Bookworm: Cold case cookbook

Published on 20/10/2012 00:00

Would you trust a recipe book edited by a veggie who boasts that she doesn’t have a kitchen and doesn’t miss it? No, me neither, but I’ll make an exception for The Killer Cookbook, which has been put together by Caro Ramsay and her crimewriting chums.

Why? First, because it’s to raise money for an excellent cause – giving Scotland a world-class morgue. This will be in Dundee and run by the wonderful Sue Black, Dundee’s professor of forensic anatomy whose evidence has led to the jailing of scores of paedophiles.

But her work is more important even than that – and the new morgue would revolutionise the training of medics and keep Dundee ahead of everywhere else in Britain (and the US too, come to that).

The Killer Cookbook, which contains recipes from such crime stars as Jeffrey Deaver, Dexter creator Jeff Lindsay and Val McDermid, is launched at Dundee Literary Festival on Friday and will be available on Amazon and at all good bookshops. Buy it from www.millionforamorgue.com, though, and every last penny goes to the charity.

IN THE SOUP WITH REBUS

Great cause though it is, I wouldn’t rely on every recipe in The Killer Cookbook for those dinner parties where you’re aiming to impress. Ian Rankin’s vegetable soup (“one of the few things that Rebus can cook”) seems to be consist of frying any vegetable you can find, then pouring boiling water over it all. Once you’ve added herbs, apparently all you need to do is to “cook until it looks like soup”.

Remind me to stay clear of Mark Billingham’s kitchen, too. His recipe for “Cheese Slop” is similarly basic, but at least you can trust his advice. “Marmite makes everything taste better,” he points out, “with the possible exception of sex.”

RETREATING RETREAT?

Artemis Cooper may be (see Page 3) already working on a series of posthumous books by Patrick Leigh Fermor, but sadly, the rest of his legacy is proving more problematic.

Leigh Fermor had always intended that his beautiful seven-bedroom house in the southern Peloponnese should be a writers’ retreat and bequeathed it to the Benaki Museum in Athens with these instructions.

Over a year after his death, however, it’s still locked up, apparently yet another victim of Greece’s economic crisis.