Maya Corrigan
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      • Five-Ingredient Main Dishes
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  • Home
  • Bio
  • Writings
    • For Book Clubs
    • By Cook or by Crook
    • Scam Chowder
    • Final Fondue
    • The Tell-Tale Tarte
    • S'more Murders
    • Crypt Suzette
    • Gingerdead Man
    • Stories and Nonfiction
  • Mystery Museum
    • Mystery Exhibits
    • Detective Story Origins
    • Edgar Allan Poe
    • Mystery Fashions
    • Poe and Austen
    • Poe and Lincoln
    • Poe, Dickens, and Ravens
    • Holmes & Dracula
    • Christie's Tricks
    • Christie's Hit Play: The Mousetrap
    • Poe Trivia Quiz
    • Christie Trivia Quiz
    • Sleuthing Sweethearts Quiz
  • Food
    • Gingerbread's Dark History
    • Chocolate's Poisonous Past
    • Candy Corn's Haunted History
    • Pie's Peculiar Past
    • Chowder in History and Literature
    • S'mores History
    • Recipes >
      • Five-Ingredient Main Dishes
      • Easy Pies and Tarts
      • Six Sweet Recipes
      • Gingerbread Cookie Recipe
  • News/Events

Where I Blog Now

2/13/2024

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You'll find some of my  older blog posts below, but since 2020 I've posted at Mystery Lovers' Kitchen, where twelve mystery authors share their favorite recipes, chat about food topics, and pass on news about their books. We also run book giveaways regularly. 

Check out my recipes there and my posts about food history. I've put up so many recipes that you'll have to click on Next Posts when you come to the end of the page.
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Final Meals on the Titanic

4/14/2021

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Menu for 3rd class passengers' meals on the Titanic, April 14, 1912
GETTY IMAGES, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

​On April 14, 1912, passengers ate their final meals on the Titanic. Fewer than half of them survived to eat another day. We know what they ate that day because a few passengers tucked souvenir menus away. For example, an American banker’s wife had the first-class lunch menu in her purse when she escaped the sinking ship. 

The largest group of passengers were in third class, and less than a quarter of them survived, primarily women and children. On most ships of that era, third-class passengers had to bring food with them for the voyage, but on the Titanic, they were served meals at long tables in a room resembling a school cafeteria. They ate dinner in the middle of the day, as was common among the working classes. A single menu card contained the details for each meal of the day.

First and second class passengers ate more sumptuous meals as the menus below show. 

First Class Luncheon Menu

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Second Class Dinner Menu

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Images licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
​In the first-class dining room, dinners were elaborate multi-course meals based on French cuisine with concessions to hearty English fare. Waiters brought the food to the table on silver platters, offered guests a portion of every dish, and suggested a wine to pair with the food. We have no way of knowing how much of this meat-heavy feast the passengers consumed. No recipes survive from the Titanic's kitchen, but recipes from that era tend to use butter and cream liberally. ​
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In S'more Murders, the fifth of my Five-Ingredient Mysteries, a Titanic-obsessed yacht owner hires my sleuth Val and her grandfather to re-create the final meal served on that doomed ship.

On the anniversary of its sinking, the yachtsman welcomes his guests aboard and assigns them roles in a murder mystery game, "Death on the 
Titanic." Val soon reaches the chilling conclusion that the host is fishing for the culprit in a more recent crime.

No one gets to finish Val's 
Titanic-inspired dinner, and it's the final meal for one person on the yacht. Val and her grandfather have to reel in a real killer before s’more murders go down. 

Read more about S'more Murders and find out where to buy the book. 
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When Valentines Turned Vicious

2/12/2021

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New York Public Library Digital Collections
​During the Victorian era, when store-bought valentines replaced handmade ones, the buyer had two choices: hearts-and-flowers cards expressing love and admiration or valentines with caricatures and insulting verses ridiculing the recipient. 

The typical format of the vinegar valentine was a caricature of the recipient and a short verse at the bottom. Men sent vinegar valentines to damsels who’d dared turn them down or to women they were throwing over. Likewise, women sent cease-and-desist valentines to men who were pursuing them.
 
The vinegar valentines weren't only for men and women in failed courtships. People could buy valentines to chastise the behavior of relatives, neighbors, and acquaintances. 
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​The cards chided women for looking and dressing too well, or for not paying enough attention to their appearance. They were criticized for frowning too much or smiling too broadly. ​Women who campaigned for the right to vote were prime targets.   

​Men were also the butt of vinegar valentines, criticized for drunkenness, vanity, stinginess, and stupidity. 

Nasty valentines poked fun at people’s physical traits or misfortunes:  their age, excessive weight, or widowed status. The worst cards suggested suicide. 

The image on one of them depicts an oncoming train with the verse: Oh miserable lonely wretch! / Despised by all who know you; /  Haste, haste, your days to end – this sketch / The quickest way will show you!
​
View more examples of vinegar valentines and read how they became popular and eventually died out in my article in CrimeReads. 
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Desserts: Five Ingredients

6/8/2020

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Recipes for six five-ingredient desserts are on this website (under the Food menu). Five of the six are easy to make. The only challenging one is the tarte Tatin in the last picture. But it's worth the trouble if you have some time on your hands. 
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Book Clubs: Why I Love Them

7/12/2019

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I enjoy visiting book clubs because ...
  • Book club members tell me if they figured out whodunit. Like most mystery writers, I spend a lot of time thinking up motives, clues, and red herrings, but did I succeed? Book club members let me know if my red herrings worked.
  • Book club members focus my attention on my writing process. Questions about how I come up with plots, structure the mystery, and lay clues make me stand back from the daily word count and reflect on what I do. Answering those questions reminds me of the big picture.  
  • Book club members ask questions about the publishing process that I couldn't answer five years ago. Now I can. It reminds me what an unexpected adventure publishing a book has been.
  • Book club members give me ideas for future books by telling me about the characters and threads they want me to explore.
And finally…
  • Book club members have made recipes from my books! So have bookshop owners. It’s an incredible treat for me, not just to eat what they’ve made, but also to hear that the recipes were quick and easy . . . and also hear their suggestions for improvement!
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My neighbor's Reston Book Club
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Brandeis Women's Mystery Book Club
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Brandeis Women's Mystery Book Club
I enjoy visiting book clubs even if they don't feed me and even if I do it remotely by Skype or FaceTime. Check out my Book Club page for topics of discussion about the Five-Ingredient Mysteries.
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Titanic Fascination

4/14/2018

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Books covers of S'more Murders, Last Dinner on the Titanic, Titanic for Dummies, and Titanic from Rare Historical Recors
Some books I consulted while researching S'more Murders.
"I want you to duplicate the final dinner served on the Titanic. Ten courses for eight people.”

Val Deniston stared at Otto Warbeck. Was he joking? Not visibly. The yacht owner had wrinkles in his forehead, but no smile lines. Not a man given to jests. When she’d agreed to cater a dinner for him on the Chesapeake Bay, she hadn’t expected him to demand an elaborate, custom-made meal, not to mention one with really bad karma. 
​--S'more Murders, Chapter 1
Today is the 106th anniversary of the day when the Titanic hit an iceberg. When I started researching S'more Murders, my Titanic-themed culinary mystery, I was surprised to find dozens of nonfiction titles about the disaster at my local library, a small subset of the books on the subject. A Google search of Titanic brings up 28 million hits. A rare copy of a menu from the first meal served aboard the Titanic is slated for auction later this month, expected to sell for 100,000 British pounds (140,000 U.S. dollars).

What explains this fascination with a disaster that claimed 1500+ victims more than a century ago? Comment with your thoughts for a chance to win an Advanced Reader Edition of S'more Murders. Note: The contest ended May 1, and the winner is K.G. from Arkansas. ​
To comment, click on the word "Comments" in the column to the left of this post.

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Rebecca's 80th Anniversary

4/12/2018

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Eighty years ago this month, Daphne du Maurier delivered the manuscript of Rebecca to her publisher. The publisher ordered a first print run of 20,000 copies. Within a month the book had sold twice that number. The American Booksellers Association voted it 1938's favorite novel, and it has never been out of print since it was first published.

British bookseller WHSmith, celebrating its 225th anniversary this year, asked readers to select their favorite book of the the last 225 years. Books by Dickens, Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Harper Lee made the shortlist. Rebecca came in as the readers' favorite. 

What's your all-time favorite book? Comment with your answer for a chance to win a free book. To comment, click on the word "Comments" in the column to the left of this post. Note: The contest ended May 1, and the book is on its way to the winner. ​​

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    Maya Corrigan

    This blog, like the books and stories I write, combines mysteries, food, trivia, and a bit of humor to leaven the grim subject of crime. Sometimes random subjects intrude here .

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