This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
“I wish to die,” said the police inspector, explaining why he proposed marriage to a murder suspect. C.P. Donnel usually wrote gritty thrillers, but in 1946, in an obscure short story in American Legion Magazine, he swerved into whimsical originality. The endearingly plump Mme Chalon had dispatched three husbands, without recourse to any indictable offence, by feeding them to death with dishes of irresistible richness.
She started a meal, typically, with potage Bagration gras — Escoffier’s purée of butter-browned veal and mirepoix in thick cream with macaroni. The great chef named it, with other dishes of comparable extravagance, in honour of one of his blue-blooded Georgian patrons.
Madame’s entrées featured imam bayildi, the Ottoman aubergine confection said to have caused an imam to swoon with delight, and chaud-froi de cailles en belle vue, stuffed with foie gras and truffles. The way the dish yields squelchingly, unresistingly to the bite is as defining as its taste.
Suprême de volaille à l’índienne (in which the chicken breasts float on stupefyingly creamy, enticingly spicy curry) might follow, or tournedos mascotte, with the caressingly soft steak squeezed between a slab of foie gras and a gilded artichoke heart, on a butter-oozing croûte.
What pudding could follow such a feast, save omelette surprise à la napolitaine, a dish Escoffier designed to end all dishes and any but the most robust life? He spread eggy ice cream on spongy genoise, coated it in stiff meringue, sprinkled it with sugar, baked it and set it alight, smothered in cherry brandy.
The combined allure of Thanatos and Eros seduced Inspector Miron. I imagine the merry widow accepting the offer of his hand with a sigh of immediate pleasure and anticipated satiety.
You can cause a coronary by including an excess of lawful but lubricious ingredients
Madame Chalon’s secret ingredient was, she said, “a bit of art” — maybe a euphemism for a bit of arsenic. No such artifice is needed. You can cook from the heart and cause a coronary by including an excess of lawful but lubricious ingredients.
Chestnut stuffing, for instance, was Madame’s favourite forcemeat, but conventional recipes for it can be enhanced by adding shreds of fatty bacon to the browning onions, soaking the breadcrumbs in cream, stirring morsels of squidgy prunes into the mixture and adding fortified wine, a whole egg and a spoonful of honey to the binding.
Thickening with crushed almonds and cream improves the sauce for aubergines à la turque. Mme Chalon used, I presume, Escoffier’s heart-stopping recipe for quails but might have hastened her husbands’ demise by introducing dried pears soaked in poire Williams, or making the jelly with Sauternes instead of water. Her steak dish demands no extra menace, except perhaps for a thick reduction of the meat’s fatty juices with sticky Madeira.
Other ways of killing an unwanted spouse without unwonted cruelty (and with less elaboration than Mme Chalon) include: using double cream in scrambling eggs and serving them with Ibérico ham, well striped with fat; or frying your gnocchi instead of prudently boiling them; or buttering bacon butties and dribbling the lard over the filling; or turning leftovers into fritters; or making roux and rice pudding with cream; or buttering bread before squashing a lump of Brie or Camembert on it; or replacing scones with lardy cakes at tea time; or dressing chips with mayonnaise in the Belgian manner — only more generously; or ordering your butcher to stop trimming the ribbons of fat from the Sunday joint.
Amongst puddings able to deliver the coup de grâce are St Louis butter cake — buttery base, with a thick topping of cream cheese and sugar — or the celebratory dish, beloved of my children’s prep-school contemporaries and known as Sticky Fried Goo-goo: flakes of cereal held together with health-busting chocolate and syrup. The effect can be boosted by serving with ice cream.
For those of faint heart or false priorities, who would rather prolong life than die happy, the antidote to Mme Chalon’s kind of poison is red wine, rather than white, and abundant, life-giving garlic in the savoury dishes, or mint or savagely strong citrus slices in the sweet ones.
Mme Chalon, I suppose, was the sort of hostess who liked Sauternes with foie gras and Gewürtztraminer with her volaille à l’indienne. If she pressed post-prandial brandy on her husbands she probably erred: a digestif is properly so called because it cuts an alimentary path through pinguid stodge.
What became of Inspector Miron? I imagine him dying of starvation after his wife predeceased him, spooning up a dollop of sour cream with her borscht.
