Passion Fruit Sangria + Christie Trivia #recipe by Maya Corrigan

 

Sangria is a wine punch or cocktail. It originated centuries ago in Spain as a way to make unsafe water potable by adding alcohol to it. Traditionally, sangria is made with red wine, but white wine sangrias are also now common. Fruit juice and a liqueur are usually added to the wine. 

In case you’re not familiar with passion fruit, it’s a tropical fruit, usually yellow or purple. In the U.S. it grows in California, Florida, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. The type of passion fruit grown in Hawaii is called lilikoi. 

The photo on the left shows the insides of smooth-skinned passion fruit. The other photo shows wrinkled passion fruit. Though ugly, the fruit is still delicious. Some people don't consider the fruit ripe until it's wrinkly. The seeds are edible, crunchy, and healthy. According to WebMD, they're a good source of fiber, protein, minerals, and heart-healthy fats. 

Yesterday I raised a glass of passion fruit sangria to the Queen of Crime on her 134th birthday. How much to you know about Agatha Christie’s drinking and eating habits?
Which was her favorite fruit: plums, apples, pears, or cherries?
What was her preferred drink: tea, coffee, cream, or cocoa?

Check your answers near the end of this post.

Now back to today's recipe. It's simpler than many others for sangria. I adapted it from one by M. Carrie Allan published in the Washington Post.

Ingredients

5 ounces dry white wine
1/4 cup passion fruit liqueur like Chinola 
1/4 cup passion fruit syrup (available online)
Cubed or thinly sliced fruit (apple, mango, orange, whole berries)
Optional: If you happen to have a fresh passion fruit you can add the pulp.

Ice for serving

Stir together the wine, liqueur and syrup in a pitcher.
When ready to serve, add some ice and fruit to your serving glasses, and pour the sangria mix over it. Garnish with passion fruit pulp if available. 

Passion fruit and peaches are my favorite fruits.

READERS: What fruit do you like most?

Answers to the Christie Questions

Agatha Christie loved apples. She came up with her plots as she soaked in a bathtub while eating apple after apple. Ariadne Oliver, a mystery writer in six of Christie's books, is an avid apple-eater.

While Christie wrote her books, she sipped cream from a cup on her desk. She did not care for alcohol. When others drank wine or cocktails at dinner, she requested cream as her beverage.  

Visit my website's Mystery 101 section for more about Christie: how she lays clues, her career as a playwright, and her preferred murder methods. 

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mystery series. It features a young cafe manager and her young-at-heart grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. Maya has taught college courses in writing, literature, and detective fiction. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit her website for book news, mystery history and trivia, and easy recipes. Sign up for her newsletter there. She gives away a free book to one subscriber each time she sends out a newsletter. Follow her on Facebook.

A PARFAIT CRIME: Five-Ingredient Mystery #9

Set in a quaint Chesapeake Bay town, the latest novel in Maya Corrigan’s Five-Ingredient Mysteries brings back café manager Val Deniston and her recipe columnist grandfather – a sleuthing duo that shares a house, a love of food and cooking, and a knack for catching killers.

At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in Jane’s freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?

After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at Granddad’s house to get to work—and enjoy his five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Granddad retrace the victim’s final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler.

Read an excerpt and see where to buy A Parfait Crime.  

Praise for A Parfait Crime

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