far more beautiful food photos than I do and, with her permission, I'm sharing her photos of the final product. Visit her blog for this recipe and others by mystery writers, as well as mouth-watering food photos. 

This sponge cake recipe is unusual for Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe. Most of the dishes discussed in the Wolfe mysteries have 15-20 ingredients. 

Do you check out the recipes included with mystery books? 

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Val and Granddad attend a mystery fan fest that features a bake-off between contestants playing the roles of cooks to fictional sleuths. As Nero Wolfe’s gourmet chef, Granddad competes against Sherlock Holmes's landlady Mrs. Hudson, played by Cynthia Sweet. Granddad blames her for ripping off the five-ingredient theme of his Codger Cook newspaper column to use in her own recipe column and cookbook. When she’s found dead in her hotel room with a whistling teakettle next to her, he and Val sort through the festival-goers to find the one with the biggest beef against Ms. Not-So-Sweet.

Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manger Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Maya lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing, and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

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