Caustic Candy: Copycats of Cordelia Botkin

(A pic of Cordelia Botkin from the San Fransisco Call.) Last week I touched briefly on the true-crime case of Cordelia Botkin. As it happens, she’s the lynchpin in the spat of turn-of-the-century poisoned candy cases in the US, and let me tell you, her case had it all: A talented reporter who fell from grace, an adulterous affair conducted by an older woman with a younger man (which was far more…

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Podcasts du Jour

I go back and forth on listening to audio-only podcasts. Typically, I prefer to listen to audio books rather than podcasts, but lately I’ve been on a huge podcast kick.

It all started when I stumbled on The Ghost Story Guys on Instagram. Their Instagram isn’t anything to write home about, but the podcast most definitely is. I found it through youtube first, but now I listen through Google…

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While calling it an assassin's cabinet may be a bit exaggerated, the dramatically titled curio is a hollowed out book from the 16th century. In the pages' place are eleven drawers of varying sizes with meticulous labels, each spelling out which plant each drawer contained. via Snapzu : Health & Body

Caustic Candy: How NutraSweet Got Me Into Hot Water

Back in 1984, NutraSweet introduced themselves to the world via a gumball campaign, where the company sent out a handful of spherical sweets to prove to the public it “tasted just as good as sugar”. Knowing they couldn’t send out the chewing gum and expect people to eat it — they preceded the mass mailing with an ad campaign letting everyone know what their mailers and gumballs looked like.…

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Rough on Rats: Obsession, Melville, & the Tea Cup Poisoner

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Cooking With Christie!

This Week’s Recipe: Cranberry Stuff Not only did I want to temper the sweetness of a jammy thumbprint cookie, which I posted about last week, I’d a hankering for a Turkey Grinder Sandwich. Critical for the taste sensation that is this sandwich you need a cranberry sauce. Not particularly enamored with the canned stuff, I made up my own recipe — an easy one-pot wonder! Here it is! 12 oz. of…

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Cocktails With Christie!

Inspiration: The Poisoner’s Cabinet You need to give the Poisoner’s Cabinet podcast a listen! It is absolutely splendid. Pairing classic, obscure, and occasionally original cocktails with vintage crimes from around the world. (The most recent crime they’ve covered on the main episodes so far was in the eighties….Which is a disturbing number of decades in the past.)  I absolutely love our…

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