While I was yet a teenager, the Nazis conscripted me to cook for their officers. As sous chef, I had to serve them breakfast. However, I had always been a subversive lad and so I hatched a plot. I would serve the officers omelettes made from rotten eggs and slowly this is how I would poison them. Because I couldn’t guarantee a steady supply of rotten eggs, I worked out a way to breed hens that consistently laid stinkers. It was eugenics in reverse. I took the research of people like Otmar von Verschuer, then did the opposite and applied the result to hens, doing my very best to ensure they were the worst hens the world has ever seen, and producing the most putrid eggs imaginable. If there was a master race of chickens, this was its nemesis.
The challenge was masking the smell so I could serve the omelettes undetected. I had to incorporate various spices, especially those that compromise the olfactory senses. That alone took weeks of research. Nearly a year passed before I was ready to deploy my rotten omelette surprise. Unfortunately, things did not go as planned. I had hoped I could introduce the poison undetected over the course of weeks. Instead, the effect was too pronounced, inducing immediate projectile vomiting and simultaneous diarrhea.
The officers, still with flecks of vomitus dribbling from their chins, hauled me into an office where they subjected me to a merciless grilling. Inexperienced in these things, it was little time before I cracked. I didn’t disclose my subversive intent, but it was a simple matter for them to uncover the evidence of it. In the end, they sent me down to Flossenbürg where, for a short time, I shared a cell with Dietrich Bonhoeffer until they hanged him and left me alone in the cell with the last of his writings and the certain dread that I would follow him. That, of course, never happened (otherwise how could I have shared this with you?) I spent my time in prison writing recipes on the back of Bonhoeffer’s letters. The result was a book. Maybe you’ve heard of it: Recipes from Cell 92.