Test Kitchen: the Culinary Mystery of Our Fair City

It has been several months since our last Test Kitchen post, in which we cook and report on a recipe gleaned from our collections in the San Francisco History Center. In keeping with our mystery-related tie-ins with the July/Aug. San Francisco Interest NextReads Newsletter, this month's post features a recipe from a culinary mystery, a sub-genre of mystery novels that combines food with a detective story.

Chocolate Quake by Nancy Fairbanks is about a food critic who travels to San Francisco with her husband for a scientific conference and discovers that her mother-in-law has been arrested for murder. The "chocolate" bit of the title refers to a recipe from San Francisco's very own Citizen Cake, called "Hazelnut on Chocolate on Hazelnut on Chocolate," a recipe too complicated for this writer (make your own espresso, ice cream, and pot de creme), who will take the advice of the protagonist Carolyn Blue and just visit Citizen Cake itself to sample it (although since the book was published in 2003, I recommend calling ahead of time to make sure they still make it). Instead, I tried baking a simpler dessert with chocolate in it, Chocolate Black Raspberry-Walnut Cake, from pp. 240-241:   

MAKE A DAY BEFORE SERVING

Serves 10 to 12

* Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour two 9-in. cake pans.

* Grind 9 to 10 oz. shelled English walnuts to a fine powder (2 cups) in a food processor or blender.

* Separate 7 eggs. In a large bowl beat egg whites until stiff. In a separate bowl beat yolks until lemon-colored and fluffy. Gradually beat 1 cup sugar into egg yolks and fold into beaten whites. Fold in powdered walnuts.

* Pour batter into the prepared cake pans and bake 25 to 30 minutes or until the cake pulls away from the sides and is lightly browned.

* Invert pans on racks immediately and let cool slightly. Then remove cakes from pans and let stand 2 to 4 hours.
* While cakes cool, prepare chocolate cream frosting.
* Melt 3 oz. semisweet chocolate in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Whisk in 5 tbs. sugar and then stir in 1 1/2 cups heavy cream. Stir constantly until mixture almost comes to a boil. Remove immediately from heat. Chill up to 2 hours, no more.
* Slit cooled cakes horizontally and spread cut sides with black raspberry jam. Put each cake back together.

* When ready to frost, beat the chocolate cream with an electric beater until it is the consistecy of whipped cream. Spread between cake layers and then on top and sides of cake. If you wish, sprinkle top with shaved choclate.

* Refrigerate overnight.

[Woman cutting into a cake, Noe Valley Founders Day], Feb. 10, 1927.
Courtesy San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco Public Library.

While Chocolate Quake is set in San Francisco, it does not reside in the San Francisco History Center's collections, but rather in the Fiction/Browsing Collection on the first floor of the Main Library, which means you can borrow it with your library card. To search for other culinary mysteries, set in San Francisco or otherwise, search the online catalog under the keywords culinary mystery.