The meal had been like sitting on pins and needles. Of course, Jotun had been the one sitting on pins and needles. Schiller ate his vegetables at an unhurried pace. Aisha wolfed down a steak bigger than her head in a few bites, then ran off to play in the backyard.
Schiller was not a vegetarian, of course, but when he ate vegetables, he truly disliked adding sauces, especially Western sauces like mayonnaise, salad dressing, and vinaigrette.
Vinaigrette, as its name suggested, was a sauce made from oil and vinegar. Yet it was already the healthiest and lowest-calorie of all Western sauces. Mayonnaise and salad dressing were practically pure fat.
Americans also particularly loved adding lethal amounts of sugar to mayonnaise, making it sweet and greasy. Once it was smeared over vegetables, one could not taste even a trace of the vegetables' original flavor. It just tasted like a mixture of fats, which truly did not suit Schiller's palate.
Of course, he had recently discovered the benefit of this habit: it greatly reduced the chance of someone poisoning him.
Poisoning required finesse too, especially when using nonlethal poison. The dosage and condition had to be controlled with great precision, or it might fail to work—or simply kill the target outright.
At such times, hot food was not a good choice. As everyone knew, high temperatures easily altered the properties of chemical compounds, most likely weakening the poison and defeating the purpose of precise control.
In other words, freshly cooked steak or soup was not especially suitable for poisoning. A poison added after carefully calculating the dose might undergo a chemical change under high heat and fail to poison anyone, wasting a perfect opportunity.
The easiest targets were naturally cold dishes, including bread, salads, appetizers, alcohol, and the like.
Poisoning drinks