Tired of unpacking boxes in his new Vermont home, police detective Franklin Warren steps onto the porch for air and finds a wicker basket filled with rustic delicacies. They include “a slab of yellow butter, flakes of salt glistening on the surface … a loaf of bread, still warm, the crust a deep brown … [and] a jar of red jam — raspberry, according to the precisely lettered label.”
The year is 1965, Interstate 91 has just been built, and Warren has fled from a personal disaster in Boston to the fictional Vermont town of Bethany, where he joins the state police force. Just moments after tucking the leftovers from the basket into his “giant white Kelvinator” refrigerator, he’s summoned to the neighbor’s house to answer a phone call. A barn on Agony Hill has burned down, and a body was discovered in the wreckage.
Over the course of the next 300 pages, Warren will investigate the case, fry eggs in a cast-iron pan, wrestle with his past and eat clam chowder at the local inn. Whether or not he solves the mystery is something you’ll have to find out on your own.
“I really wanted to give readers the flavor of what life in Vermont was like during this period.” Sarah Stewart Taylor
Released in August, Agony Hill is Hartland author Sarah Stewart Taylor‘s ninth mystery novel and the first entry in a new series, which will center on Warren and a cast of intriguing small-town New England characters in the years just before the author’s birth.
“I was born in 1971,” she said. “It’s always been a little bit of an obsession for me, wondering about the period right before I came on the scene.”
One aspect of the era that fascinates her is the food. “As I imagine [characters’] lives, I always think about what they’re eating and what they’re cooking,” said Taylor, an enthusiastic cook who consulted vintage cookbooks as part of her research. “I really wanted to give readers the flavor of what life in Vermont was like during this period.”
She learned early lessons about food traditions from her family. Taylor was brought up on Long Island, but every summer the family packed up and moved to the New Hampshire side of the Upper Valley for two months. There, Taylor’s grandmother, an avid gardener, “cooked in a way that really celebrated the fresh produce of the summer,” she said. Many of the recipes her grandma made, including preserved and canned goods, harked back to the Great Depression and the postwar era — “traditions that were born of necessity,” Taylor recalled.
These days, Taylor lives in a classic white Vermont farmhouse with her husband — former state senator Matt Dunne — and the two of their three children who are still in high school. They grow copious amounts of kale and Swiss chard in a large garden, raise sheep and chickens, keep bees, experiment with apple grafting, and grow blueberries.
When this writer visited, Taylor was baking a loaf of graham bread in one of two ovens that sit side by side in her black, six-burner vintage stove with cherry-red knobs. A homegrown bird roasted in the other — a meal for the evening’s dinner guests. A hutch in the corner was piled with classic Polish pottery glazed white with deep blue accents, and a central island held appliances, ingredients for the loaves she was making and a signed baseball in a wooden basket.
Most of Taylor and Dunne’s cookbooks are tucked away in a bookshelf beneath the kitchen counter. But the oak kitchen table was stacked with the ones she consulted while writing Agony Hill, including the cloth-covered Stowe Community Church Cookbook, a slim green volume called The Vermont Good Luck Cook Book and a paint-speckled copy of Elsie Masterton’s Blueberry Hill Menu Cookbook.
“Vermont and northern New England were such an interesting place in those days,” Taylor said. “American cuisine was looking outward to the world. People [had come] back from World War II with these experiences of European cooking.”
Thrift was another strong influence on Vermont cuisine in this period. In Agony Hill, farmer and housewife Sylvie Weber must hurry to cook and can a batch of berry preserves before the fruit crop molds, even though she just lost her husband in the barn fire. The bereaved farm family needs all the income it can get. In other scenes, Weber prepares simple, economical meals for her four young boys.
Meanwhile, Detective Warren is shown to have a secret talent for Italian cuisine, and his well-to-do neighbor, Alice Bellows — who is involved in several mysteries of her own — has a helper to stand over her stove stirring chicken stock.
Taylor, who identified herself as the primary cook in her household, said her cooking style is a mix of the ones readers will notice in her characters. She prepares seasonal and homegrown ingredients with global flair.
“I’m such a fan of stews and casseroles, things I can make early in the day and have going in the oven during the colder months,” she said. “That’s my sweet spot.”
The lambs that she and Dunne raise appear regularly on their menus, sometimes as a shawarma inspired by chef Yotam Ottolenghi and sometimes with Greek herbs and “a lot of white wine,” she said. One of the couple’s children is now a vegetarian, which has pushed Taylor to explore “how to put vegetables front and center in more of our meals.”
Despite her long-standing love of food, Taylor’s previous mystery books, the Sweeney St. George series and the Maggie D’arcy series, don’t feature quite as much cooking as her new work, she noted. What they all have in common is being rooted in places she loves, including Long Island, Ireland and Vermont.
Taylor said the biggest influence on the food in Agony Hill was the classic volume Out of Vermont Kitchens. The 1947 edition, compiled by the Trinity Mission of Trinity Episcopal Church in Rutland and the Women’s Service League of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Burlington, features handwritten recipes from parishioners accompanied by charming, childlike illustrations. “I just love the personality in that … just imagining the women who wrote those recipes,” Taylor said.
One thing she noticed as she delved into historical volumes was differences between the recipes that came from contributors who lived in rural areas and those who inhabited bigger towns and cities.
“Rutland was quite cosmopolitan,” Taylor said, as was Brattleboro. “Maybe some of the women had traveled or had experiences outside of Vermont. There were some French and Italian recipes. You’re also seeing some Chinese inspiration, although some of the recipes were not that authentic.”
Back in her fictional Bethany of 1965, the cuisine still hews to classic New England fare, such as maple baked beans. Readers of Agony Hill will find secrets, lies and stories aplenty, served up with slabs of fresh bread and wedges of cheddar cheese.
Now that the highway has been built, making it easier to move food into and out of Vermont, some things in this small burg are about to change. Perhaps the differences will come to light in sequels to Agony Hill.
The second book in Taylor’s series, Hunter’s Heart Ridge, is due on August 5. Set about three months after the events of Agony Hill, it deals with a shooting at a men’s hunting and fishing club, an early snowstorm, a dinner party host with a hidden agenda, and an exceptionally fudgy chocolate cake.
Correction, January 2, 205: An earlier version of this story misidentified the character Alice Bellows.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Murder’s Cooking | Author Sarah Stewart Taylor used community cookbooks as inspiration for her latest mystery”
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This article appears in The Reading Issue 2024.
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