I am in the process of building a new website at A Wolfe In The Kitchen – Dishes To Die For which is a cookbook of recipes taken from mentions in the corpus.
This cookbook is the brainchild and work of Dorothy Moran aka Inspector Cramer. She compiled the recipes with the valuable assistance of members of the Wolfhounds email list. Many people sent in and tested the recipes, but Dot was the one that spent over 2 years doing the grunt work. She did all of the compiling and typing as well as coming up with the ideas of the Exotic section, the Melting Pot section, the NY NY section and all the non-Wolfe stuff, in this MASSIVE collection of recipes based on the 47 books/74 stories of the Corpus.
I got involved in this project just recently (July 2015) when I sent her an email in response to one she has sent to the Nero Wolfe mailing list where she mentioned the “A Wolfe In The Kitchen” cookbook. After doing a search on Google and not finding anything there I emailed her asking if it was in print and if so where I could get a copy. She wrote back that there were only 2 printed copies and 1 disk in existence and she would send me the disk if I was interested. After a bit I got another email where she told me that upon opening the box that she thought held 1 print copy and the disk, that the publisher had not returned the disk. She then offered to send me that print copy if I was interested in scanning it. Even then I had no idea just how extensive this cookbook was (though she told me it had around a thousand pages) so I agreed to take on the project.
Upon receiving the package and opening it I started to realize what a treasure I held. And how much time it was going to take to get this scanned and back into a format suitable for printing. I dug out an old scanner, installed OCRFeeder (Linux OS here), and got started.
I quickly found that the thin paper the pages were printed on allowed the reverse side to show through enough to mess up the OCR software and moved to scanning the pages into GIMP where I could trim the sides off and increase the contrast enough to where the resulting file could be read by the OCR software with only minor corrections needing to be done by hand.
I started rebuilding the book in Libre Office and after a few pages realized that it would be more suited to a Website than a print book. I did a rough layout, put up a few recipes, and sent the link to Dot for approval. She liked it and gave me the go ahead and this site was born. It is an ongoing project and will most likely take months, if not years of spare time to complete, so if there are books without links and recipes, please note, it’s not Dot’s fault, it’s just that I haven’t gotten around to getting it scanned in yet.
And lastly, I want to say, THANK YOU Dot, for this WONDERFUL addition to the Corpus! AND for allowing me to make it available to all here on the web!
Dave Patty
aka Albert Freyer
Nero Wolfe 