Good Food Wherever You Look!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Standing ovation and rose petals and champagne! It is always such a joy and an honor when we are graced with the presence of the inimitable and fabulous Catriona McPherson.

(And I will never forget the key she offers to pronouncing her name: Her first name is  like the hurricane, and the last name rhymes with what you would call a human. A...person. Isn’t that perfect on so many levels?)

Speaking of perfect. Catriona has a new book! (Dandy number 16, incredible, and I fell in love with her at book 1.) And now I cannot wait to read THE WITCHING HOUR. 

But first: the Menu.

And then some very very serious discussions. About food. Yay.

Good Food Wherever You Look!

by Catriona McPherson

In the opening scene of THE WITCHING HOUR (Dandy Gilver #16), it’s Hugh Gilver’s sixtieth birthday and he has been allowed to choose the menu for his birthday celebration. 

That was the rule when I was wee: the birthday girl got to choose dinner. From my mum’s repertoire, that is; we knew better than to ask for steak tartare and choux-pastry swans on a tempered chocolate lake.

(In fact, we would have run a mile from steak tartare – raw mince and raw egg? Yukko – and didn’t know that the stuff eclairs were made of had a name.)

Hugh, aided and abetted by Mrs Tilling, the Gilverton cook, chooses to revisit his Victorian childhood and Edwardian youth with a dinner in the grand old style. The menu is:

Clear soup

Poached fish

Pigeon terrine

Gooseberry sorbet

Roast beef

Salad

Suet pudding

Cheese

Coffee and bon-bons

I imagined the soup to be chicken and the fish to be salmon, but toffs of the time wouldn’t go to town describing things on the menu so I didn’t either. 

My choice – one course and pudding – was more likely to be gammon steak, with a ring of pineapple as God intended, roast potatoes, peas and corn (the sweetest vegetables because, even though it was a birthday, you still had to have vegetables) and for pudding: birthday cake. Obviously.

I can’t imagine setting to on the kind of dinner menu that was typical among the upper classes at the turn of nineteenth to twentieth century.

Not that there’s anything on that menu I wouldn’t eat – in fact haven’t eaten – but more because nine courses requires you to eat hardly any of each dish. I find that exhausting. 

Modern tasting menus regularly give me a headache and sometimes give me the giggles. (Not that I’m against “fine dining”. I’d love to go to the Manoir au Quat’ Saisons once in my life, for instance.)

But, you know, when the menu item is six lines long and the dish, when it appears, is two polite mouthfuls or one normal one? Hilarity ensues. One time, I put my reading glasses on to try to find the celery that had definitely been mentioned in writing. Turned out it was the edible string holding together a posy of deep-fried thyme on top of the scallop.

(It might have been a lamb fillet. But it was the size of a scallop.) 

I think the meal that Dandy and Alec wheedle out of a shut kitchen in a pub, halfway through the book, sounds much nicer: tea in a brown china pot and freshly cut sandwiches of thick white bread, ham and pungent pickled something. If I was hungry, that’s the kind of food I’d fall on.

Speaking of scallops as we were, though, I recently hosted Leslie Karst and her wife Robin, for brunch on my porch. Neil said, when I told him, ‘You’re cooking for the woman who wrote JUSTICE IS SERVED? Are you nuts?’ I’ll admit, it did give me the collywobbles. That book’s subtitle is a tale of scallops, the law, and cooking for RBG. There’s a chapter on finding the right plates!

Leslie’s menu for Justice Ginsburg was as follows:

Salted cashews and rice crackers with wasabi peas

Seared sea scallop with ginger lime cream sauce

Roasted butternut squash soup with brown butter

Baby spinach, blood orange, red onion, dried cranberries, pine nuts and gorgonzola

Blackened ahi, wasabi mashed potatoes and snow peas

Patisserie

Perfect, right? A bit more detail than “poached fish” etc, but no novellas, and a special but sensible five courses plus the hors d’oeuvres. 

My menu for brunch on the porch was:

Mushroom and potato frittata

Courgette ladders*

Bacon

Sourdough and butter

Fruit salad and Greek yoghurt

And I wished I hadn’t remembered that episode of Modern Family where someone tries to sneer at Cameron by assuming he’ll serve frittata and he says, “Are we eating in 1998?” Gah.

Thing is though, when I shared Neil’s supportive (not!) words with Leslie on my porch that Sunday morning, she said something both striking and true – “The thing about people who love to cook is that they’re people who love to eat and so they love it when people give them food.”

Isn’t that the truth? As long as you’re not a picky eater – and I eat everything except two-bite eyeballs – there is no downside to someone laying down a plate of lovingly cooked or swiftly assembled food in front of you.

Posh food with wasabi, peasant food with nameless pickles, curries so hot you can see the future, Wonderbread sandwiches with olive loaf and Miracle Whip (as described in the 1980s section of Jess Lourey’s THE TAKEN ONES, which I am reading now and which makes me want to find a retro deli). It’s all good. 

I think having to eat whatever my mum made while I was growing up and only getting to choose my own dinner once a year is probably a big bit of why I’m such an omnivore now, but it does take me ages to choose in a restaurant – everything sounds lovely!

What do you think? Did you have to clear your plate as a kid? Do you like when people cook for you? What would you choose if – let’s say Leslie Karst, to make it easy – was in your kitchen right now raring to go? I’m nosy as well as greedy, see? 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, that’s SO difficult!  Standing rib roast with yorkshire pudding and asparagus?  

And we had the three-bite rule. You had to take three bites of everything, and then you could eschew (!!) the rest.  

How about you, Reds and Readers?

(And I adored Leslie’s book!)

*Griddled zucchini – makes a lot of smoke in the kitchen but worth it and uses up a good bit of glut at this time of year.

Serial awards-botherer, Catriona McPherson (she/her) was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US in 2010. She writes: preposterous 1930s private-detective stories, including September 2024’s THE WITCHING HOUR; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories about a medical social worker; and contemporary psychological standalones. These are all set in Scotland with a lot of Scottish weather. She also writes modern comedies about a Scot out of water in a “fictional” college town in Northern California. She is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime.  www.catrionamcpherson.com 

THE WITCHING HOUR

It’s the spring of 1939 and Dandy Gilver, the mother of two grown-up sons, can’t think of anything except the deteriorating state of Europe and the threat of war. Detective work is the furthest thing from her mind. It takes a desperate cri de coeur from an old friend to persuade her to take on a case.

Daisy Esslemont’s husband Silas has vanished. It’s not the first time, but he has never embarrassed her with his absences before.

It doesn’t take Dandy and her side-kick, Alec Osborne, long to find the wandering Silas, but when they track him down to the quaint East Lothian village of Dirleton, he is dead, lying on the village green with his head bashed in, in full view of a row of alms houses, two pubs, a manse, a school and even the watchtowers of Dirleton Castle. And yet not a single one of the villagers admits to seeing a thing.

As Dandy and Alec begin to chip away at the determined silence of the Dirletonites, they cannot imagine what unites such a motley crew: schoolmistress, minister, landlord, postmaster, park-keeper, farmworkers, schoolchildren . . .

Only one person – Mither Golane, the oldest resident of the village – is loose-lipped enough to let something slip, but her quiet aside must surely be the rambling of a woman in her second childhood. Dandy and Alec know that Silas was no angel but “He’s the devil” is too outlandish a claim to help them find his killer. The detecting pair despair of ever finding answers, but are they asking the right questions?