Hi, guys!
Winnie’s hubby here again.
As my first post (“…enter, and sign in please”) made
abundantly clear, there’s virtually nothing I can tell my wife about
cooking. She’s always the one who
comes up with the fabulous recipes, whether it’s something her Mom used to
make, something from the bookcase full of well-loved cookbooks in our living
room, or something we spot on the Cooking Channel / Food Network that strikes
our fancy and we print from their respective websites.
However, as the old Southern expression goes, even a blind pig
finds an acorn now and then, and there was one instance where I was able to
show her something when it comes to cooking. Alas, I can’t take all the credit: that goes to one of my favorite literary detectives – the
286-pound orchid fancier and gourmand, Nero Wolfe.
For those who aren’t avid mystery readers, or who (like
Winnie) only have vague recollections of the 1980s TV show with William Conrad
as Wolfe and Lee Horsley as his assistant, legman and amenuensis Archie
Goodwin, let me briefly acquaint you with Mister Wolfe. He lives in a brownstone on West
Thirty-fifth Street in Manhattan, the number of which Archie, and his “literary
agent,” Rex Stout, are intentionally vague about (one account, which Wolfe
actually testifies to in court [in “The Next Witness”], has him at 918 West 35th,
which as any New Yorker can tell you would put Wolfe’s house in the middle of
the Hudson River) in order to deter curious sightseers. Wolfe rarely leaves the house, which is
why Archie does most of the investigating and reports back to Wolfe – and to us. The brownstone has a greenhouse on the
roof, where Wolfe tends to his beloved orchids with Theodore Horstmann, and a
kitchen where he and chef/major domo Fritz Brenner create their daily culinary
masterpieces (no doubt why Wolfe weighs in at a seventh of a ton). And they are droolworthy. Stout even helped create a cookbook
full of recipes based on the dishes mentioned in the books.
It’s one of the dishes in one of the short stories that
allowed me to wow my wife in the kitchen.
Not the eggs au beurre noir or
shad roe aux fines herbes, not even the corned beef hash (with pig chitlins!), but
something more basic (and more suited to my abilities): that staple of the
summer, corn on the cob.
Here’s the exchange between Wolfe and Inspector Cramer, the
head of the Homicide Bureau, from the short story “Murder is Corny”:
“Do you eat sweet corn?”
“Yes. You’re stalling.”
“No. Who cooks it?”
“My wife. I haven’t got a Fritz.”
“Does she cook it in water?”
“Sure. Is yours cooked in beer?” (Wolfe
also drinks beer. Lots and lots of
it. – Hubby)
“No. Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage
every summer day. They are turning
a superb treat into mere provender. Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and
nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes,
shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef’s ingenuity and imagination have
ever created a finer dish.”
You can find the story in the book Trio for Blunt Instruments.
My Dad (who introduced
me to the novels when I started watching the aforementioned ‘80s TV show) and I played
around briefly and found the ideal temperature for the oven to be 375° F, for the forty minutes Wolfe
indicated. All you have to do is
preheat the oven, leave the corn in the husks but cut the excess silk off the
end, and put it in the oven. We
butter and pepper it rather than salt it.
That’s it.
Winnie was
skeptical. She and her Mom, along
with those “millions of American women, and some men,” always boiled their corn
on the cob. She was afraid the
corn would catch on fire and burn the house down. She was more afraid it wouldn’t taste good, and that cooking
it for so long would dry it out.
To my great delight, and
her surprise, she found Wolfe’s description of “ambrosia” to be an
understatement - crisp yet succulent, and cooked to perfection. Now we don’t have corn on the cob any
other way.
Give it a try. Trust me, it is ambrosia – food for the gods.
Now if I can only find
Wolfe’s house to thank him …
