Almonds

I asked Gary, "Why don't murderers kill people by just putting cyanide in almond cookies and just burning them a little? To trick those rare people who say cyanide smells like burnt almonds?"

After several side arguments from Gary (IT'S NOT CYANIDE IT'S STRYCHNINE / YOU CAN'T SMELL CYANIDE BECAUSE YOU CAN'T TASTE IT / ALEXA DOES STRYCHNINE SMELL LIKE BURNT ALMONDS) we found that I was partly wrong: the cyanide-smellers don't say the cyanide smells like burnt almonds, they say it smells like bitter almonds.

"Okay, fine," I said, "Then why don't they make almond cookies and add something bitter? Then no one would suspect. Everyone would smell 'bitter almonds' when they smelled the cookies."

He said, "What are bitter almonds anyway?" That led to some more research, and come to find out, you know what there's a lot of in a bitter almond? Cyanide. 

So how is it that only "certain people" can smell cyanide? "It smells like bitter almonds," they say, smugly. Well, yeah duh. So they're really just special because they know what a bitter almond smells like. Can I get some bitter almonds, sniff them to see what they're like, then hire myself out as a cyanide-sniffing specialist?

Also, there still seems like you could "accidentally" swap out normal almonds for bitter almonds  and murder someone that way, that would be even simpler. Especially since this Magic Nose Cyanide-Sniffer job seems to be a bust.

Comments

[KC]

It'd have to be a raw dessert (cooking knocks off the compound) with *enough* bitter almonds, and bitter almonds are not especially available in the US, and they are *strong* (thus why they are used as flavoring for marzipan, etc.), so I think it'd be fairly difficult to do a swap in adequate quantities to be hazardous unless someone's taste buds were messed up or unless they really liked bitter things and were not suspicious of you.

But if you're set on writing a murder-mystery, you could probably have someone scheme to feed someone a bitter-almond custard while they have smell and taste inhibition from covid? Maybe?

[theQueen]

KC - I had no idea you could cool the poison out of almonds the way you cook alcohol out of vanilla. But now I looked up the alcohol you make from bitter almonds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_almond_liqueur) and evidently just chopping it up gets rid of the cyanide. This seems impossible to me, but chemistry is magic.