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A Review of “A Critical Study of Female Culinary Detective Stories: Murder by Cookbook”

Nieves Pascual’s study on female culinary detective stories engages in an intellectual conversation with two bodies of scholarship: literary and food studies. When Pascual writes, “‘eating is the first crime of humanity,”’ she interlinks these areas of research (35). Through food and literature, humanity expresses its actions; crime marks its presence in both expressions. Eating, as Pascual points out, is “by definition . . . a deadly act, the first one in history.” Eating “implies the sacrifice of a living being, be it animal or vegetal,” and through such “sacrifice we make culture” (45). Paraphrasing, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, she further explains how culture is memory and how “the corpse that we kill by eating never abandons . . . memory.” Therefore, while we eat “we remember former murders because the pleasure of eating is often accompanied by the memory of past banquets” (45). Literature, in this case of the detective genre, is the vessel of both memory and culture. At first glance, Pascual’s book seems to simply begin without an actual introduction to either the genre of detective fiction or culinary scholarship. However, as the opening chapter, “What Did Sherlock Homes Eat?,” progresses, it leaves no doubt of its appropriateness to unearth the examination of female culinary mysteries. By beginning with the iconic detective figure, Sherlock Holmes, and illustrating that rarely (if ever) we see him eating, Pascual’s work immediately engages in a classic philosophical debate found in literary and food studies: the division between the knowledge of the mind and the knowledge of the body. Pascual shows how Holmes follows the logic of Western masculine thought in conducting his detective work, as the only sense he trusts is sight. Sight (as well as hearing) holds an epistemological privilege as “it is the sense that most acts through separation” (3). Separation from the object of examination allows for objective reasoning. Thus, the major motive why Holmes does not eat is because eating is a sign of corporeal connection, which gets in the way of objective clarity. Pascual sums up Holmes’s detective paradigm by stating that, “detection is the art of rationality and is ruled by two moral principles: emotional distance and repression of the body” (7).