This is the chapter of unhappy, unsettled men. It starts with Monty, Agatha’s ne’er-do-well brother, invalided out from his life of African adventure. Settling down to domestic tranquility in England did not suit him in the slightest. Living again with his mother in Ashfield, he would demand the servants prepare “chops and steaks” for him whenever he felt like eating—even if that happened to be at four in the morning.
Eventually they got him into the care of a widow with thirteen children, Mrs. Taylor, who knew how to handle a man like Monty. She cooked him delicious meals and grew a garden of “peas, new potatoes and French beans.” Monty liked her well enough to stop with the four a.m. calls for steak.
And that is the end of food references in this chapter, which gives way to the crumbling of her marriage to Archie. We get one note of a drink: how Agatha with friend Nan would quaff “half a pint of raw cream thinned down with milk” when their husbands were off golfing. Agatha joked that she was a golf widow. Ultimately it wasn’t just golf that stole her husband, but a young lady golfer as well.
Rather notoriously, this chapter omits a good deal of the story, including Agatha’s 11-day disappearance. (For some of those details, read the opening section of my article “Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Christian.” Then read on for a lengthy exploration of Agatha’s faith.) But she does capture the terrible, poignant truth of feeling an abrupt emotional estrangement that she can’t account for, culminating in the sudden realization that Archie was a total stranger to her. By that point, all that was to follow was inevitable and irrevocable.
But the end of the marriage is not the end of the story. Agatha concludes the chapter with something to set the hearts of fans aflutter. To ease her pain and distract her mind after the divorce, she decides to join an archaeological dig in the Middle East. And to get there, she will ride on… the Orient Express.
Probably even then she hoped she might get a book out of her adventures. She certainly never expected to get a second husband out of her adventures.
Cheese Soufflé
Not a lot of options in this chapter: chops, steaks, or raw cream cocktail! I thought of doing a vegetable medley based on Mrs. Taylor’s garden, but after all, that’s what Monty ate, not what Agatha ate. Then I thought, Agatha has mentioned more than once that she’s a dab hand with a cheese soufflé. Once on her own, she could bake it and serve it to herself immediately, pre-collapse, with no irritable invalid Archie to wave it away. So, let’s assume she made this for herself and thoroughly enjoyed it, a small pleasure to be had during the worst period of her life.
4 Tbsp (50 g) unsalted butter, plus extra for the dish
a small handful of breadcrumbs
3 Tbsp (50 g) flour
2 c + 2 Tbsp (500 mL) milk
½ tsp salt
½ tsp mustard powder
5 ¼ oz (150 g) cheddar cheese
5 eggs
Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Butter a soufflé dish (a straight-sided ceramic baking dish) and sprinkle lightly with bread crumbs, and set it aside.
Melt the butter in a frying pan and sprinkle in the flour. Whisk quickly until it all clumps together. Slowly pour in the milk, whisking as you go to make sure the flour clumps absorb it all. (You can heat up the milk in advance to make this process easier, but I can never be bothered.) Once all the milk is incorporated and the resulting béchamel is reasonably smooth, let it simmer on lowest heat about 5 minutes. Whisk in the salt and mustard powder, then set the pan aside, off the heat, to cool.
Grate the cheese and set it aside. Separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs. I do this by breaking one egg, letting the white drip into a small bowl as I shift the yolk back and forth between the two halves of shell, and then dropping the yolk in a separate small bowl (or in this case you can dump the yolk on top of the cooling béchamel). Then tip the white into a large bowl. Repeat the process. This gives you some wiggle room in case you accidentally break some yolk into the white, because even a tiny bit of yolk will contaminate the whole batch and the whites will never billow as needed. So if that happens, set aside the contaminated white and use it for something else, like adding to scrambled eggs. Start over with a clean little bowl to catch the whites in.
Once you have all the yolk-free whites poured into the large bowl, beat with an electric mixer till you have just barely stiff peaks. Whisk the piled-up yolks into the béchamel, then add the cheese and whisk that in, too. Scrape about half the béchamel into the bowl of whites, on the side, so as not to crush them too much. Fold the mixture together with up-and-down motions of a rubber spatula until mostly mixed. Add the rest of the béchamel and complete the process. It’s better to have a few streaks of whites left than to mix so thoroughly that you press out all the air.
Scrape the soufflé mixture into the prepared baking dish and pop immediately into the oven. Bake for 30–40 minutes until well poofed on top. It will depend on the efficiency of your oven. You want it mostly cooked through, but a little liquidiness at the center is fine. Overbaked won’t be very good. Serve as fast as humanly possible, since soufflés are notorious for desouffling.Souffle, without the accent mark, is French for “breath.” Once this dish exhales, it never inhales again.