A fantastic new cozy mystery series with a vintage flair from USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award–winning author Ellen Byron.

Twenty-eight-year-old widow Ricki James leaves Los Angeles to start a new life in New Orleans after her showboating actor husband perishes doing a stupid internet stunt. The Big Easy is where she was born and adopted by the NICU nurse who cared for her after Ricki’s teen mother disappeared from the hospital.

Ricki’s dream comes true when she joins the quirky staff of Bon Vee Culinary House Museum, the spectacular former Garden District home of late bon vivant Genevieve “Vee” Charbonnet, the city’s legendary restauranteur. Ricki is excited about turning her avocation – collecting vintage cookbooks – into a vocation by launching the museum’s gift shop, Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbooks and Kitchenware. Then she discovers that a box of donated vintage cookbooks contains the body of a cantankerous Bon Vee employee who was fired after being exposed as a book thief.

The skills Ricki has developed ferreting out hidden vintage treasures come in handy for investigations. But both her business and Bon Vee could wind up as deadstock when Ricki’s past as curator of a billionaire’s first edition collection comes back to haunt her.

Will Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbooks and Kitchenware be a success … or a recipe for disaster?

Amazon ~~ B&N ~~ Kobo ~~ GoogleBooks

Alibris ~~ IndieBound ~~ PenguinRandomHouse

Recipe

French Pancakes a la Gelee

The recipes included in Bayou Book Thief are all culled and adapted from my own collection of over 100 vintage cookbooks. This recipe for French Pancakes a la Gelee is from The Ford Treasury of Favorite Recipes from Famous Eating Places (1950 edition). This was the first vintage cookbook I ever bought, and it’s still one of my favorites.

Created to appeal to Americans road-tripping across the country—hopefully in their Ford vehicles!—the book includes recipes from some of the nation’s most well-known restaurants of the time, complete with beautiful color illustrations of the locations, many of which were historical. In keeping with the Big Easy setting of Bayou Book Thief, I’ve chosen to share my version of the recipe from New Orleans’s legendary Antoine’s Restaurant, founded in 1840.

Ingredients:

½ cup all-purpose flour
1 egg
1 egg yolk
⅛ teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons milk (more, if needed)
5 tablespoons currant or red raspberry jelly
1 tablespoon melted butter
Powdered sugar

Directions:

In a large bowl, combine the flour, egg, egg yolk, salt, and milk. Either whisk or beat with an electric beater until smooth. To make the batter the consistency of light cream, add more milk if needed. Cover and then chill for half an hour.
Dip a sheet of parchment paper into the melted butter. Heat a skillet or heavy pan and wipe the pan with the butter-coated parchment paper, which you can then discard. Pour in enough batter to just cover the bottom of the skillet or pan, tipping the pan to evenly distribute the batter.
Brown a pancake on one side, and then flip to brown on the other side.
Remove the pancake from the heat and place on a plate. Spread with a thin layer of jam and then roll the pancake jelly roll–style. Sprinkle with powdered sugar. (You can place the pancake under the broiler to glaze the sugar or skip this step.)
Repeat the process until you’ve used up all your batter.
Serve immediately.
Servings: 12–15 five-inch pancakes

About the Author

Ellen’s Cajun Country Mysteries have won the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel and multiple Lefty Awards for Best Humorous Mystery. Bayou Book Thief will be the first book in her new Vintage Cookbook Mysteries. She also writes the Catering Hall Mystery series under the name Maria DiRico.

Ellen is an award-winning playwright, and non-award-winning TV writer of comedies like Wings, Just Shoot Me, and Fairly Odd Parents. She has written over two hundred articles for national magazines but considers her most impressive credit working as a cater-waiter for Martha Stewart. An alum of New Orleans’ Tulane University, she blogs with Chicks on the Case, is a lifetime member of the Writers Guild of America and will be the 2023 Left Coast Crime Toastmaster. Please visit her at https://www.ellenbyron.com/