Even When There’s a Murder, There’s Also a Meal

There’s comfort to be had in that gathering

Hi friends,

What a week for Louise Penny fans! A new book yesterday and the first two episodes of Amazon’s “Three Pines” comes out on Friday. You’ll also want to check out this interview Anne Bogel did with Louise for her podcast.

We have a — dare we say it — delicious essay from Nancy Reddy this week about the food featured in the Inspector Gamache books. The perfect post-Thanksgiving read.

— Elizabeth & Aya

When I recommend Louise Penny’s Three Pines mysteries, I almost always start by talking about the food. On any given morning at the bistro, the town’s elegant yet homey restaurant, you might choose from scrambled eggs and Brie, blueberry crêpes, French toast, or Eggs Gabri (which turns out to mean the addition of lemon zest to the hollandaise, making it “a little tart”). (Those are all examples from A Great Reckoning, Penny’s twelfth book, but, really, you could flip through nearly any book in the series and find meals to make your mouth water.) The bacon is, of course, always maple-cured, the cafés au lait served in bowls. Olivier will drop off a basket of almandine croissants while you wait.

And that’s just breakfast. The sandwiches are, for my money, where Penny’s pen-and-ink cookery really shines: in A Great Reckoning, for example, Inspector Gamache and his wife, Reine-Marie, eat grilled sandwiches of “Brome Lake duck, Brie and fig confit,” served on fresh bread from Sarah’s boulangerie. Later in the same novel, having taken up the villagers’ habit of eating in the chapel, they take a picnic into the pews and eat roast beef, arugula, and Camembert on baguette and chicken, pesto, and sliced apple on fresh-baked multigrain. (There’s always one really enticing element, something I’d never have on hand at home, like the fig confit, or perhaps just an ordinary ingredient I might not think to add, like the apple paired with pesto.)

Dinners at the bistro are decadent, the menu small but varied and ever-changing. In one meal in The Brutal Telling, for example, Gamache selects “a fruit-stuffed Rock Cornish game hen, done on the spit,” while Isabelle Lacoste is served melted Brie, fresh tomato and basil fettuccine, and Jean Guy Beauvoir orders lamb and prune tagine. Their individual entrees are complemented by “a platter of fleshly harvested grilled vegetables,” presumably for the colleagues to share.

And it’s the sharing of food, as much as the food itself, that becomes a motif across the books. As the friendships among villagers Clara, Myrna, Ruth, Olivier, Gabri, and the Gamaches deepen across the series, they each host meals at home as well. These meals are often potluck collaborative affairs, as in a dinner hosted at the Gamaches’ Three Pines home, which features a shepherd’s pie made by Myrna, garlic bread made by Clara, and “a massive chocolate cake” baked by Gabri. The friends gather around rich, well-seasoned food and drinks. No one drinks too much. No one worries about calories or weight gain. They enjoy the food. They share each other’s company—not without conflict or controversy or the occasional misunderstanding or jealous snit—but they’re together, all the same.

I began reading the Three Pines books while on a trip to Quebec in 2018. I devoured the first two while in Quebec City, where I ordered huge bowls of cafes au lait and imagined I was being served by a long lost cousin of Olivier. When we stopped for lunch on the way to Montreal, I was momentarily disappointed that we hadn’t somehow gone off-map and dropped into Three Pines, a village that’s notoriously hard to find unless you’re meant to be there. 

But it was a bit later, during the intense, homebound early months of the pandemic that the novels really grabbed me. It’s easy to forget now what lonely months those were. In that first spring and summer of the pandemic, my family and I saw almost no one. When my kids occasionally played outside with other kids on our block, I chatted with my neighbors, but masked and distanced. Even when we felt safe enough to invite one friend at a time for an outdoor gathering, we took precautions. A dear friend came over for a drink, but brought his own folding chair and cup and wiped it all down with disinfectant before sitting at the far end of the porch. I’m not the cook Gabri is, but I do love sharing meals with friends, and it felt wrong to invite people over and then sit six feet away and drink the beers we’d each brought from home.

So, in that time, Three Pines and the way the community gathers together around food presented a really appealing fantasy. Even when there’s a heinous murder, there’s also a meal, and there’s comfort to be had in that gathering.

As The Madness of Crowds, published in August, 2021 as the seventeenth book in the series, opens, it’s late December and the residents of Three Pines are skiing and tobogganing and gathering in the bistro for hot chocolate served with licorice pipes. In this world, the pandemic is over. Penny imagined a world in which the availability of a vaccine meant the end of the pandemic, and as I read the book, I felt a pang as I remembered that I’d imagined that once, too.

In our world, pandemic recovery has been much slower and more uneven. We’ve masked and unmasked and masked again. We’ve held a makeshift birthday celebration for my younger son by inviting neighbors over for cupcakes on the porch. We’ve invited neighbors over for drinks and s’mores around our fire pit. And this year, as my family is all newly boosted and planning for the holidays, feels like a cautious almost-normal.

The dear friends with whom we’ve shared our Thanksgivings every year for more than a decade, save the pandemic pause, will once again travel from Maryland to our house in New Jersey, bearing wine and pumpkin pie and party crackers. And this year, new friends and their new baby, will join us. The massive google doc where we’ve tracked our meals since 2015 is once again buzzing with comments and multi-colored notes about who’s bringing what. This year, we’re going classic—batch cocktails prepped the day before; one stuffing, possibly from a box; mashed potatoes made in advance; maybe even store-bought gravy—and keeping it low-stress. I’ve been reminded that it’s being together that counts.

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Nancy Reddy is a writer and a writing teacher. She’s the author of three books of poetry, most recently Pocket Universe, and the coeditor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. You can subscribe to her newsletter “Write More, Be Less Careful” and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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Notes from Three Pines is a short-run newsletter run through Substack celebrating and exploring Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books. Love Gamache or Ruth’s duck Rosa? Reply to this email, leave a comment or email notesfromthreepines@substack.com.

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