Wolfe’s tale of murder unfolds when Rex Stout’s three-hundred-and-fifty-pound detective is to give a short speech at the United Restaurant Workers of America Fourth of July celebration at Culp’s Meadows, somewhere on Long Island. As narrated by Archie Goodwin, Wolfe’s assistant, the story “Fourth of July Picnic” (1958) takes its time solving a murder at the picnic but never gets to what is served there. The victim is supposed to be suffering from bad snails, but when he is discovered stabbed and dead, what he ate is immaterial.
Death of a Dude has two picnics in), both at Lily Rowan’s Bar JR Ranch in Lame Horse, Montana. Picnic #1 is on the Fishtail River, but we’re not given a menu. Wolfe, and Goodwin fish for cutthroat trout, of course, but do eat any here. Picnic #2 is not a picnic per se, but a box of snacks packed at the direction of Lily Rowan (but very much in the style of Wolfe) for Goodwin, who has been arrested. Upon his release, Goodwin shares it with Sheriff Jessup in his office at the jail:
“May I open that carton?”
He said certainly, and I went and got it and put it on the desk. The knot looked complicated, and I borrowed his knife to cut the cord, opened the flaps, and unpacked. When I finished, there was an imposing spread lined up on the desk:
1 can pineapple
1 can purple plums
10 (or more) large paper napkins
8 paper plates
1 jar caviar
1 quart milk
8 slices Mrs. Barnes’s bread
6 bananas
1 plastic container potato salad
4 deviled eggs
2 chicken second joints
1 slab Wisconsin cheese
1 jar pâté de foie gras truffe
1 huckleberry pie
6 paper cups
2 knives
2 forks
4 spoons
1 opener combo
1 saltshaker.”
If Stout intended a satire of Kenneth Grahame’s River Bank picnic in The Wind in the Willows, he might have included cold tongue to this menu, too.
See Rex Stout’s “Fourth of July Picnic” in Four To Go (1958) was originally titled “The Labor Union Murder”; Rex Stout and the Editors of Viking Press. The Nero Wolfe Cookbook (New York: Viking Press, 1973)