Guest post written by author Priscilla Paton
Priscilla Paton writes mysteries set in the greater Minneapolis/St. Paul area. Priscilla grew up on a dairy farm in Maine. She received a B.A. from Bowdoin College, a Ph.D. in English Literature from Boston College, was a college professor and taught in Kansas, Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Minnesota. She has previously published a children’s book, Howard and the Sitter Surprise, and a book on Robert Frost and Andrew Wyeth, Abandoned New England. She married into the Midwest and lives with her husband in Northfield, Minnesota. When not writing, she participates in community advocacy and literacy programs, takes photos of birds, and contemplates (fictional) murder. When The House Burns is out now.
There is no chocolate in my newest Twin Cities mystery, When The House Burns. And it released on Valentine’s Day.
Wait, false alarm. As ever, Detective Erik Jansson has a stash of KitKat bars which his investigative partner Deb Metzger mooches.
Not that chocolate is required in the sort of mysteries I write, which can be defined as “traditional” or as warped procedurals which drop a few f-bombs. It could be debated that chocolate does not pair well with the book’s topics of homelessness and crimes against women. I don’t recall any percent of cocoa solids in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely or Agatha
Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles (all right, there’s a cup of cocoa in Death on the Nile). Alcohol is more common to noir, hard-boiled, and upper-class mysteries, supplemented by sobering coffee west of the Atlantic Ocean and a reviving cuppa to the east. The Nero Wolfe Cookbook, based on Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin series, does not have any chocolate recipes—terrapin is listed, however. According to The Lord Peter Wimsey Cookbook, Lord Peter “drinks anything but cocoa and fizzy lemonade.” Excellent books have been written that exclude chocolate—excuse me while I take a break. (The author consumes Reese’s peanut butter cups.)
When The House Burns is set in apple-picking and pumpkin-spice season, a Minnesota
October, when the fall foliage has the same hues as the pies. Pies are the dessert of farm life, and
Erik Jansson with rural grandparents often has a hankering for them. When I was growing up on a Maine dairy farm, we did have chocolate. Hershey’s for occasional candy bars and cocoa, Baker’s for baking chocolate, and Nestle’s Quik stirred into fresh milk from our cows. Snickers appeared for Halloween, and Toblerone replaced Hershey’s when my father hiked New Hampshire’s White Mountains because Toblerone did not melt easily. But we didn’t grow chocolate.
We did grow rhubarb, raspberries, blackberries, apples, squash, and pumpkin. My mother bought flour by the twenty-five-pound sack so there was plenty for pastry, and she used the recipe from the back of a 1940s Crisco can. She also preserved homemade mincemeat: boiled venison from the neck of a deer (or beef from a butchered cow), apples, suet (again from the butchering), raisins, lots of sugar, and spices. While an acquired taste in the twenty-first century, real mincemeat is far superior to canned meatless versions which in my experience are overly sharp with citron. My mother’s version did not taste “meaty,” though the mince gave it a dense texture. Calorie-laden and nutrient rich, it was just the thing for people laboring outdoors in the winter.
Why include sweets in a murder mystery? They do go well with the decadence of finding pleasure in death and the taboo. As Agatha Christie well knew, food and drink can convey poison. (It’s coming back to me—poisoned chocolates are a cause of death in Rex Stout’s And Be A Villain.) Mysteries are no place for moderation. Appetites run amok, deadly ones for wealth, status, sexual conquest, or revenge. My detectives Deb Metzger and Erik Jansson experience hunger. The hunger is literal when their detecting cuts into mealtime. After witnessing violence, they hunger for justice. They may hunger too for thrills, for vengeance, for a soupçon of “gotcha.”
I write a wee bit hungry. I can only face a small breakfast, and by the time I get cooking at the computer, there’s a slight gnawing sensation. That gives me an urgency that hopefully is a positive for the narrative, a restlessness like Erik Jansson’s. After powering through a section, I give in to a morning snack, an energy bar that may or may not happen to have chocolate. Authors like characters can be driven by other hungers. A hunger for fame and fortune will often go unsatisfied. Many authors, though, want to do well enough that they can continue writing, continue to feed the need to explore and express.
Descriptions of food and drink in books can reveal who’s loved, who’s not, who’s desperate, and who’s in avoidance mode. They can set off a Pavlovian response. I’m ready for a croissant or a crisp wine after reading passages from Louise Penney’s Three Pines mysteries. Other authors are far better than I in the kitchen and it shows in their books. Check out the sites for Mystery Lovers Kitchen, Jenn McKinlay, Mia P. Manansala, and Raquel V. Reyes. No doubt you’ll come across more.
Back to chocolate goodies. My fun was spoiled when I lost tolerance for gluten. A setback, there are always setbacks in mysteries, and like my detectives I had to adapt to a shifting unwanted reality. Without gluten, baked goods can be dry, crumbly, and reminiscent of Styrofoam. After trial and error, I discovered that chocolate chip cookies made with gluten-free flour were as good as ever. For a variation on death by chocolate, I discovered an online recipe for a moist gluten-free Bundt cake. If you’re wondering, the Bundt pan, designed with a German influence by a Scandinavian descendent for a Jewish women’s group, is a Minnesota native.
Finally, white chocolate is not a thing—tastes like a stale hollow Easter bunny. Save your irresistible urges for the dark matter.
