Scary vintage recipes

[delphipsmith]

How many of these terrors of the table do you remember?

The banana ones are particularly nightmare-inducing. But the little igloo meatloaf is kind of cute.

When I was a kid, my mom went through a serious health-food kick. The rule at every meal was "No matter what you think, you have to try at lesat one bite." Then, if you didn't like the brewer's yeast surprise or the kale cookies, you didn't have to eat them.

This rule stood until one morning when my brother barfed his one bite of wheat-germ-scrambled-eggs all over the breakfast table.

What's your scariest childhood food memory?

Comments

[arcanetrivia]

Are you familiar with James Lileks' books on this sort of topic, The Gallery of Regrettable Food and Gastroanomalies? Pretty funny stuff. Although often, I think, when you actually read the ingredients they aren't that terrible, maybe bland and boring, but frequently it's just awful food photography. The idea of foods arranged to look like other things or other foods probably goes back at least to medival "sotelties".

That said, my mother had a lot of those Sunset cookbooks that had some of the worst offenders. Thankfully I was never made to eat anything that weird (but then, my childhood was mostly in the 80s and early 90s, not the 50s-70s). And say what you like, I actually kind of like layered Jello desserts with or without fruit in them. "Ribbon salad" (lime, cherry, and cream cheese or sour cream blended into lemon for the "white" layer) was traditional for us at Christmas for a while and we also sometimes had "under the sea salad" (canned pears and I forget what all in probably lime Jello since it turns pale green when you put the sour gream in it).

Vegetable salads, though, ugh. Why, why, why. Especially that one with like, asparagus and bloody hot dogs and I forget what shit. WHY.

[delphipsmith]

Are you familiar with James Lileks' books on this sort of topic, The Gallery of Regrettable Food and Gastroanomalies? Pretty funny stuff.

No, but I'm definitely going to go hunt them up -- thanks!

Edit: OMG the summary over on GoodReads is hilarious XD