I WROTE THIS STORY ABOUT CHIEF INSPECTOR GAMACHE, THE BELOVED CHARACTER IN MY FRIEND LOUISE PENNY’S SERIES OF NOVELS. WHILE MOST OF GAMACHE’S WORK IS DONE IN CANADA, AND WHILE THE SETTING IS OFTEN THREE PINES, A PLACE EVERYONE WHO READS THE BOOKS WANTS TO GO TO, HER LAST BOOK, “ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE,” IS SET IN PARIS, WHICH IS WHERE LOUISE AND I MET. SINCE LEMON MERINGUE TURNS UP IN ALL OF LOUISE’S NOVELS, I DECIDED TO CREATE A LEMON MERINGUE DESSERT, A COOKIE, FOR GAMACHE.
This story and the cookie recipe first appeared in the New York Times Magazine. The photograph is by Heami Lee; food styling by Maggie Ruggiero; and prop styling by Rebecca Bartoshesky.
IF, LIKE MILLIONS OF OTHER READERS, YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH LOUISE PENNY’S NOVELS AND INSPECTOR GAMACHE, REJOICE: THE 17TH BOOK IN THE SERIES, “THE MADNESS OF CROWDS,” WILL BE OUT AUGUST 24, 2021 (AND IS AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER NOW).
At the start of the pandemic, as we all made plans to stay put, a friend said, “How I wish I could be in Three Pines.” I understood. Three Pines is a small village in Quebec with a good boulangerie; a bookstore that smells like tea and flowers; a bistro with an excellent chef; and a community of fascinating eccentrics. There’s the poet Ruth, who often curses and just as often says something so profound you want to tuck the line away in your pocket. There’s Clara, the brilliant artist whose dinners last into the night because the conversations are so good. And there’s Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, whose job is to investigate murders but whose remarkable gift is to understand people. I’m obsessed with him — with his love of literature, his quiet intelligence and his after-shave, some combination of sandalwood and rosewater. It doesn’t hurt that he likes a black licorice pipe (my mother’s favorite candy) with his café au lait. With his Scotch too.
I’m grown-up enough to know that a place this idyllic can only be mythical, and this one was imagined by Louise Penny, who has written 16 Gamache books, not one of which I’d read until a few days before she came to my apartment in Paris two years ago. She was in town to research what would be her latest novel, “All the Devils Are Here,” and a friend suggested we meet. In preparation, I baked gougères. I also made a dinner reservation for us at Juveniles, one of my favorite places, and scrambled to read her first novel. By the time she knocked on my door, I couldn’t decide whether to hug her and thank her for the pleasure the book had given me, or damn her for making me miss one stop on the No. 86 bus, two on the No. 10 Métro line and a few hours of sleep the night I wouldn’t stop reading until I got to the end. (I decided on a hug.)
Since then, I’ve read through her books, all of which include family, mystery, murder, knotty moral dilemmas, goodness lost, goodness found, dogs, a duck, children, very old people and food, lots of it. In “Devils,” the food is French, and it’s served in Paris. Gamache and his family have dinner at Juveniles — he loves the rice pudding with caramel sauce as much as Louise and I did. There’s a meal at my neighborhood bistro, Le Comptoir, where Louise, who has since become a friend, and I had lunch, and a piece of cake that a Left Bank building concierge gives to Gamache for his wife (too bad its delivery is delayed by murder). There’s a lemon tart eaten in the garden of the Musée Rodin and, later, a lemon meringue pie.
There has been a lemon meringue pie in each of Louise’s books, starting with her second, “A Fatal Grace,” where a fisherman in a diner finishes a slice and then looks toward Gamache, his eyes shining with compassion. Ever since, the pie, which was Louise’s husband’s favorite, “has come to symbolize the divine,” she told me. It’s now a touchstone for her readers as well as for Gamache.
“Devils” ends with Gamache home again in Three Pines, enjoying a slice of lemon meringue pie at the Bistro. As I closed the book a couple of months ago, I felt as if I, too, had returned home, and I set about doing something I’d never done — I baked lemon meringue for an imaginary friend, Armand Gamache.
I wanted to make him something special, something different from the pie at the Bistro. I toyed with the idea of a French tarte au citron, an echo of the book’s opening. In the end, though, I made a cookie, a beautiful, surprising cookie that tips French but shrugs at tradition.
Like a classic lemon meringue pie, it has three parts. The base is a vanilla sablé, a French shortbread cookie with a fine, crumbly texture — this one’s thick, so it’s also a little chewy at the center. The flavor is classic, but the way I bake the cookies isn’t: The dough is shaped into logs, chilled, cut into pucks and then popped into muffin tins, so they all bake to the same size and are golden on the bottom and around their straight sides. Because they’re well baked, the butter tastes nutty and the sugar caramelizes a bit. The middle layer is lemon curd, homemade or store-bought, but puckery — it’s got to be sharp. And the top is the meringue, not soft and billowy as it is in a pie, but crunchy. The meringue is quick to make and slow to bake; what you’re actually doing is drying it, so that you can cut it into pieces.
The three elements can be made ahead — best if they are — then put together at the last minute. Spoon the curd over the cookies, then scatter over the bits of meringue any way you want. Be neat or go for the look I like best, loosey-goosey. Eat them the minute they’re ready, so that you get the crumbly cookie, the velvety curd and the crack of the meringue. My friend Gamache might or might not find these divine — that’s a lot to wish for — but I love imagining us together in front of the Bistro’s fireplace with mugs of dark coffee and a plate of the cookies between us. Maybe he’d find that heavenly. I would.