As the Christmas Cookie Crumbles (A Food Lovers’ Village Mystery)
Cozy Mystery
5th in Series
Midnight Ink (June 8, 2018)
Paperback: 288 pages

Synopsis

Erin is one smart cookie, but can she keep the holiday spirit—and herself—alive till Christmas?

In Jewel Bay, all is merry and bright. At Murphy’s Mercantile, AKA the Merc, manager Erin Murphy is ringing in the holiday season with food, drink, and a new friend: Merrily Thornton. A local girl gone wrong, Merrily has turned her life around. But her parents have publicly shunned her, and they nurse a bitterness that chills Erin.

When Merrily goes missing and her boss discovers he’s been robbed, fingers point to Merrily—until she’s found dead, a string of lights around her neck. The clues and danger snowball from there. Can Erin nab the killer—and keep herself in one piece—in time for a special Christmas Eve?

Includes delicious recipes!

Guest Post

Culinary Time Travel

I love community cookbooks. Typically spiral-bound, the older versions filled with photocopied pages of recipes typed on a myriad of typewriters, complete with typos, they give us a taste of a particular place and time. A bit of culinary time travel.

My favorite is Butte’s Heritage Cookbook, created in 1976 by the Butte-Silver Bow Bi/Centennial Commission—and yes, that’s what they called themselves, in honor of the country’s bicentennial and the city’s centennial. Butte, America, as it’s sometimes known, is without a doubt the state’s most colorful and diverse community, with the wildest history. I was a teenage bookseller, working in Waldenbooks in Rimrock Mall in Billings, Montana when the cookbook was published, and we sold hundreds of copies. They still show up in yard sales and at thrift shops around the state, and I snatch them up for friends.

Most of the contributors were women, of course, but what makes Butte’s Heritage Cookbook so interesting is that it is divided in sections by the ethnic heritage of early Butte settlers, most of them drawn to the copper and silver mines. American Indian, Black, Cornish, Finnish, Irish, Yugoslavian—21 of the more than 80 nationalities that settled the area are featured. Each section opens with a short history of that ethnicity in Butte, then moves into the recipes. I consult it as much for the cultural history—the photos of community celebrations, the personal stories, the descriptions of grocers and butchers and the group’s role in the larger community—as for the recipes. And the names—Simonich, Ducich, Mirich, Vucanovich, “all the iches,” as a character in my WIP (work in progress) says.

My father was a traveling salesman for nearly 30 years, selling to the furniture stores that once anchored small-town retail. In his travels, he picked up a pair of community cookbooks sponsored by small town radio stations in western North Dakota. I imagine one of his customers had the books for sale and he picked them up as a gesture of goodwill. If you want recipes for Jello Salad, I’ve got ’em. A friend whose parents came from that area browsed them happily, seeing names he recognized from family stories as well as the family tree.

Though towns and technology have changed, the tradition of community cookbooks isn’t dead. A couple of years ago, I was the special guest at the Glacier County Library’s cookbook sale, giving a talk about food fiction and my mysteries. Library staff had gathered years of cookbook donations for a blow-out sale in the library basement. A copy of a cookbook with recipes from Tamarack Time, a community potluck and celebration of autumn in the town where I live—the basis for Jewel Bay, in my Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries—surfaced, and they put it aside for me. Many of the contributors still live here—I’ve even eaten some of the dishes!

And when I spoke at the Clancy Library in central Montana, in the old red schoolhouse in the center of town, the Friends of the Library tucked a copy of their community cookbook, a fundraiser, in my thank you bag. They take their food seriously. Their library, too, thank goodness.

Ultimately, our traditions around food are a defining element of our heritage. As the editor of the Butte cookbook wrote, “the greatest riches [on the ore-laden hill] are the people who settled here.”

So the next time you see a spiral-bound cookbook from a church group or women’s association at a garage sale or a library book sale, pick it up. Look past the bent corners and stained covers, the casseroles made with Campbell’s Soup and the recipes that list ingredients but give no instructions. You may discover something much more nourishing: a tasty bite of history.

About the Author

Leslie Budewitz is the author of the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries and the Spice Shop Mysteries—and the first author to win Agatha Awards for both fiction and nonfiction. She lives in northwest Montana with her husband, a musician and doctor of natural medicine, and their cat Ruff, a cover model and avid bird-watcher.

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