GETTY IMAGES, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
​On April 14, 1912, passengers ate their final meals on the Titanic. Fewer than half of them survived to eat another day. We know what they ate that day because a few passengers tucked souvenir menus away. For example, an American banker’s wife had the first-class lunch menu in her purse when she escaped the sinking ship. 

The largest group of passengers were in third class, and less than a quarter of them survived, primarily women and children. On most ships of that era, third-class passengers had to bring food with them for the voyage, but on the Titanic, they were served meals at long tables in a room resembling a school cafeteria. They ate dinner in the middle of the day, as was common among the working classes. A single menu card contained the details for each meal of the day.

Second and third class passengers ate more sumptuous meals as the menus below show.  First Class Luncheon Menu Second Class Dinner Menu Images licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. ​In the first-class dining room, dinners were elaborate multi-course meals based on French cuisine with concessions to hearty English fare. Waiters brought the food to the table on silver platters, offered guests a portion of every dish, and suggested a wine to pair with the food. We have no way of knowing how much of this meat-heavy feast the passengers consumed. No recipes survive from the Titanic's kitchen, but recipes from that era tend to use butter and cream liberally. ​ In S'more Murders, the fifth of my Five-Ingredient Mysteries, a Titanic-obsessed yacht owner hires my sleuth Val and her grandfather to re-create the final meal served on that doomed ship.

On the anniversary of its sinking, the yachtsman welcomes his guests aboard and assigns them roles in a murder mystery game, "Death on the Titanic." Val soon reaches the chilling conclusion that the host is fishing for the culprit in a more recent crime.

No one gets to finish Val's Titanic-inspired dinner, and it's the final meal for one person on the yacht. Val and her grandfather have to reel in a real killer before s’more murders go down. 

Read more about S'more Murders and find out where to buy the book.