Mysteries and food--which came first?

Sometime in the last few months I was at my son’s new house and in the kitchen I searched for the wooden spoons my daughter-in-law has always had. Gone! “He threw them out during the move,” she said, “because he wants everything to match.” She was left with black plastic utensils. I was horrified and I think as said as much to the son involved. My other daughter-in-law routinely puts her wooden spoons in the dishwasher. I explained that would dry them out, but the next time I emptied her dishwasher, there they were. “Habit,” she shrugged.

To me, wooden spoons are special. Most of mine speak of years of cooking; a few are relatively new, some of most interesting woods. But I reach for them for almost anything I cook. I found today a blog titled “Pen, Spoon and Dagger” with a post that talks about the heritage and importance of wooden cooking spoons. I printed it out because—shhh!, don’t tell! I have a lovely engraved wooden spoon put away in my gift closet for the daughter who lost hers. I'll include a copy of the blog with it.

But the blog combines cooking and mystery, a frequent combination. I’ve often wondered why we have so many culinary mysteries. Is it because food is one of the biggest comforts of life? Maybe we combine it with murder—the ultimate disaster—to soften the horror? Maybe to humanize the protagonist? I love culinary mysteries, and with Murder at the Blue Plate Café have edged close to writing one.

Traditionally chefs were always men. Nero Wolfe was the first to make food a character in his books and you can still get the Nero Wolfe Cookbook. But today’s culinary mystery protagonists are almost uniformly women, while a man may be the antagonist, if not the villain. Does that have to do with women’s equality? Julia Child?

The relationship between food and mysteries is one I have long wanted to explore. The list of culinary mysteries is almost endless, but I haven’t untangled the thread yet. Anybody got any ideas? Maybe another time I’ll list some of the mysteries, and some of the cookbooks—by gosh, there’s even a Nancy Drew cookbook and I don’t remember a word about food in those books.

The amazing Nancy Drew

Especially for her time--the fifties and sixties--Nancy Drew was an amazing young lady. She could swim, dance, hike, do all manner of things. As one reviewer at today's Nancy Drew Luncheobn said, she could do anything.  She had amazing survival skills, living through being shoved overboard on a cruise and being buried in a cave-in, among other disasters. For a young lady in a time when people didn't travel as freely as they do today, she was surprising well traveled--from the Netherlands to Arizona to Istanbul and other exotic places--in over 48 mysteries, she could do a lot of hopping around the world. Her mystery solving skills are beyind comparison; never mind that she relied on coincidence and lucky happenstance for a lot of her solutions. When us oldsters were reading her books way back then, we believed she could do all those things and that all those adventures could happen to her (we hadn't become cynical about the Cabot Cove Syndrome yet)--and we wanted to be Nancy Drew with her red convertible. In a room of over fifty women, only three had never read the books--and two of those just read their first to be on the discussion panel. Fascinating stuff, and it took many of us back a lot of years.
The menu at today's luncheon was pretty much from the fifties--high in carbs. There was Scarlet Slipper Raspberry Punch from The Scarlet Slipper Mystery; Crooked Banister Corn Bread from The Crooked Banister; Shadow Ranch Barbecued Beans from The Secret of Shadow Ranch (one of the earlier books); Mannequin Casserole from The Mysterious Mannequin; and Brass-Bound Trunk Candy from The Mystery of the Brass-Bound Trunk. I didn't taste the punch but others said it was pretty good; the cornbread was just that--cornbread; the barbecued beans were really really sweet--what we in Texas call northern beans. They were made with two cans pork and beans, not from beans soaked overnight, and cooked only two hours. Good, if you like sweet beans--and I do. The main dish, Mannequin Casserole, was a melange of ground beef, macaroni shells, tomato sauce, creamed corn and cheese with onion, bell pepper and mushrooms. Good, but as a friend next to me said, "It's sort of what we call ghouash," and another said "It's like the Doris' Cassereole you make, Judy." Still, if I weren't on the small portion kick, I'd have gone back for more.
Presenters synopsized each book from which a recipe came but they were hard put to tie the recipe to the book--the cornbread was actually mentioned on a specific page in Crooked Banister, but the reviewer for Shadow Ranch could only surmise that when they packed a picnic lunch for a day's outing, it included the beans. And the reviewer for The Mysterious Mannequin, in which Nancy finds herself in Istanbul, guessed that it was based on a dish from that region of the world. Hmmm. With canned corn?
 The cookbook was originally compiled in 1973 by Carolyn Keene, the pen name used by the several authors who compiled the mysteries; a later version, Nancy Drew: Clues to Good Cooking was published in 2005 and was the book the recipes came from today.
Highlight came when Tracy Thompson read from Nancy Drew's Guide to Life which contains such gems (roughly paraphrased) as "If you see a bleeding injured man swimming toward your boat, be sure to stop and help him; he may be fleeing evil pursuers." Or, "Never disregard fine lines on a piece of paper--a microscope may reveal them to be fine printing."  Or "If you see something resembling a shark in the water, don't fret. It's more likely a small submarine operated by thieves." Words to live by.
Fun event, and now I think I even want to reread one of the books--don't I remember a title about a winding staircase? And another about an old clock? The friend next to me said she still has all thirty-six of her books. If you want to delve more deeply into Nancy and her history, there are scholarly books today, such as Nancy Drew and The Women Who Created Her, which I suppose talks about The Stratemeyer Syndicate that created not only Nancy but the Hardy Boys and other series. A great era in young-adult literature--and we got a welcome glimpse back into it today! Kudos to Susan Oakley, Shari Barnes, and Human Relations at TCU for a great luncheon .

Nancy Drew and childhood memories

Buying The Hidden Staircase for Maddie, a product of the current Nancy Drew craze, made me think about my childhood. I talked tonight to a good friend a few years younger than me (isn't everyone?), and she remembers that she and three other girls in her Kansas City neighborhood spent an entire summer reading Nancy Drew (okay they also played Monopoly and Parcheesi) and they traded books, until they'd all read all the books up until then. I began to remember the summers--was I ten or eleven?--when I rode my bike from our house in Madison Park to the Blackstone branch of the Chicago Library every morning. I took out three or four books, went home and read them, and brought them back the next morning to exchange for more books. In retrospect, I am amazed my parents let me ride alone those eight or ten blocks on the South Side of Chicago--by the time you got to the library, you were close to 47th Street, where a questionable neighborhood began, and we were always afraid to go. But it was a different time. Mom also let me ride from 50th to the commercial district on 53rd to meet a friend and substitute for lunch--this was an occasional treat--those thick, real-ice-cream chocolate shakes at Cunag's where the straw stood straight up in the middle. Today, I don't let Maddie sit on the steps in front of my house unless someone is watching her--it's a through street, and you never know. But it's a shame. We've lost a wondereful part of childhood in the '50s and '60s--and our grandkids will never know it.
TCU Press about a year ago published Before Texas Changed: A Fort Worth Boyhood, in which David Murph, now a minister and director of church relations at TCU, recalls a childhood in the TCU area when he was free to roam downtown and virtually anywhere in the city--he just had to be home for supper. Of course, David had an inventive imagination and got into unimagineable scrapes, which are what make the book a delight, but he had that sense of freedom and yet safety.
Sometimes I think it's the publicity given to abductions these days. There were kidnappings when I was a child--I remember one horrible one in the Chicago area that scared the life out of me because a man had taken a ladder to the to the second-story bedroom of a young girl. My bedroom was on the second floor. But surely we have to publicize these things to make the public cautious--and in so doing, we've changed childhood. It's a circular maze, and there's no figuring it out, but I don't like it. On the other hand, I'm fierce about keeping my grandchildren safe. So there's the dilemma.