every food in: Nancy Drew #23, Mystery of the Tolling Bell
Nancy Drew #23: Mystery of the Tolling Bell
Originally published 1948, revised 1973 and reprinted 1998
Nancy Drew was my favorite book of all time growing up, and I own a lot of them. Keeping in tradition with how I originally read them, I haven’t bothered to review them in number order - it doesn’t honestly matter much, since each book is mostly self contained.
To the best of my knowledge, this version is a pretty dead-on reprint of the 1973 version with no alterations - the illustrations seemed the same as older copies I’ve seen, and the foods/activities/general cultural stuff seemed 1973 enough. I’d love to read the 1948 version, but the publishing rights to Nancy Drew are under intense lock and key, apparently, and I’ve had a harder time finding ebooks of them compared to other series I’ve written about. Short of somehow acquiring an (expensive) physical copy of an older book, my 1998 reprint will have to do for now.
So normally Nancy books are pretty formulaic - Nancy finds a mystery, Bess talks about food for 3 pages, Nancy gets chloroformed, mystery solved, Nancy somehow survives without long term brain injuries from being constantly in an induced coma, everyone has a celebratory dinner.
#22 goes off formula a bit in that they spend the entire summer working at a restaurant, and she goes out on dinner dates with Ned, but I only counted mentions of specific dishes three times. The location, also, gets a little wobbly with the plausibility - RIver Heights isn’t in any particular state, but generally tends to be set near locations in the Midwest. This time, the plot clearly takes place near an ocean, and the food seems very East Coast. So either Nancy has traveled a really long way to work at a cafe during summer vacation, or the ghost writer forgot where it was supposed to be. Either one seems equally believable, having now read upwards of 100 of them at this point.
A note on the Dandee Tart - I seriously cannot find any reference or even fathom what this would be. It sounds like some kind of nightmare hybrid between a cream pie and a savory fish pudding. It’ll become apparent as I write up more of these, but many of the Nancy books have food mentioned that sounds a little… bizarre. I’m not sure if they’re all from a specific cookbook, or the ghostwriter invented them, but it won’t be the first time that it’s a dish that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else.
Chapter 1: The Perfume Cart
“In addition to lobster and puffed shrimp there were tomatoes, coleslaw, potatoes, hot biscuits, lemonade, and apple pie.”
Chapter 2: An Intriguing Story
“..including the Dandee Tart, filled with steaming hot fish pudding topped with salmon colored meringue.”
“…a frosted glass of iced tea.”
Chapter 5: A Warning Message
A glass of lemonade
Chapter 7: A Mysterious Malady
“….delicacies from Mrs Chantrey’s tearoom.” (Unspecified, but earlier mentioned that the tearoom serves salad and sandwiches.)
A lemonade
