Flipping through the pages of a new cookbook, I ran across this recipe — which inspired quite a debate in our household. My husband, whose folks weren’t into serving highly processed canned goods, never enjoyed the original tinned version of this dish as a kid. So, when I went to make this from-scratch version, he assumed it was a main dish. Citing the fact it’s a pasta with a red sauce and sprinkled with parmesan — like spaghetti.
(The Cookbook I found this recipe in and would recommend it to anyone looking for great and straightforward dinner recipes!)
And, technically, I supposed both the original and look-alike versions are pasta dishes.
However, as a kid who’s eaten more than their fair share of canned goods, I never once connected the components to a traditional pasta dish. Moreover, my family always ate the original tinned version as a starchy side dish — since it didn’t actually contain any visible vegetables.
This debate went round and round (as I was cooking the dish). Finally, we compromised and added a bit of chicken for protein.
Even with this non-called-for-ingredient addition (as well as the deletion of garlic and onion (due to allergies) and the addition of grated celery root), it turned out really well! And if you’re looking for a trip down memory lane with a far superior version, this homemade o’s recipe is for you!
Christie: Honesty, the only detective I can ever see entertaining the idea of making One Pot Homemade O’s is Tuppence, who perhaps would make them for her kids.
Amongst the treasure trove of Golden Age mysteries, we find Sherlock Holmes enjoying his seven percent solution, Philip Marlowe’s prodigious drinking makes the characters in Mad Men look like teetotalers, Elizabeth Daly pitted Henry Gamadge against a heroin addict in Somewhere In The House, and Dorothy L. Sayers engineered a plot where Lord Peter Wimsey broke up a cocaine ring in Murder Must Advertise…These and a title wave of like-minded plots prove Golden Age mystery writers (and those from the surrounding decades) didn’t shy away from including alcohol and/or illicit substances in their works.
Yet absinthe, the purported creator of fiends and madmen, rarely gets mentioned.
Above and beyond the fact that the “Absinthe Defense” repeatedly fell short in courtrooms, thereby making it less appealing as a McGuffin for writers, I think there are a couple of other factors as to why “Absinthe made me do it!” never became a trope in mysteries. (Or at least not among the tomes I’ve helped collectors locate or in the reprints I’ve cracked the covers of.)
First and foremost, UK scientists and physicians gave Magnan’s 1869 paper detailing his flawed test findings, the stink eye. Pointing out the same problem I saw when first encountering Magnan’s experiment — i.e., using wormwood oil rather than absinthe effectively negates the test as the essential oil contains significantly higher thujone levels than absinthe. So while France, Switzerland, and the USA (amongst others) lost their shirt over absinthism (which Magnan believed his test conclusively proved as a separate and worse disease than standard alcoholism) and the fiends the green fairy purportedly created.…This scientific side-eye damped the alarm over absinthism in the UK and is considered one of the main reasons Parliament dismissed the idea of banning the Green Fairy out of hand.
It also doesn’t hurt that absinthe never came anywhere close to supplanting Gin, Irish Whiskey, Single Malt, or Welsh Whisky in the hearts of British Isles imbibers. Otherwise, British distillers might have found themselves tempted to join forces with French vintners in their smear campaign against absinthe.
In any case, while the UK never banned absinthe, it doesn’t mean those who enjoyed the odd Frappe or Corpse Reviver at their local pub could do so. Unfortunately, when the Swiss and French bans landed, distilleries in both countries either switched production to a less contentious product or closed up shop. So, whilst the UK patrons could order a Sazerac or a Death in the Afternoon, most bartenders couldn’t shake or stir one up due to the lack of the key imported ingredient (according to the sources I read).
(Unless said pub owner, or their supplier, navigated the red tape around importing absinthe directly from Pernod’s distillery in Catalonia, Spain (where the liquor was never prohibited) until it closed in the 1960s. Or someone working in this theoretical pub somehow cultivated a connection to a Swiss home brewer. Despite the ban, Swiss fans with home distilling skills still produced it — though many switched their recipes to the clear version so they could pass their homemade efforts off as some other liquor if lawmen came a knocking.)
Then came WWI and WWII.
Under the hail of bombs, bullets, fear, and rationing, together with battlefield atrocities grabbing headlines and bans stymieing absinthe sales — news stories focused on crimes committed by “absinthe fiends” by and large fell away and without new fuel, the hullaballoo around absinthe slowly extinguished. Moreover, with people focusing on just surviving the day, for so many years, absinthe & its sinister reputation largely passed into urban legend.
In my estimation, this exit from the public’s day-to-day consciousness further rendered the “Absinthe made me do it!” solution unappealing to mystery writers. Since younger authors and audiences probably never tasted the anise flavored liquor or knew much about the brouhaha it caused. While mature authors and their readers could recall the attached lousy science and the ineffectualness of the absinthe defense in courts across Europe and the Americas.
Okay, these titles probably don’t mention absinthe within…but it’s what I’ve got!
Perhaps all these aforementioned reasons account for the general absence of absinthe in mysteries penned by the Queens of Crime: Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers; The American Queens of Crime: Elizabeth Daly, Craig Rice, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Phoebe Atwood Taylor; Plus: Georgette Heyer, Josephine Tey, and Patricia Wentworth. In this pantheon of titans, only three (I can recall off the top of my head) chose to employ absinthe in any of their stories.
Agatha Christie used absinthe in the 1926 Mr. Harley Quin short story The Soul of the Croupier to quickly flesh out the deterioration of a promising future due in part to absinthe’s influence. Similarly, Georgette Heyer employed absinthe in her 1934 novel The Unfinished Clue. Evoking the memory of the hedonistic existence and excess of turn-of-the-century artists to quickly sketch out a similar sort of character. And Craig Rice mentions the liquor in Headed For A Hearse as one of her characters is battling an absinthe inspired hangover with a plate of eggs (I believe).*
The relegation of absinthe to a piffling plot device by these Mistresses of Mystery, I think, struck the death knell of the “Absinthe made me do it!” solution before it ever had a chance to take off as a trope. Furthermore, the sheer dominance of these women’s works during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (together with the lasting influence they still enjoy within the genre) played a significant role in perpetuating absinthe’s role as a bit player in plots.
And with heat now wafting from each vent of our house, repairmen on their way, and our cash reserves depleted — I bid adieu to another home repair inspired question until next November.
(But hopefully not.)
*If I failed to mention a reference (as I am not infallible, nor have I read the complete bibliography of each authoress — yet), please be nice if you wish to point out an omission.
Inspiration: Last amongst the treats I whipped up this year as holiday gifts were Brigadeiros.
The recipe I used was from the 2017 American Test Kitchen Christmas Cookie issue. However, while brilliant at turning out some of the most reliable recipes around, the ATK site requires you to pay to gain unrestricted access to their site, or you need to purchase their magazines and/or books as I do. So here are two different web recipes, 1 & 2; that, while similar to the ATK one, are not carbon copies.
The magazine where I got the recipe from!
In any case, these sweets are super simple to make….and are probably the stickest substance I’ve worked with in several years! Even after they are chilled!
Even better, due to their coating of sprinkles, they turn the gooey chocolate instantly festive! And since they’re so rich, I can only envision myself making them on holidays like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween. (As these suckers are so soft, I cannot imagine making them for warm weather holidays, lest my parent friends quietly kill me as their kids get the fudgy substance all over their clothes and person.)
These Brazilian treats went over splendidly with every chocolate lover on our gift list this year!
Helpful Hint: If you use a teaspoon to scoop the gooey goodness out of the pan — make sure to grip the measuring spoon by the neck. Otherwise, if yours are like mine, there’s a possibility the spoon will bend from the sheer effort needed to drag it through the set chocolate.
Christie: If these were introduced to St. Mary Mead, I could see Miss Marple or any other village ladies whipping these up for holiday parties and church fetes! Or at Halloween parties where kids and chocolaty treats go together like Ariadne Oliver and apples!
The leftover mess from cutting out, stamping, and decorating 60 plus gingerbread cookies! And I thought this book appropriate to place next to a bowlful of hundred and thousands (aka sprinkles).
Now that we’ve established absinthe’s meteoric rise and even faster fall in the realm of public opinion, we can now focus on my original question: Why haven’t I read mysteries where, during the summing up, the malefactor yells, “Absinthe made me murder/rob/eat Uncle Singin McBuzzleworth!”
One Unscientific Opinion/Answer: The “Absinthe made me do it!” defense didn’t hold up in real-life courtrooms.
When examining classic mystery and real-life motives like avarice, revenge, envy, and sex — the “Absinthe made me do it!” defense appears weak by comparison. Moreover, despite large swaths of the population (within many countries) purportedly believing absinthe poisoned the minds and hearts of any who partook of the Green Fairy’s potion — defense councils were still hard-pressed to engender enough sympathy in jury members to make this justification stick.
Take the case of Auguste-Leon Thabuis.
Near the township of Dole in the department of Jura in France sits Saint-Ylie Hospital (or Asylum; the French translator app I used was not flawless). Back in 1909, the 1,500 people (or so) residing within Saint-Ylie were separated into different pavilions by age and gender then sub-divided further based on their ailment — those possessing some sort of paralysis lived in one ward, those with mental health issues in another, and the “incurables” (their word, not mine) lived in their own wing.
In April 1909, the hospital director hired Auguste-Leon Thabuis to work in the men’s paralysis ward. Besides discovering he owned a terrific thirst, which he quenched at a nearby tavern, hospital administrators found no problem with Thabuis’s work.
Fast forward seven months.
On Friday, November 19, 1909, Thabuis reported to his supervisor that Justin Garneret (age 61) had died. Busy with one thing or another, Thabuis’s superior didn’t take the time to look the body over, instead they told Thabuis to get on with it. Which he did — leaving Justin Garnet’s body in his room, Thabuis went to prepare the earth for her newest resident — as he also moonlighted as a gravedigger and amphitheater boy for the hospital when needed.
Now it’s unclear precisely what roused the other nurses’ suspicions, perhaps because Justin Garneret’s death came completely out-of-the-blue or the curious piece of serendipity which found four other patients passing away, about one every other day, on Thabuis’s watch starting on November 10, 1909. Either way, they snuck a peek at Mr. Garneret’s body whilst Thabuis was away….And were rewarded with the sight of darkening fingermarks encircling Mr. Garneret’s neck.
Fetching Hospital Director Bierry and Chief Physician Santenoise, the nurses explained their misgivings and subsequent discovery.
At about this point, Thabuis returned to Mr. Garneret’s room with a coffin. In the ensuing conversation, during which I imagine Thabuis sweating more than a few bullets, Dr. Santenoise questioned the nurse about the undeniable signs of strangulation. Unfortunately (for Thabuis), the Chief Physician didn’t buy the story he spun: That one of the lunatics must’ve snuck out of their ward, into his, strangled Mr. Garneret, then crept back to their room — their absence and presence remaining undetected by everyone the entire time.
When the public prosecutor, examining magistrate, their clerk, and two trained forensic examiners answered Dr. Santenoise’s summons, Thabuis told them that Mr. Garneret attacked him and he’d been forced to defend himself. This explanation, which went over about as well as his first, prompted Thabuis’s immediate arrest — during which he cried out, “I’m innocent! I’m innocent!” Mr. Garneret’s autopsy, carried the same night around eight pm, confirmed the nurses’ worst fears — he was indeed murdered.
The Question Was: Did the other four patients who died under Thabuis’s care over the past eight days meet the same fate?
Performing a quadruple exhumation and autopsy the following Friday, authorities found some answers. Sadly, the bodies of the first two possible victims decomposed to the point where murder couldn’t be conclusively proven. The third victim, Francoise-Emile Menefere (age 54), bore bruises in the outline of two hands around his neck and a bruise on his chest. The fourth victim, Xavier Guinez (age 54), sported a similar bruising pattern as well as a row of four broken ribs and other defensive injuries. (It seems in addition to using his hands, the murderer used his knees to compress his victim’s chest to hasten the deed.)
My photo of a glass of absinthe!
With cause of death now established and confident they had their man, investigators turned to motive…..which proved troubling. Not because they found its establishment difficult but because the only dependable benefit Thabuis received from any of the deaths was the single extra franc he earned for each grave he dug. This veritable pittance was hastily spent at the neighborhood tavern. Where, when “flush” with cash, Thabuis reputedly drank up to four liters of wine and twenty-two glasses of absinthe.
All these facts & theories, together with the unsavory intelligence Thabuis sent notes to grieving families asking if they’d like him to maintain their loved ones’ graves in exchange for a small donation, emerged during his trial, which commenced in July of 1910. (It’s unclear if Thabuis wrote the families of the men he murdered.) This seedy behavior, coupled with a job history that included terminations due to theft, insolence towards a nun, coming to work while inebriated, and serving a three-month prison sentence for insulting a Swiss police officer — didn’t help his case.
However, his public defender, Milleret, was up to the task.
Amongst the sixteen witnesses called by the prosecution, Milleret determined that while all the nurses, who’d first raised the alarm, believed Thabuis culpable in the murder of Mr. Garneret (based on his and their movements that day), none could confidently assign his hand to the deaths of Mr. Menefere or Mr. Guinez. While the prosecution argued that Mr. Garneret’s murder proved the pattern. Milleret countered this by pointing out that the prosecution could not call a single “reliable” eyewitness to the crimes.
(Now, here comes the cream, at least for the question I’m trying to answer.)
In a Classic Scenario of ‘I didn’t do it. But if I did it.’: Milleret attempted to establish that Thabuis suffered from a classic case of hereditary degeneration and, therefore, shouldn’t be held accountable for his actions. (Yes, this case explicitly put absinthism to the test.) Not only did Thabuis prefer the embrace of the green fairy above all others — Milleret argued this devotion/addiction decayed Thabuis’s moral fiber to the point where taking another man’s life in pursuit of another glass felt justifiable. Moreover, due to weak genes he’d inherited from his father, whose excessive drinking sent him to an early grave six years prior, Thabuis’s ethical putrefaction was all but guaranteed.
It’s unclear if the alienist the prosecutor brought in successfully refuted Thabuis’s defense or (more likely in my estimation due to the slant of the newspaper reports) the members of the jury couldn’t overcome the repugnance of Thabuis killing a man for a single franc. Either way, it only took the jury three-quarters of an hour to find Thabuis guilty of Mr. Garneret’s murder and sentence him to seven years in prison and a ten-year ban of stay. (I’ve no clue what that last bit means. Maybe it banned him from working in another hospital for ten years after his release?)
In any case, the regular rejection of Magnan and Legrain’s absinthism defense by juries presents a fascinating counterpoint to the anti-absinthe campaign, which embraced these theories and was, at that moment in time, gaining momentum across several continents. Perhaps if women, the backbone of the temperance movement, were allowed to serve on juries during this period, acquittals based on the “Absinthe made me do it!” wouldn’t have been rarer than hen’s teeth.
Moreover, the lack of acquittals based solely on “Absinthe made me do it!” may have signaled to Golden Age mystery writers the inherent weakness in this particular solution. Since their livelihoods were based on fashioning viable and (generally) believable solutions for their readers, placing the blame solely on absinthe for the unfortunate fate befalling Uncle Singin McBuzzleworth could place a lackluster ending on an otherwise strong story — which might cause an author to lose readers.
An idea I imagine any pro would find insupportable.
Apparently, in a fit of waste not want not, the French military cooked up the confiscated absinthe and used it in bombs in 1915….According to an American correspondent.
Inspiration: Once again, wandering down the aisles of one of my favorite independent grocery stores, I spied an endcap displaying this book, along with the ingredients for gingerbread. Encouraged by my husband, as I loved the gingerbread pub on the cover and love cookbooks that list the weight of the ingredients in grams, I set it in our cart.
Only when I got home and really started reading it did I figure out the book was penned by one of my all-time favorite bakers on Great British Bake Off — Helena Garcia!
BTW: If you love spice forward bakes like gingerbread, I would highly picking up this cook book! Not only are the recipes excellent, Helena Garcia’s does a great job incorporating a Halloween vibe into winter holiday bakes!
Happy, I started whipping up her Basic Gingerbread Dough. (Though because I was making these cookies for people who do not appreciate Halloween with the same intensity that either Helena Garcia or I do, I stuck with basic holiday shapes.)
And they turned out great! Paired with the caramels and brigadeiros (which I will talk about next week), we got a nice set of sweet treats to hand out to neighbors and coworkers during the holidays!
Christie: Obviously, I can see any of Christie’s intrepid investigators enjoying a bit of gingerbread over the winter holidays!
My 52 Weeks With Christie 
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