THE COOKBOOK TEST #0007: THE NERO WOLFE COOKBOOK BY REX STOUT

INSTALLMENT #0007 (PAID) / THE CULINARY DETECTIVE / CREOLE FRITTERS / ‘CHEESE’

At the dinner table, in between bits of deviled grilled lamb kidneys with a sauce he and Fritz had invented, he explained why it was that all you needed to know about any human society was what they ate. If you knew what they ate you could deduce everything else - culture, philosophy, morals, politics, everything. I enjoyed it because the kidneys were tender and tasty and that sauce is one of Fritz’s best, but I wondered how you would make out if you tried to deduce everything about Wolfe knowing what he had eaten in the past ten years. I decided you would deduce that he was dead.  – Rex Stout writing as Archie Goodwin in The Final Deduction

Dear Subscribers,

Part of the deal with THE COOKBOOK TEST is that you’ll get subjected to some of my life’s great, silly loves - foods, people, video games, books - in the hope that you might find something new to love, too. I sincerely hope that you haven’t read any Nero Wolfe detective novels by Rex Stout before getting this newsletter, because I’d be honored to introduce them to you.

I have friends who collect Nero Wolfe books but I prefer to scoop them up as needed - before a work trip or vacation I’ll often hit a used bookstore and dive bomb the mystery section, soaking up two or three of these books for a few dollars with the knowledge that I’ll share them, or lose them, or sell them back once the trip is done. 

These are books that are at once very light and very heavy. They’re very light in that they’re set in a sort of fantasyland mid-century Manhattan populated by comfortable fixtures - the gruff police sergeant, the interfering D.A., the meddling but persuadable newspaper columnist, the old friend who owns a restaurant, etc. and so forth. Set at the emotional if not geographic center of that Manhattan is the brownstone on West 35th Street, populated by Nero Wolfe (an impossibly grouchy and brilliant private detective who undertakes to do as little work and as little travel as possible), his gregarious, charming, and resourceful right-hand man, Archie Goodwin, Wolfe’s trusted chef Fritz Brenner, and Wolfe’s in-house gardener and orchid expert Theodore Horstmann. The central team of Wolfe and Goodwin are backed up by three freelance investigators (Saul Panzer, Orrie Cather, and Fred Durkin), and jointly there are no in-universe mysteries that they can’t crack.

The books are heavy in that readers are asked to sympathize with an arrogant, condescending, generally unpleasant man who is nearly always right about nearly everything. Wolfe is easy to write off at first glance, but as the books unfold it becomes clear that while he might be a curmudgeon, he is a deeply ethical, incredibly thoughtful, highly moral curmudgeon who is constantly battling his own formidable conscience and invariably losing. Part of Wolfe’s personal lore is his love for food and drink, but he’s not (merely) a glutton - hospitality is sacred to Wolfe, and feeding and caring for guests in his home may be his first commandment.