Roachy

(a).—Active, wary, light-brown insects with a “roachy” odour, found in pantries and bakeries; several species but the most common is the Croton-Bug or German Cockroach. (Ectobia Germanica)

Why, it leaves spots, and if you should take a cup and saucer, probably put coffee in it and drink out of it, you have a roachy taste which you may imagine it might be the food that is spoiled, something of that kind, but it is nothing but the liquid that comes from the mouth of the roach.

The harm the cockroach does, however, is not so much in the quantity of food it consumes as in the amount it taints and spoils; it leaves its excreta over everything, and tainted food, even when cooked, has a distinctly “roachy” flavour. This “roachy” taste and smell is communicated partly by the wax which is secreted by certain glands on the body, and partly also by the saliva ejected through the mouth.

They come out at night to feed and are practically omnivorous, feeding on all kinds of foodstuffs, woollens, leather, book covers, etc., and where they occur in numbers impart a disagreeable “roachy” or foetid odour to shelves or articles they run over, in addition to tainting food.

They fought like wolves for the sticky smears on discarded candy wrappers and did strange, roachy things in the folds of our blankets.

In the country, a bare-handed beekeeper will pay you to collect the colony with the queen in tow. But I’d already made several phone calls and, except for one guy who’d go in and get ’em for seventy-five bucks, it seemed city exterminators stick to bigger game. Roachy things.

“Shelter is shelter, such a night as this, if it is the waste and desert gloom of Malone’s establishment with its mackerel-scented halls and roachy corners,” she continued, plunging into the shadows of the long, dim hall, and feeling in the dark for her door-knob; […]

Another letter tells of visiting Mary Earle on Long Island. It sounds fine, but you are right that romantic things really happened in roachy kitchens and back yards.