Mary Mallon, foreground, is forced to lie in quarantine in New York City in 1909.

In page number and detail, Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical is the thinnest book of chef-writer Anthony Bourdain’s career–though it’s not really his fault. Even though she was the most infamous carrier of typhoid fever during the early 1900s, there isn’t a whole lot of historical documentation about Mary Mallon. The lethal cook was an Irish immigrant who prepared food in NYC households and hospitals. She never developed the illness herself but passed it along to others who ate her meals. There were fifty-three cases and three deaths attributed to her.

What was most perplexing is that health authorities couldn’t get her to stop working as a cook (which she did sometimes under pseudonyms). She simply refused to believe that she was spreading the illness. Mallon was forcibly quarantined twice and died during her long second separation from the general public. Bourdain is left to fill in the blanks with supposition. An excerpt from his 2001 book about the confection that likely allowed Mallon to transmit the disease to so many people:

“We know for certain that she was very good at ice cream. Peach ice cream in particular was well-remembered–even by her victims. Sadly, it was exactly this specialty that was the probable source of transmission for many of her victims. As Soper correctly points out, cooked food, by the time it reaches cooking temperature, would have killed any typhoid germs Mary may have transferred. Ice cream and raw peaches, however, would have been a very attractive medium. The relatively high number of fellow servants afflicted suggests that chambermaids and laundresses, passing through Mary’s kitchen, might have grabbed a piece of raw fruit, nicked a raw string bean, stuck a finger in a tub of ice cream on occasion–which would explain their higher ratio of infection.”