The Swedish Cook – A Recipe For Disaster?

From time to time we all make mistakes when cooking up something in the kitchen and then blamed the recipe or the cooker for burnt food or foul tasting offerings. However, now and again the recipe really is at fault as in the recent case of the ‘poisonous apple cake’ in Sweden. In this case there was no mistaken identity, such as the one made by the celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson who recently apologised after mistakenly recommending a potentially fatal weed as part of a healthy living regime!

The recipe which appeared in a magazine in Sweden resulted in ten thousand copies of the food magazine being recalled after a mistake in one of its recipes left four people poisoned. It turns out that here was a mistake in a recipe for apple cake. Instead of calling for two pinches of nutmeg it said 20 nutmeg nuts were needed. Four people ate one cake made from this recipe. The four people had experienced symptoms of poisoning, including dizziness and headaches, but were ok.

Now I don’t know about you but surely you would notice that there might be something amiss here.

For a starters, who has 20 nutmegs lying around in a jar? You would struggle to get 20 in a hurry and you’d probably spend around £10 buying them, which is probably probably more than all of the other apple cake ingredients put together. After that, how long would it take to grate 20 of things? Also, while a sprinkle (or two pinches, as the apple cake recipe should have called for) of nutmeg is nice, what would a cake with 20 nuts’ worth of the stuff taste like? I’ll wager that it would be pretty much inedible.

Assuming you’d got this far, how would anyone be able to eat enough of the finished cake to overdose and wind up with nutmeg poisoning?

Below is a video recipe for making Apple Cake properly

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