Another Nero Wolfe Cookbook

ABSTRACT:

Good eating is the norm at the fictional dining table of Rex Stout’s great and overweight detective Nero Wolfe. It has been that way since Stout’s first Wolfe murder mystery, Fer-de-Lance, was published in 1934. From early on, Stout and his publishers were aware of the appeal of the fine-foods feature of the Wolfe stories — an awareness reflected most obviously in the commercial publication of two popular cookbooks, as well as in the much more limited and obscure publication of another cookbook of a sort. This article will (1) briefly examine the two commercial cookbooks; (2) take a slightly closer look at the other cookbook — really an odd but appealing, and certainly unconventional, recipe box dressed up to look like a book; and (3) present the entire contents of that other cookbook/recipe box in a more conventional bookish form.