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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Mysteries with Recipes Origin Story by Maya Corrigan #Giveaway Pot Luck Monday

Recipe Cards from Mystery Lovers Kitchen Authors

In my latest book, Bake Offed, which takes place at a mystery fan fest, a book vendor explains the popularity of culinary cozy mysteries: “Today’s readers want to know, not just whodunit, but what to eat for dinner.” The recipes appended to cozy mysteries serve that purpose. Most of the Mystery Lovers' Kitchen writers include recipes in their books. I've read mysteries since my mother brought home an armful of them every week from the library, but I don’t remember any crime novels with recipes in them until the last two decades. I did some research to find out which mystery writer was the first to include recipes in a book. 

The first detective novel with recipes that I’ve been able to find was Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout, which came out in 1938. Stout’s detective, Nero Wolfe, is a gourmand who rarely leaves his home. While solving crimes from his armchair, he obsesses about food, often discussing ingredients and cooking methods with his personal gourmet chef, Fritz. Wolfe appears in Stout’s novels and shorter works from 1934 to 1975, but Too Many Cooks is the one book that included recipes, and only in its first edition. However, those recipes had a life of their own outside of the book.

Rex Stout went on what must be the most expensive book tour ever. The Saturday Evening Post, which serialized Too Many Cooks, held a lavish luncheon in a dozen cities. The guests, influencers like book reviewers and sellers, not only enjoyed a multi-course feast, but also received a keepsake, a book-shaped box containing Nero Wolfe’s recipes. The promotional recipe box, only a thousand of which were produced, is prized by collectors and now worth more than a first edition of the book. The current price for the box in good condition with all recipes is close to $4,000.

Recipe box photos: WFinch, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The recipe box plays a role in my 8th Five-Ingredient Mystery, Bake Offed. My sleuths, café manager Val and her grandfather, the Codger Cook, are helping a friend who’s running the fest. Besides the usual panels and book signings, my fest also includes a murder and a Deadly Desserts bakeoff, in which Granddad competes. Each contestant must assume the persona of a fictional detective’s cook and bake a sweet the detective would like. Granddad, who promotes five-ingredient dishes in his recipe column, is assigned the daunting role of Nero Wolfe’s gourmet chef, who cooks with “scads of ingredients.” The Too Many Cooks recipe box Granddad finds in the attic has a dessert recipe he can handle. He’s now sure he can win the bake-off against his rival recipe columnist, who plays Mrs. Hudson, Sherlock Holmes’s landlady. On the first night of the fest, Granddad’s prized recipe box disappears and Mrs. Hudson is found dead in her hotel room next to a whistling teakettle. So how do mystery fans who love murder on the page react to a murder in their midst? You’ll have to read the book to find out. 

Readers: Do you look at the recipes included in mysteries? Do you ever try any of the recipes?

I’ll give away a set of recipe cards (shown in the first photo of this post) to one person who comments. DON'T FORGET TO INCLUDE YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS if you'd like to win the recipe cards.

Nero Wolfe Lamb Loaf

by Sheila Connolly

Here at Mystery Lovers' Kitchen, we write mysteries that include food, and often recipes.  But we're not the first to do that: many years ago Rex Stout created the gourmand character Nero Wolfe, and wrote over sixty books and stories featuring him, starting in 1934. Wolfe lived for food, and solving crimes was a distraction from planning the next meal with his patient chef Fritz. In 1975, only a couple of years before Stout's demise, Penguin published The Nero Wolfe Cookbook; although all the foods outlined in the book did appear in a book, Stout acknowledged in a foreword that he hadn't written the recipes personally, but he had tested and approved them all.

I've had the cookbook nearly as long as it's been in print, and I've used a number of the recipes (which is why it lives with my cookbooks rather than with my mystery books).  This is one recipe I've been making almost from the beginning, although of course I've tweaked it over time. It's good to have on hand if you get bored with the same old meatloaf.

Sometimes it's not easy to find ground lamb in your market (it kind of comes and goes where I live).  You can ask a butcher, if you have one, to grind some for you, or you can grind your own from other pieces of lamb—assuming you have a meat grinder, which I do, inherited from my mother, which attaches to my KitchenAid stand mixer, although I don't recall seeing my mother grind meat, ever.

Lamb Meatloaf

1 1/2 lbs ground lamb

1/2 lb ground pork

2 eggs

2/3 cup bread crumbs

1/4 cup chopped parsley

1/4 cup chopped shallots

1/2 tsp dried basil

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp ground pepper

1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1/2 cup dry white wine

1/2 cup melted butter

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

If you want to make your own bread crumbs and have a food processor, reduce the bread to crumbs, then add the shallots and parsley and pulse a few times to chop them too (note:  food processors weren't around when Nero Wolfe was cooking!).

In a large mixing bowl, combine the lamb, pork, eggs, crumbs, parsley, shallots, salt, pepper, cheese, and wine.  Use your hands to mix the ingredients thoroughly (handy household hint:  if you don't like squishing about in raw meat, you can buy disposable latex gloves).

Ready, set -- moosh!

Shape into an oval loaf and place on a rack in a shallow baking pan. The rack is important:  lamb can be fatty, so it needs a place to drain.

Brush the loaf with the melted butter.  Place in the preheated oven, and bake for 1 1/2  hours.

BURIED IN A BOG -- the first book in Sheila Connolly's new County Cork Mysteries, coming February 5th!