Dinner and a book is supported by the Rex and Alice A. Martin Foundation of Elkhart, celebrating the spirit of Alice Martin and her love of good food and good friends.
Hidden in the depths of 18th century London, a secret apothecary shop caters to women.
The owner, Nella, sells well disguised poisons to be used against oppressive man.
200 years later, Caroline Carswell discovers an antique vial in the River Thames during her first stay in London.
Carolyn discovers a link between the vial and London's long unsolved apothecary murders.
In Sarah Pena's The Lost Apothecary, let's welcome my guest, chancellor of Indiana University, South Bend, Susan Elrod.
Welcome.
I'm glad to be here, excited to talk about this book and cook some great food.
Yes, some food from, what, 18th century London?
I think I would say inspired by and inspired by food that delivered the poison.
Yes, exactly.
And this is quite an interesting story that we don't read about so much today, but we'll get to that.
So tell me, what are you going to be making today?
Well, today I'm going to be making some rosemary cookies or biscuits, as they would call them in Britain from a recipe in the back of the book.
Okay.
And also Welsh Rarebit, inspired by the cheese and bread that Nella and her assistant, Eliza, enjoy after they go beetle hunting, which we'll talk about.
Yes.
Yes.
That's an exciting, important part.
Well, and I'm going to be making some creamy mushroom soup.
Still a bestseller for those hoping to poison someone.
But I will not use the death cap mushroom in my soup today.
So let's get this sort of settled here.
These these two women are 200 years apart.
First, let's talk about Nella and Eliza.
Mm hmm.
Where are they and what are they doing with their life?
So Nella is the apothecary who grew up learning about how to be an apothecary from her own mother who died.
And so she has those skills and has an event that occurs in her own life which causes her to shift her focus from dispensing healing tinctures and balms to these well disguised poison.
Yes.
And she makes she makes a vow to herself she will only help women poison men.
She will only dispense the poisons if they are going to kill a man.
And Eliza is her young on unanticipated assistant.
He's 12 years old.
12 years old, who comes from a situation where there was a betrayal.
Yeah.
To her, just like Eliza and her life experience.
And Caroline and Caroline, the.
The modern American who comes to London.
She was supposed to have come with her husband to celebrate their 10th year anniversary.
Shortly before they leave, she discovers, lo and behold, James, her husband, is having an affair.
Mm hmm.
And so she says he's.
He can't come on the trip.
She's going alone.
The setting for the development of Caroline in London.
It really is a fast paced change of life, isn't it?
It takes place.
So here's the setting.
And we we hear about, you know, the types of potions that are used.
And, of course, this this happened quite frequently, quite often, until about the time when the doctors could determine what the person died from and if it was poison, they could determine that and they can find out who might have done it.
Today, you don't read that somebody died of poisoning unless it's a special case.
You hear about a pet dying, but it's not something that you hear about so much.
There was arsenic and strychnine and you were always very careful with if you're going to use those ingredients.
So let's get started.
And our first step here, and then we'll come back and we'll talk about what Caroline does in London on her own, her first trip alone.
Right.
Right.
So I'm going to get started on my mushroom soup.
I'm going to cook the mushrooms in some nice butter.
And then I'm going to make the cream soup and add some sherry.
And that will be my soup today.
And you're going to start with your cookies.
You're going to give a lesson on how to chop roses.
I am going to do that.
So these cookies start with a base of butter and sugar.
Like most good cookie recipes, I suppose.
And the key ingredient is fresh rosemary.
And so I have some two sprigs of fresh rosemary here.
You want me to go ahead and start chopping?
Sure.
Go ahead.
So what you do here is you need to remove the leaves of the rosemary.
We don't want to chop up the stem because that maybe that has some flavor.
I don't know.
But it's certainly it's kind of tough.
Tough.
Yeah, right.
So the leaves are more tender.
And so I'm just going to peel off the leaves of the rosemary stem here.
And, you know, if you grow rosemary in your garden, you have a ready supply of rosemary to make these cookies.
I also think these cookies would be good with lavender.
Oh, yes, I've had lavender cookies.
I actually modified the recipe like I do many times.
I almost never leave a recipe untouched, and I added a little cardamom.
So I.
Love cardamom.
That's a secret ingredient.
It is a secret special ingredient.
While you're doing that, I am kind of wiping off these mushrooms because, you know, they love to carry dirt with them.
I never quite understand why we can't dip them or spray them in some water.
I guess there would be too much moisture in them, but in any case, these are safe, unlike the ones that my father in law, bless his memory, picked in our backyard, made mushroom soup, and ended up in the hospital.
Oh, my.
God.
Hallucinating.
And guess what?
They served him cream of mushroom soup, which we thought was quite, quite an interesting.
In the hospital, they served him?
Yes!
I'm going to be making a cream sauce.
I'm going to add a little of this, and I've got to be sure I don't cook all this buttery stuff.
Now, tell us you're going to you've got your.
Rosemary, Rosemary.
So if you're okay, I'm going to cream the butter and sugar together.
Oh, go right ahead.
And then make a little noise.
It's a lovely mixmaster here.
You know, this has a light so you can make your cookies in the dark.
you could cook in the closet!
Not because you would do that.
But it actually helps you see in the in the dish.
So I'm just going to cream the butter and sugar together.
This is a really simple cookie recipe.
So I'm creaming the butter and sugar and I'm going to add I have just about that a half a tablespoon of rosemary, but I don't know, that's somewhere between a half.
And that's great.
And then I'm going to mix that in.
And then next we're going to add my pre measured sugar or flour.
Sorry, some of ADD.
And while you're doing that, I'm adding the flour to the butter, melted butter.
Then I'll add milk and some cream and we're cooking the mushrooms and then we'll put it together and.
Oh, nice.
All right, let's see here.
Let's see if I can burn all the butter here.
So you just mix this together until it starts to form a dough.
And then I always get as much dough off the mixers.
And then if you have a little one around, you can hang them.
My mom used to always hand me the oh yeah, the mix.
You know, the mixer.
You're supposed to clean them up and I. Yeah, clean them up.
That was.
The best.
Part.
Always fun.
So then the next part for the cookies and.
Yes.
Right.
I have these great cookie scoop so I have different sizes.
This is the smaller one.
I never very good at keeping all my cookies the same size.
So this helps you with that?
That's a good idea.
Yes.
And I'm watching that.
I don't burn this wonderful butter and I'm using half and half with a little milk.
And so I'll add the cooked mushrooms.
So I'm just going to demonstrate before going to stick these cookies out.
And then I want to do the whole tray at the moment and then you just you can use a glass or.
I just use my fingers.
I've watched my hands, of course, pat them down, maybe shake them up.
They stay about the same shape when they're done.
So then you just fill up the cookie tray and refrigerate the cookies for about an hour before they're baked at 375 for about 10 minutes.
And that's what you're going to do right now, right?
Yes.
I'll finish my.
Cookie time and I'm adding my reactions now to this cream sauce strictly for full.
Seems good.
Yes.
Everything smells good here, doesn't it?
And I'm going to add a little sherry and sometimes people and hazelnuts to this or anything that we think would make it special.
And we'll go let that cook a little bit.
And we're going to take a little break here.
And I just want you to take a look at some scenes of 18 century London and look at the town and see what's going on, maybe even find an apothecary store.
We'll be right back And our book is The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner.
My guest is Chancellor Chancellor Susan Elrod.
All so glad to have you here.
Happy to be here.
Lots of energy.
Thanks for suggesting this book, by the way.
There's a lot a lot of in and out happening here in this book.
This second part, we're going to talk about Caroline and her husband, James, and what actually happens in this situation.
So she's in her hotel.
What does she find out is going to happen?
Well, she's in her hotel without her husband.
She's feeling betrayed and maybe angry.
And so she goes out into London because she's on her own.
And so she's on her way to a pub, I believe, or on her way from a pub.
One of the two Friar Area.
Yes.
And she runs across a gentleman who invites her to go mud larking.
Mud larking a new sport.
And she had read about mud larking because when she was in college, she read 18th century.
She liked that British novels like that period.
And so she had read about it, but she'd never actually experienced.
And she was doubtful.
Right.
Well, she was tired, too.
She wasn't sure she wanted to do mud larking in the Thames, but she finds a little vial in the water, a little blue.
Vial.
Blue vial, and she takes it with her.
And the fellow leaving it just said, oh, you know, there are a lot of those are there are a lot of this or that and they talk about it.
And Alfie's is a side character in the book, along with his daughter.
Galen Gaynor.
Gaynor Gaynor, who works in the British Library.
Yes.
Yes.
And so she gets involved with Carolyn and they become super friends.
And this thing gets very complicated because Gaynor runs into mysterious happenings in the area of London that have this very same apothecary shop.
And we just we can't believe how complicated this becomes.
And we go back and forth to the 1700s to modern day London.
But well, who comes to visit?
Carolyn?
It's I sound like Joe.
Yes.
Unannounced.
Yes.
So he's feeling like he's a real, you know, the French say a sham or a real cad.
And he tries to get back in her good graces.
Right.
And after two days in London, she becomes an independent woman.
Right.
And we learn that she wanted to apply to graduate school in Cambridge, but her husband, she got married, did.
She started working on the family farm.
So her life became predictable and yes and uninteresting.
He's a busy, busy man.
And she's doing the books for her in-laws at the farm.
Or maybe it was her.
It was her parents or a family farm.
And right then and there, I would have said, no, kill me now.
But she.
So she discovers this researcher in herself.
Yes.
When she's free to explore.
And so her husband shows up and she's not all that happy about him showing up unannounced.
This sort of unusual for her.
Oh, he's here.
He's going to be fine.
She says, wait a minute.
He's not.
So sure.
About that.
I don't know about you.
After all, I've had a little bit of freedom here in these 24 hours since I left you.
And, of course, this is this is keeps the energy of the book going.
And so when we talk about these two stories, they get pretty complicated, a lot of details.
And I kept forgetting all the details.
But she reads about this.
Nella Well, she finds out.
the apothecary Apothecary, and she goes into mysterious dark places in London and finds the apothecary shop.
Which has been untouched for 200 years.
Amazingly amazing.
Yes, amazing.
But the shop was well hidden even back in the seventies, in 1791.
Because she's almost arrested.
They run after when they find out she's the woman making these poisonous potions back in the 1700s.
Yeah.
So we've got these two stories.
And I even found the language changed a little bit.
And the structure, the structure for the English part was a little bit more, what shall I say, antique and a little bit more formal.
Formal?
There's the.
Word.
Yeah, as the British can be, you know.
And then we get back to the Americans were first a little bit looser and and so her husband comes and he doesn't feel good.
Why does he feel good?
Has he?
I think he gets it.
Well, I.
Well, we're never really sure exactly what happens with him, but he ends up drinking instead of rubbing on his throat eucalyptus oil.
So he ends up in the hospital.
In the hospital.
And the police come and they see this this little booklet that a notebook that Caroline has been writing in about.
All these different poisons, the apothecary and all.
These.
So you see these, all of a sudden they're making conclusions.
She must be she must have done this to him.
And they almost they want to arrest her.
And then the librarian comes and comes at the right time and saves.
Her and says, no, no, she's really doing a research project.
And then the husband, of course, admits, and we're not really sure whether he drank the eucalyptus oil to try to win her back as a, you know, like, oh, poor me.
Come on.
I think he did.
Yeah.
Right.
And she says, but you drank it and I was in trouble because of that.
Why didn't you read the bottle?
Yeah.
Didn't you read the bottle?
Don't you know what I'm doing here?
Well, in any case, he goes back to the United States, and she, of course, she's loving the people she's meeting.
She particularly likes Gaynor, the woman in the library, and they hit it off, which is sort of an interesting thing, too, because Europeans don't jump into a relationship right away.
Yeah.
I mean, they take a little time, they kind of look at you.
But Gaynor and Caroline hit it on.
And off, I think because of the research project.
And it's interesting to Gaynor as well.
Yes.
So we have this going on.
Meanwhile, Nell is poisoning men while she's with the help of Eliza.
I'm going to start my my career, but here.
Excellent idea.
We're having so much fun talking about the book.
Yes.
So we'll get back to the poisonings.
So I'm going to make a Welsh rarebit, which is not rabbit.
It's just cheese.
No rabbit.
And basically it is.
It starts with a roux.
And if you know what a roux is, it's butter and flour normally with milk or cream.
But this Welsh rarebit roux is made with beer.
So I have an ale here.
Spotted cow ale from the state of Wisconsin where I used to live.
And this is brewed by the new Glarus Brewery.
And you can only purchase it in the state of Wisconsin.
So.
So you're driving through Wisconsin.
Truck drive.
Convenience stores, gas stations, liquor stores.
Anywhere you can get that.
So I have my butter, a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of flour.
I'm going to mix in and, you know, a good rue starts with equal proportions of both.
Yes.
So I'm going to just get that mixed up.
We have a lot of cream sauce today.
And then I'm going to add the beer.
Like you would add the cream.
That's a nice gadget, too.
There you have.
Oh, my little.
Yeah.
Your measure.
Oh, and then then I'm going to add this is a grated double Gloucester cheese.
So I tried to find a cheese that would be reminiscent of the times.
So this roux is just thickening up a little bit.
And then what I'm going to do is add and you can add as much cheese or as little cheese as you want.
Do you want it thick or do you want to.
You want it kind of thick because we're going to put it on toasted bread and then broiling broil.
Yes, I'm melting the cheese.
And many recipes call for horseradish or mustard.
All of them call for Worcestershire sauce.
I add a little bit of that and you can add as much of that as you want.
this is starting to smell good t So I'm just going to keep stirring this till the cheese melts and then we'll place it on a toasted bread.
So I have some toasted bread here, and then we're going to broil this.
And then that's the end of Welsh Rarebit.
Yes.
And and is it still a popular dish?
It probably is in bars, maybe.
I mentioned this to a friend and she said, oh, yeah, Welsh Rarebit Just like it was a part of her regular household.
There you go.
You rotation.
So it smells good.
It's nice.
Nice and thick.
Yeah.
And my soup is nice and thick and it smells a little bit of sherry.
And this this cheese has some onions and herbs in it.
So I didn't add horseradish.
But you can just use a hard like Greer need actually any hard cheese that you would want.
Yeah.
So this is about melted looks good.
And so you're going to spread this on the toast.
So I'm going to turn that.
The reason she's getting so much done that we did a lot of you did a lot of preparation ahead of time.
We don't want you to sit and watch us toast bread, you know, so.
So you want scientists to.
So this is just like carrying out a protocol in the laboratory.
I see, I see.
Well, you know what recipes are?
They are a mixture of ingredients.
Yep.
So here we go.
I'm going to go and I'm just going to spread.
You might normally let this set up a little bit, but you can just scoop it on here.
The bread.
This is great.
And you know what?
It's tasty and everybody has some cheese and toast in that in bread in the house, makes a nice dinner.
Who doesn't love cheese?
And you could you know, you probably could try this if you're lactose intolerant with a well, I you know, I would try it.
Okay.
There you go.
With some kind of dairy.
Dairy cheese, a nondairy nondairy cheese.
Okay.
And how long you going to broil this?
They just broil for a couple of minutes.
Okay, put it here.
I'll put them in.
I mean, kind of watch it so that it does.
Okay.
And we're going to take another little break to set up our table and prepare our food to present to you.
And I just wanted you to see my apron that said the secret ingredient.
And I don't think I'm thinking too secret.
I think I've been.
You've been pretty up front.
I've been up front here.
And you put a poison in there.
I haven't yet.
Okay.
We'll be right back.
And in the meantime, we'll show you the menu.
Thanks And today, Susan Elrod from IU South Bend is with me.
We've been discussing the Lost Apothecary and I love the book.
And tell us what you made here.
You've you've really got into this.
I really did.
I made Welsh Rarebit inspired by the cheese and bread that Nella and her assistant, Eliza eat after they collect the poisonous beetles that they use to they dry them out, bake them and grind them up to make a poisonous powder.
Yes.
Is administered through a fig liquor so I couldn't easily get my hands on that.
But we have a lovely port.
Let's have a little sip.
We didn't get very many of the Beatles in here.
No, we got no Beatles in this.
Oh.
Oh that's nice.
Mhm.
So from Creek Bend down in Bloomington.
Right.
And then I made some rosemary cookies recipe in the back of the book with a little bit of cardamom.
And it smells wonderful.
And I made some homemade mushroom soup with a little bit of sherry in it.
And I just want to talk about your favorite part in this book.
What did you like the best?
Well, I'm a scientist, and so I really loved the whole part of the apothecary shop, how she put the tinctures and other things together.
One part she was delivering rat poison, essentially in eggs.
Yes.
And so she had to help the person who was going to deliver the poison, understand everything, and then the collecting of the Beatles and creating the poisons.
National.
Interest.
Drying them out.
It's very complicated, but very efficient, isn't it.
To work?
It may work many times.
So we're so glad you joined us today.
And thank you for coming.
It's a pleasure to have you.
And I like your book choice.
And we might leave you with the idea that good food, good friends, good books, good drinks make for a very good life We'll see you next time.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This WNIT local production.
Has been made possible in part by viewers like you.
Thank you.
Dinner and A Book is supported by the Rex and Alice A. Martin Foundation of Elkhart, celebrating the spirit of Alice.
Martin and her love of good food and good friends.
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