So, there I was, just chugging along with my usual weekend crossword. You know, the kind that makes you feel smart one minute and like you know absolutely nothing the next. I get a real kick out of them, most of the time anyway.
Then I landed on this particular clue: “dessert named for soprano nellie”. And it was a good number of letters, I think it was ten if memory serves. My brain just sort of… stalled. “Soprano Nellie?” I kept repeating that in my head. Honestly, opera isn’t my strongest suit. I can name maybe two famous opera singers, and Nellie wasn’t ringing any immediate bells.
My first thought was, “Okay, ‘dessert’. That’s a good starting point.” So I started mentally listing off desserts. Cakes, pies, puddings, ice cream concoctions. Was it something super fancy? Or something really old-fashioned? Crosswords love to dig up those old terms, don’t they?
I kept circling back to “Nellie.” Nellie, Nellie, Nellie. The name itself felt vaguely familiar, like something I’d heard in a completely different context. It wasn’t clicking with opera directly, but it was tickling something in the back of my mind. I was just about to give up and look for an easier clue when a different connection sparked. Melba! Like Melba toast!
Now, Melba toast isn’t a dessert, obviously. That’s what you eat when you’re on a diet or feeling a bit peaky. But the “Melba” part stuck. Could “Nellie” be Nellie Melba? That sounded right! I’m pretty sure I’d heard that name before – a famous singer from way back when. Yes, that had to be it. Nellie Melba.
So, if the soprano is Nellie Melba, what’s the dessert? My brain immediately jumped from Melba toast to something else with “Melba” in it. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: Peach Melba! Of course! Peaches, raspberry sauce, vanilla ice cream. Classic. Elegant. Definitely a dessert named after someone famous.
I quickly counted the letters for P-E-A-C-H-M-E-L-B-A. Ten letters. Bingo! Fit perfectly. It’s funny how sometimes you have to go around the houses a bit in your own head to get to the answer. It’s not always a straight line from A to B. But getting there, in the end, that’s the fun part of it, isn’t it?
So that was my little mental workout for that clue. Just goes to show, sometimes the answer is lurking in there, you just have to connect a few weird dots to find it. Another one bites the dust!
