An unintentional trial of apricot kernels – oh, the irony.
In the past 6 months the most visited post on my blog has been the one about apricot kernels and the risk of cyanide poisoning. I am sure a link from the excellent quackometer played a large part in this. However it is noticeable how many visits I continue to pick up from search engines as people hunt down information about apricot kernels.
Over the past few weeks I have been quietly munching through this large jar of mini amaretti biscuits. My wife highlighted the list of ingredients:
Sugar, Apricot Kernals (20%), Egg White, Lactose and Milk Protein, Raising Agent (E500), Ammonium Carbonates, Flavouring: Natural Identical Raising Agent (E503)
There is 225g of biscuits in the jar. So that makes a horrifying 45g of apricot kernels in my tasty biscuits. Using some back of a fag packet calculations based on figures in my previous post my 3 year old daughter would receive a fatal dose if she ate half a jar. (Not very likely I concede.)
I had blithely assumed that amaretto had something to do with almonds but apparently it commonly has apricot kernel oil in as a base. Who knew?
Whittards have gone into administration and although they continue to trade they no longer have amaretti biscuits on their site. (I am fairly sure these are unrelated facts.) But if you must have your amaretti biscuits with a dash of cyanide then Harvey Nicks will sell you them here - and they don’t skimp on the kernels either with a whopping 36% for you, sir.
I have searched my soul and I can honestly say in this random uncontrolled open label trial I have felt no better or no worse. Nice biscuits though.
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It was a Dorothy Sayers book where the murder was carried out by a man who had first built up his tolerance to poison (arsenic in this case) so he could eat the same dish with no ill effects. I wonder if your tolerance for cyanide has similarly built up? Perhaps the perfect crime?