I love doing research. I come across the coolest stuff, even if it doesn’t make it into an article. As I said in this week’s article about orgeat syrup, you don’t have to resort to making orgeat yourself, you can always just buy it and make it more pungent by adding more bitter almond extract or extra rose or orange flower water. Orgeat syrup used to be concocted from both sweet and bitter almonds, but the bitter almonds had to be used sparingly or processed because, as I learned reading good old Waverly Root’s book Food…In raw form, chewing or mashing bitter almonds with water will release small amounts of prussic acid, more commonly known as hydrogen cyanide. Cyanide! I can’t be the only one who thinks that’s cool. Not that there isn’t plenty of stuff in the household cleaning aisle that can kill. This is just more romantic somehow. Prussic acid was Lizzie Borden’s first attempted, and alleged, weapon of choice. Prussic acid, along with arsenic, was an uncommon mode of murder 200 years ago, yet eagerly and disproportionately storied. Granted, it would take a large amount of bitter almonds to kill you, but if you tried going DIY with them, it’d be curtains!I found tons of references to it in 19th century crime reporting and literature. According to Alfred Swaine, author of On Poison, prussic acid posioning is unmistakeable. “If death has been rapid, the dose large, and the inspection recent, …all the cavities as well as the blood have the odour.” Death by bitter almond. You can’t have that, it’s mine! I’m going home now to write the spec script for CSI:1850. I couldn’t find any 19th century references to cordials made from bitter almonds leading to accidental low-grade poisoning, but bad homemade bitter almond anything, especially improperly made extracts, had to have happened. I’ll keep looking. Chemistry is fun, and sometimes nefarious.(*Note: Commercial bitter almond extract is totally safe, even though bitter almonds are not allowed to be imported into the US according to the FDA. The word “benzaldehyde” you see on the back of ingredients in your commercial marzipan or almond extract is the pure and safe experience, derived from bitter almonds, that we’ve come to know as “almond.”)