Mrs. Butterworth Cleared in Mystery Maple Caper

Jack: “Do you smell maple syrup?”
Liz: “Yes!”
Jack: “Don’t panic, Lemon. It’s probably not a chemical attack.”
Liz: “What do you mean, ‘probably’?”
Jack: “It’s probably just a strange wind pattern coming over those factories in Staten Island where food flavors are made. I don’t think it’s northrax.”
Liz: “What’s northrax?”
Jack: “It’s a chemical agent we sold to the Saudis in the 1980s that smells exactly like maple syrup, but I don’t think this is it.”

This memorable exchange from NBC’s hit series 30Rock may have been lost on much of the prime time viewing audience, but the allusion was not lost on New York City dwellers. On January 5–for the sixth time in the past four years–New York’s Office of Emergency Management was inundated with calls haling from Harlem to Soho reporting an overwhelming smell of maple syrup.

While the smell of maple syrup isn’t one which conjures terror in the nose of the beholder, New Yorkers aren’t inclined to shrug off such olfactory warnings of possible-bioterrorism, and city officials have sought the source of the mystery-scent since its first inexplicable appearance in October of 2005.

Today, flanked by Emergency Management Commissioner Joseph F. Bruno, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced, “The mystery of the maple-syrup mist has finally been solved.” And the 30Rock writers, it turns out, weren’t too far off-base–well, not unless you’re prone to mistaking Staten Island for North Bergen, New Jersey. According to Bloomberg, the probably source of the sweet mystery-scent was a Jersey plant operated by flavor and fragrance company Fruitarom which processes seeds of the herb fenugreek to produce fragrances. Frutarom appeared to be blindsided by the mayor’s announcement. In a statement, a spokesman for the company, Jason Fink, said that its apparent contribution to the recurring odor “came as a surprise to us.”

Bloomberg, who repeatedly mispronounced the name of the word fenugreek as “fenugeek,” admitted that two other fragrance-additive companies in the area may have played a role in the incidents and gave no explanation for singling out Frutarom. He did, however, offer the conciliatory-if-peculiar statement, “I never smelled it but for the record I do like maple-sugar syrup on my French toast.”