"...either he went to bed and stayed there, living on bread and onion soup...or he sat in the kitchen telling Fritz how to cook things and then eating them on my little table."
--Archie Goodwin's lament in Rex Stout's Fer-de-Lance

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Nero Wolfe and Soup

(by Rex Stout)


Rex Stout succumbed to pressure in 1973--after 40 years of penning Nero Wolfe mysteries--and wrote a cookbook of the Fritz-cooked favorites of his pachydermal, moody, orchid-loving, gourmand detective, who was reputed to weigh in at 1/7th of a ton. In this cookbook, he details the soups that are created and lovingly described on West 35th Street in the course of murder solving. These include: Chestnut Soup, Consomme, Green-Turtle Soup, Onion Soup, Snapper Soup, Sorrel Soup, and Spinach Soup.

Here's a couple soup tales from the over 50 Nero Wolfe mysteries that Rex Stout wrote.


ONION SOUP
"I [Archie Goodwin] had never really understood Wolfe's relapses. ...Nothing that I could say made the slightest dent on him. while it lasted he acted one of two different ways: either he went to bed and stayed there, living on bread and onion soup...or he sat in the kitchen telling Fritz how to cook things and then eating them on my little table. He ate a whole halp a sheep that way in two days once, different parts of it cooked in twenty different ways. At such times I usually had my tongue out from running all over town from the Battery to Bronx Park, trying to find some herb or root or maybe cordial that they needed in the dish they were going to do next." --from Fer-de-Lance (1934)
CHICKEN-SORREL SOUP
"...It was foolhardy to ask her to marry you [Wolfe told a client]. You can't know what a woman is like until you see her at her food. I invite you to dine with us. There will be chicken sorrel soup with egg yolks and sherry, and roast quail with a sauce of white wine, veal stock, and white grapes." --from Kill Now, Pay Later