Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Recipes for Murder was a Christmas gift from my sister-in-law, who was a delightful surprise as someone who loves cooking and Agatha Christie. The book has an insightful forward by Agatha Christie, literary expert and archivist John Curran.

Recipes for Murder is divided by decade and populated with recipes of dishes found in Christie’s novels. Before each recipe, there is a quotation or excerpt from the book that the recipe was chosen, and many have hand-drawn representations of the food, which give the book a homey feel.

I will be honest: when I think of Agatha Christie, I don’t think of her descriptions of food- my mind tends to fixate on her dialogue or psychological intrigue- and I was curious about what foods make up the world of Agatha Christie. To my delight, Hercule Poirot’s “perfect cup of hot chocolate” on page 140 and a recipe for “stuffed vegetable marrows” on page 14 perfectly capture Poirot’s food obsessions.

However, there are plenty of lesser-remembered recipes ranging from every day “macaroni au gratin at the Ginger Cat Cafe” on page 46 or “a perfect omelet” on page 102 to fancy dinner party fare such as “oyster Rockefeller on the Orient Express” or “Regatta Lobster Newburg” and Karen Pierce even included menus for different occasions ranging from book club to Halloween Murder Mystery party.

There’s a lot to love, including the cheeky inclusion of Lucy Eyelesbarrow’s deadly (or so we thought) mushroom soup and mouth-watering sweets of not one but two delicious poisonous cakes, which I am dying to make!

There’s also a smattering of cocktails and cool drinks to sip while watching your favorite Christie adaptation from the comfort of your couch. Next time I put on a version of “Death on the Nile,” you can bet I’ll be sipping on Pierce’s “lemon squash on the Karnak,” ready to watch a love triangle descend into murder.

My quibbles with the book are few; while the hand-drawn sketches of the food are charming, I wish the cookbook included extensive glossy photographs of the food on beautiful china with a glitzy server- which is hard to do in the dimensions of this small volume, which brings me to another minor gripe- the book is too small and need to be a big hefty cookbook. They could have filled it out with the history of certain dishes, pictures of Christie eating some of the foods in the book (if any exist, handwritten draft notes of Christie’s books, period menus with these foods listed, but upon further research this book was not put out on behalf of the Christie estate so they are not involved which greatly limited the scope of materials involved.

I plan to make several recipes and feature them on the blog. “Southern-Italian Spaghetti & Meatballs” will be coming soon on pages 114-116. Reading through the cookbook, there doesn’t seem to be a close hewing to using the methodology of cooking that would have been used during the period these foods would have been prepared, but that probably makes it more accessible to modern cooks.

Have you tried any of the recipes in Recipes for Murder? If so let me know how they were in the comments below.