Waldorf Salad

It wasn't only in America that Waldorf salad was popular. This recipe elevates the Waldorf to a finger food, but it can also be served on lettuce , with a couple of tiny rounds of buttered brown bread on the side, as a part of a sit-down dinner.

Finely chopped celery

Diced red apple

Chopped walnuts

Brown bread and butter

Lettuce

Mayonnaise

Salt, Cayenne pepper

Take equal quantities of finely chopped celery and crisp apple cut into dice, add a few chopped walnuts and season with salt and cayenne. Spread rounds of brown bread with butter, and on them place cut out rounds of lettuce. Pile up on the lettuce the chopped apple etc and coat with a little mayonnaise.

Episode 1 - Cocaine Blues

The five-course menu I created in advance of this episode bears little resemblance to the food and drink actually consumed in it, but you could say it's thematically linked. Phryne drank cosmopolitans, champagne (twice) and tea, but the only food that passed her lips was a piece of plain toast. The murder victim also had toast, with cumquat marmalade, but it was laced with arsenic or strychnine.

Like Phyrne's cosmopolitans and the victim's cumquat marmalade, the menu of oyster cocktails, Waldorf salad, lobster cutlets, sauteed rabbit and quince fool is predominantly red: the tomato in the oyster cocktail, the lobster's flecks of coral, red wine in the rabbit and the blood red of the quinces.

This 1920's menu is anything but bland: Tabasco, Worchestershire and Cayenne add heat, celery lends crispness and colour, and the lemon cuts the oil and flour in the cutlets.