For Your Dearest Reader on Valentine's Day

You can't say we didn't warn you. Valentine's Day is Friday, February 14th, exactly two weeks from today. This gives you some time to find a book and a little accompaniment for your dearest reader. Here are some suggestions:

Are you lucky enough to be shopping for a chocoholic crime fiction fan? Pair Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (Little, Brown, 2013; see Sister Mary Murderous's review here) with a beautiful chocolate bird from Alma Handmade Chocolates in Portland, Oregon. Fran's Chocolates in Seattle has salted caramels and chocolate flavors that include Oolong Tea, Raspberry Truffle, and Milk Chocolate Espresso. Along with that candy, give Anthony Berkeley's charming 1929 classic, The Poisoned Chocolates Case, in which members of a detection club vie to solve a poisoning that has Scotland Yard baffled.

Another idea is a box of incredibly detailed anatomically correct human parts chocolates and a suitable book: Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood (Ace, 2013) is a space opera set in the year 7000, when a humanoid descended from robots, Krina Alizond-114, goes on a quest to find her sister Ana and is pursued by an assassin. This tale, involving futuristic macroeconomics, initially made my head spin, but after acclimation, I enjoyed it. There are two story threads that eventually tie up in Belinda Bauer's Rubbernecker (Bantam Books, 2013): one featuring Patrick Fort, an anatomy student with Asperger's syndrome, who discovers something odd about a cadaver he's studying; and another featuring a comatose patient. This highly original standalone, set in Cardiff, Wales, was a 2013 Gold Dagger finalist.

I'm a huge fan of bathtub reading, and perhaps your loved one is, too. Or, maybe he or she has yet to discover the joys of reading while lolling in the water, caressing the faucet with the toes, and hearing water lap against the tub sides. For Valentine's Day, present your mer- maid/man with a nice piece of lacquered wood sized to span the tub. Along with it, an appropriate book. One that contains a drowning is thoughtful (Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin) or you might want to encourage water play with some little boats and Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander, Book 1 in the wonderful Aubrey/Maturin naval series set in Napoleonic times, or Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Or, go for deadpan humor and a weird, slow-moving tale set in the New Mexico desert, featuring a comatose teenager and those who hold vigil for him: John Brandon's A Million Heavens (McSweeney's, 2012).

For a twosome in the tub, put a bottle of rum, two glasses, and Moby Dick, Or, The Card Game on the tub board between you. (If you're wearing an eye patch in the shape of a heart and have a parrot sitting on your shoulder, it will make things very festive.) For other Valentine's Day suggestions for a duo in the tub, consult your imagination.

Valentine's Day is a wonderful excuse for eating cookies. There are several ways to go with a cookies gift. One is sugar cookies rolled out and cut in the shape of individual letters from the alphabet, accompanied with a book full of wordplay, like a Jasper Fforde Thursday Next book or a P. G. Wodehouse novel. Another suitable book is Mark Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea, in which letters are outlawed by the superstitious governing council—and disappear from the book accordingly—as they drop off a pangram (i.e., "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog") creator's statue.

An alternative to individual-letter cookies are cookies cut and decorated like addressed envelopes. Give these with a book that features a poison pen, such as Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington, Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger, Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night or Carter Dickson's Night at the Mocking Widow. Other great books with these envelope cookies would be Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation (Knopf, 2014), a portrait of marriage as seen in love letters between "the wife" and her husband while they were dating; and Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road, which contains correspondence between an American and Marks & Co. booksellers.

Of course, you can also write some heartfelt letters of your own and accompany them with any delicious cookies for Valentine's Day.

It's one thing to hold a book with one hand while shoveling soup into the mouth with the other; it's another thing to struggle to read while eating food that requires two hands, like a burrito the size of Rhode Island from Chili Peppers. This Page Boy bookholder is a nifty little gadget that frees up both hands. A good companion gift is a thriller such as Drew Chapman's The Ascendant (Simon & Schuster, 2014), with numbers savant Garrett Reilly trying like mad to save the world while the US and China wage surreptitious war against each other; or Pierre Lemaitre's Alex (translated from the French by Frank Wynne, Quercus/MacLehose, 2013), in which Police Commandant Camille Verhoeven races against a ticking clock to save a kidnapped woman. Gift wrap the book and Page Boy in a large, colorful cloth napkin.

Any of us who've suddenly experienced a sense of unreality while walking down a familiar street, or awakened in the middle of the night, not knowing who or where we are, would enjoy Familiar, a slim book by J. Robert Lennon, published in 2012, by Graywolf Press. When we meet Elisa Brown, she's in her car, returning to New York from her annual pilgrimage to Wisconsin, where she's visited the grave of her 15-year-old son, Silas. Suddenly, she and her car have morphed into something different. Elisa has fallen into a sort of parallel universe where she is—and isn't—herself, and others are both familiar and unfamiliar, too. With this book, give what Elisa could have used: a beautiful little mirror or a cup for a jolt of caffeine. Cuddle up the cup in a little sweater, and include some scrumptious biscotti for dunking.

A tin of unusual tea or cocoa, a bag of great coffee beans, or a bottle of Irish whiskey makes a good Valentine's Day gift. For a hardboiled fiction fan, add Gene Kerrigan's Dark Times in the City (Europa Editions/Penguin Group (USA), 2013), the story of Danny Callaghan, who falls afoul of a vicious drug gang after he saves the life of a petty criminal in a Dublin pub. Irish writer Gene Kerrigan's crime fiction is of the don't-miss variety; another choice is his 2012 book, The Rage; see my review here.

True lovers of ice cream recognize no season as inappropriate. If your favorite reader pines for pear Riesling sorbet or some other icy concoction, and you can't come up with a fantastic pint locally, there's mail order, but it's pricey. A good bet is Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams (at some other time, we will delve into ice cream in mind-numbing detail; I come from a long line of ice cream fanatics). To go with it, Ivy Pochoda's Visitation Street (Ecco/Dennis Lehane, 2013). The Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood of Red Hook is the main character in this story of what happens after 15-year-old best friends Val and June take an inflatable raft out on the water one summer night, and only one of them returns. Like books by Richard Price, it examines the neighborhood and family left behind.

We'd love to hear what you plan to give or what you'd love to receive on Valentine's Day. 

Recipe for Murder

I'm supremely untalented in arts and crafts. I can't sew a straight line; in life drawing class, my version of a reclining human form looked like a displaced sea lion; my attempts to learn how to knit were so laughably futile I decided I'd have better luck using the knitting needles as chopsticks. My failures in this sphere are probably part of what caused my lack of interest in craftsy mysteries.

I'm not bad at cooking and baking, so I perk up more at mysteries that feature food. Not so much the ones with cute, culinary titles and lots of recipes in them, though. I prefer books that integrate a lot of good food in the characters' lives and make me want to dash out to a restaurant or into the kitchen to put the pots and pans to work.

Crèpes Suzette

Naturally, the French and Italians specialize in making the reader drool all over the page. Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret regularly eats traditional dishes, like fois gras with truffles, tripe á la Caen, coq au vin, onion soup and crèpes Suzette––and there's more where that came from when he's at home. Madame Maigret is characterized as a good, plain cook, but her meals sound delicious to me––and they attract Maigret home for lunch quite often. There is even a book of her dishes, collected by Robert J. Courtine and titled Madame Maigret's Recipes. The book is out of print, but can be located.

Marseilles café

Even in a gritty, noir series like Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy, protagonist Fabio Montale takes time out from investigations to enjoy the city's bars, music and, yes, food.  Of course, it has a more Mediterranean flair than your Parisian cooking, but that's not a bad thing; not with dishes like spaghetti with basil and garlic, baked anchovy purée, and fricassée with clams.

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's not just amoré, it's a regular night in a book featuring Donna Leon's Inspector Brunetti, Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano or Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen. Maybe my favorite meal description is in Camilleri's The Smell of the Night, when Montalbano stops in at a tiny trattoria recommended to him. It doesn't look like much of a place to him, but he's ravenous and decides to give it a try. The proprietor tells him they have burning pirciati that evening if he feels up to it. Montalbano doesn't want to give the man the satisfaction of asking how the dish is prepared, and he certainly feels he's "up to it," whatever that means, so burning pirciati it is. When the dish arrives, it smells wonderful, and Montalbano immediately digs in––only to feel as if his mouth has burst into flames that are only barely subdued by his drowning them in an entire glass of wine.

Pirciati (not sure if it's burning, though!)

Montalbano decides he must know what is in the dish, and the proprietor tells him: "Olive oil, half an onion, two cloves of garlic, two salted anchovies, a teaspoon of fine capers, black olives, tomatoes, basil, half a pimento, salt, Pecorino cheese, and black pepper." Battling the sweat pouring down his forehead, Montalbano devours the whole dish and grabs bread to mop up the juices, "[p]unctuating his forkfuls with gulps of wine and alternating extreme agony and unbearable pleasure." He refuses a second course, and the now-respectful proprietor is understanding, since he comments that "[t]he problem with burning pirciati is that you don't get your taste buds back until the next day."

Braised wild turkey

Closer to home, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe is at least as famous a gourmand as he is a detective. He keeps a full-time chef, Fritz, at his brownstone, and with Fritz's cooking, there is no wonder the detective weighs, as his colleague Archie Goodwin tells us, one-seventh of a ton. You won't be surprised to learn that The Nero Wolfe Cookbook was published–––and, unlike Madame Maigret's Recipes, this book is still in print. Georgette Spelvin is devoted to Nero Wolfe (and even more to Archie), and I have challenged her to write about the objects of her devotion here. In hopes that she'll be more likely to comply, I won't say any more about Nero Wolfe, Archie or Fritz's cooking.

Steak frites

Regular readers of Read Me Deadly know how dedicated I am to Louise Penny's Armand Gamache/Three Pines series. If I could enter the world Penny creates, I'd head straight for Olivier's bistro in Three Pines. The croissants sound like they're of Parisian quality, but Olivier doesn't make them; he buys them from the bakery down the block. So, much as I love croissants, especially pain au chocolat, what I'd show up for would be Olivier's impressive sandwich creations and, most of all, the steak frites. Come to think of it, Martin Walker's Bruno Courrèges makes a pretty mean steak, too. What I know about steak is a little secret I learned from the folks at America's Test Kitchen. Here it is, from the May & June 2007 Cook's Illustrated magazine:

Pan-Seared Thick-Cut Strip Steaks (for four)

2 boneless strip steaks, 1-1/2 to 1-3/4 inches thick (about 1 pound each)
Kosher salt and ground black pepper
1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 275 degrees. Pat steaks dry with paper towels. Cut each steak in half vertically to create four 8-ounce steaks. Season steaks liberally with salt and pepper. Using hands, gently shape the steaks into uniform thickness. Place steaks on wire rack set in rimmed baking sheet; transfer baking sheet to oven. Cook until instant-read thermometer inserted horizontally into center of steaks registers 90-95 degrees for rare to medium-rare, 20-25 minutes; or 100-105 degrees for medium, 25-30 minutes.
2. Heat oil in 12-inch heavy-bottomed skillet over high heat until smoking. Place steaks in skillet and sear until well-browned and crusty, 1-1/2 to 2 minutes, lifting once halfway through to redistribute fat underneath each steak. Reduce heat if food begins to burn. Using tongs, turn steaks and cook until well-browned on the other side, 2 to 2-1/2 minutes. Transfer steaks to clean rack and reduce heat under pan to medium. Use tongs to stand two steaks on their sides. Holding steaks together, return to pan and hold them with the tongs so that you can sear all the edges until browned, about 1-1/2 minutes. Repeat with remaining 2 steaks.
3. Return steaks to wire rack and let rest, loosely tented with foil, for about 10 minutes. If desired, make a steak sauce in the now-empty skillet; e.g., red wine and mushroom pan sauce.

Delhi street food vendor

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to the audiobook of Tarquin Hall's The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken.  The protagonist of Hall's mystery series is Delhi private detective Vish Puri. When I tell you that his nickname is Chubby, you begin to understand that food is something Vish takes very, very seriously. As he zips around Delhi, he makes detours to all his favorite street vendors. In just this one short book, he eats at least a dozen meals that will have you looking up airfares to India, or at least plotting an immediate visit to the nearest good Indian restaurant. Half of these dishes I've never heard of, like poori, rajma chawal, papdi, channa batura and bedmi aloo, but that doesn't mean I wasn't ravenous for them.

Butter chicken over rice

What I didn't know about the book is that in its printed form, it includes some recipes at the end. On audio, you don't even get a hint of that. While I was reading about Vish devouring butter chicken at a cricket banquet, all I could think about was how much I wanted some. I didn't care that it killed a guest at the banquet. I just remembered the butter chicken at Amber India in Mountain View, California. When I worked in Palo Alto, a group of us would go there for their lunch buffet every couple of weeks. It may have been a buffet, but I only had eyes for the butter chicken. I don't know what recipe Tarquin Hall put in his book, but here's the Amber India recipe that was printed in the San Francisco Chronicle some years ago:

Butter Chicken from Amber India

Main ingredients

3 pounds chicken (2 half-breasts, 2 thighs, 2 legs), skinned
Juice of one lemon
1 tablespoon hot red pepper flakes
2 teaspoons salt
1-1/2 cups unflavored yogurt
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1-1/2 teaspoons garlic paste
1-1/2 teaspoons ginger paste
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander seed
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon garam masala
1/2 teaspoon salt

Sauce ingredients

1 teaspoon powdered ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground red chile
Pinch garam masala
Pinch mace
Pinch nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/4 cup butter
2 cups canned tomatoes, chopped
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 cups water, or more as needed
2 tablespoons heavy cream
2 teaspoons ground fenugreek
Salt to taste

Instructions

1. Make 3 parallel cuts on top of each piece of chicken. Place the chicken in a resealable bag.
2. Combine the lemon juice, red pepper flakes and salt; pour over the chicken. Seal the bag and refrigerate 30 minutes.
3. Combine the yogurt and cream in a bowl; blend well.
4. Mix together the garlic paste, ginger paste, coriander, cumin, garam masala and salt. Add to the yogurt mixture, blending thoroughly.
5. When the chicken has marinated for 30 minutes, remove it from the refrigerator, open the bag and pour in the yogurt mixture. Reseal the bag and refrigerate overnight.
6. Next day, to make the sauce, combine the ginger, ground red chile, garam masala, mace, nutmeg, white pepper and brown sugar in a small bowl.
7. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, the spice/sugar blend and water. Simmer, stirring frequently, for 20 minutes.
8. Add more water if the mixture gets too dry.
9. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
10. Remove the chicken from the marinade; discard the marinade.
11. Arrange the chicken pieces in a baking pan large enough to hold them in a single layer. Bake for 30 minutes.
12. Let the chicken cool until you can handle it; then remove the meat from the bones and discard the bones.
13. Add the chicken meat, the cream and fenugreek to the sauce. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent burning. Add salt to taste and serve over rice.

Serves four.  Nutrition information per serving: 325 calories (not including the rice), 28 grams protein, 8 grams carbohydrates, 20 grams fat (10 grams saturated fat), 1 gram fiber.

Swedish cream wafers

If you want to read mysteries that won't make you hungry, I would recommend most Nordic mysteries. The food usually sounds dreary at best, dreadful at worst. Sheep's head or fermented shark fin, anyone? If the food isn't frighteningly grotesque, it's just sad, like Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander and her regular diet of frozen pizzas. I always feel so sorry for the Nordic books' characters that I want to make them some Swedish cream wafers; simple cookies so good that I haven't made them in decades because I will eat the entire batch all by myself. I have no idea where I got this recipe. I just have my handwritten index card from at least 30 years ago.

Swedish Cream Wafers

Wafer ingredients

1 cup salted butter (at room temperature, so it's soft)
1/3 cup thick cream
2 cups sifted flour
Granulated sugar for coating the wafers

Filling ingredients

1/4 cup salted butter (at room temperature, so it's soft)
3/4 cup sifted confectioner's sugar
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla (or lemon extract if you prefer)

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix together the wafer ingredients and refrigerate the dough for at least an hour, until it is cold. Using one-third of the wafer dough at a time, keeping the rest cold, roll out the dough 1/8 of an inch thick on a lightly floured surface. Cut the dough with 1-1/2 inch round cookie cutter (flour the cutter so it doesn't stick), coat both sides of each wafer with granulated sugar, prick with a fork four times. 

Bake the wafers for 7-9 minutes, until a light golden. Do not brown. Let cool.

While the wafers are baking and cooling, mix the filling ingredients until the filling is smooth. Once the wafers are completely cooled, spread the flat side of a wafer with the filling and lightly press the flat side of another wafer against the filling to make a filled cookie. Repeat with the rest of the wafers and filling.

Would you like to tell us some of your recipes and the books that inspire you to make them?

Nuthin' Says Lovin' Like Sumpthin' from the Oven

I admit it. I'm not the world's best or most organized cook. While I'm rushing pasta from stove to sink I bump into my kids as they're setting the table. When a dinner guest cuts my chocolate cake I spill coffee beans all over the kitchen floor. I'm as apt to chop my finger as the scallion I'm holding.

This might explain why I'm more fond of reading cookbooks than I am of cooking from them even though I love good food and enjoy messing around in the kitchen. I'm fascinated by glimpses into the mysterious lairs of professional chefs where culinary miracles are produced and served. As a fan of crime fiction, however, I most enjoy witnessing something lethal in those kitchens and I'm not talking about the artistic arrangement of dead carrots on a plate.

After all, a well-equipped professional kitchen is a natural place for violence and death. Glittering knives, sharp tools whose use I can only guess, heavy pans and flaming dishes. A walk-in refrigerator. Large plastic bags. Drāno for the sink. A butcher's block. What better place for hot tempers to boil over into homicidal rage? A good place for a waiter to debone another with a fish knife or a wine steward to clobber the pastry chef with the Châteauneuf du Pape.

I'm not a fan of TV chef Anthony Bourdain, but his book Bone in the Throat: A Novel is a very grisly yet merry caper set in the Dreadnaught Grill of Manhattan's Little Italy. Everyone in the Dreadnaught kitchen is caught in the cross-currents of food, entrepreneurship and crime, including the dentist in legal trouble who is forced by loony feds into becoming a restaurateur as part of a farcical sting operation to ensnare loan shark Salvatore "Sally Wig" Pitera, who bankrolls the eatery; the dope-using chef; and sous-chef Tommy Pagano, Pitera's nephew. Tommy isn't fond of the Mob, but Uncle Sal raised him, so Tommy allows him and some other mobsters to use the kitchen for after-hours "business" and is caught in a squeeze by the FBI as a result. Oh, boy.

If you think that a grease fire or getting cut while chopping onions is the worst that can happen in a kitchen you're in for an eye-popping, stomach-churning experience when you read Bone in the Throat. This is a delectable satirical novel; maybe not for reading while eating, although the knowledgeable talk about ingredients and savory recipes stoked my appetite and kept me munching as I peeled the pages of this book. Bourdain graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, but he deserves an honorary degree from the Homicidal Institute of America as well. Clever gangsterese, hearty servings of SoHo culture, entertaining characters and over-the-top kitchen mayhem. Black humor en croute. Bon appétit!

P.S. If this book promises to be too violent for your taste but you're looking for a food-infused mystery, former Washington Post restaurant critic Phyllis Richman's first Chas Wheatley book, The Butter Did It, is a fun traditional mystery and may satiate your appetite.