Food
Summer is the best season for poisoners. There are so many ways of hiding your tracks. Heat makes food go off more quickly and helps along any little bacilli that may be lurking on the plate. Salmonella colonises chickens. Listeria makes play with that cook-chill meal that wasn't quite as chilled as it might have been. Ice-cream contaminates itself as it melts. Food poisons food, and the strong flavours mask chemical additions. Who's to notice if a stealthy murderer helps the germs to claim their victim?
In Malice Aforethought, the classic yellow-back shocker by Francis Iles, murder is committed via a plate of potted-meat sandwiches. Wicked Dr Bickleigh prepares a dish of botulism and serves it up for tea. "As he spread his bacilli on the potted meat . . . his only conscious thought was that he must not forget to put them back on the plate with their distinguishing marks (a tiny smear of potted meat on the corner of the white bread) uppermost. Of Madeleine and Chatford he did not think at all." It's hard to picture meat paste - that textureless goo - without botulism after reading Malice Aforethought.
Seafood is another possible conduit for poison. You could get a bad oyster or mussel and keep it in a hot room for a few days. Then, using a pipette, transfer some of the rotten juices to a fresh plate of raw shellfish, being careful to remember which shells are uncontaminated (use a lemon wedge as a marker). Generously offer the plumpest, most sewery oyster to your victim. If they eat it now, when there's no "r" in the month, it won't be so very surprising if they collapse into their soup. Indeed some would blame the deceased for being so foolish as to accept the offending mollusc.
For dessert, you might have sugared sweetmeats - I seem to recall Dorothy L Sayers writing about Turkish delight coated in powdered arsenic. Or what about some tempting plums? In I, Claudius Livia kills Augustus by putting poison on his fruit while it's still on the tree. But many fruits are naturally poisonous. The seeds of the rose family - peaches, apricots, plums, pears, apples, almonds - contain cyanogens, which, when acted on by an enzyme, react with water to form hydrogen cyanide. The poison vanishes on heating, leaving only the distinctive prussic acid aroma (like bitter almonds or amaretti), which conveniently masks the taste of any cyanide you may choose to add.
A well-chosen salad course can also be deadly. Jeffrey Steingarten wrote an essay entitled "Salad, the Silent Killer" in which he discussed the toxins concealed in salad vegetables. Lima beans and bamboo shoots contain cyanogens. Raw spinach and Swiss chard contain oxalic acid, and undercooked kidney beans have haemagglutinins, which make red blood cells stick together. Watermelon seeds damage the liver. Green potatoes contain solanin. Add a little groundnut oil to a salad dressing and serve it to a peanut allergy sufferer and you have another death at the dinner table.
If someone asks you to dinner and offers you lima bean and shellfish salad, with peach-kernel cream and crisp little amaretti to follow, bitter almond liqueur and a potted meat savoury, I would eat very cautiously indeed.
Amaretti di Saronno
Take the stones of a dozen or more apricots and smash them open with a rolling pin. Place the kernels in a low oven with 100g blanched almonds for 20 minutes. Pulverise with 100g icing sugar and gradually add an egg white. Arrange in spoonfuls on a baking tray lined with rice paper and bake in a hot oven for 15-20 minutes until brown. Serve with strychnine-scented coffee for the full Agatha Christie touch.
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