Jack Vance had a parallel food in his DEMON PRINCES novels, called Charnay, a delicious fruit, supposedly the ultimate tasting food, but it has to be prepared correctly or it’s fatal. A banquet full of people are murdered by the villain injecting the poison back into the prepared charnay. There is even an organization of charnay growers who actively stops anyone from breeding a non-toxic charnay, to keep their product exclusive. At one point a food critic is quoted extolling it, and a note is appended remarking he died fairly soon after from eating improperly prepared charnay.
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