Recipes people really printed. Recipes you really shouldn't make.
Beer brewed from sulphuric acid. Bread risen with hydrochloric acid. A peacock re-dressed in its own feathers with camphor burning in its beak. All of it published as normal, sensible cooking.
Beer of Sulphuric Acid
Dilute battery acid, orange syrup, two gallons of water. “Entirely harmless, even if taken in considerable quantities.”
The 20th Century Home Cook Book · 1906
Pick your poison
Five flavours of bad idea, sorted by exactly how it will get you.
The greatest hits
If you only ever read nine of these, make it these nine.
Peacock
“Kill a peacock by thrusting a quill into his brain,” roast it, re-dress it in its own feathered skin on iron wires, and set burning camphor in its beak at table.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery · 1912
Syllabubs Under the Cow
Sugar, lemon, a pint of sherry and a glass of brandy in a punch bowl — then “take it to the dairymaid, and let her milk the cow into the bowl until it is quite full.” Stands overnight.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery · 1912
Canker in the Mouth (frog butter)
Boil a pound of butter, add “four common green frogs,” cook until dry, stir in alum. For canker of the mouth, throat or stomach. Said to be infallible.
The House-Keeper's Guide and Indian Doctor · 1851
Bonbons cast in leaden moulds
“Provide leaden moulds… oiled with oil of sweet almonds.” Boiling candy syrup goes straight into the lead. The sweets are for children.
Mackenzie's Ten Thousand Receipts · 1867
Larks in Onions (Italian Recipe)
Eight larks boned and baked inside four Spanish onions, then glazed and served with the heads put back on — “from which the eyes should be removed.”
Mrs. Beeton's All About Cookery · 1907
Salt Test for Poisonous Mushrooms
“The best rule” for telling a deadly fungus from a safe one: salt the gills and watch the colour. Yellow, poisonous. Black, edible. It is a coin flip.
Household Discoveries and Mrs. Curtis's Cook Book · 1914
The Whale-Carcass Rheumatism Cure
American whalemen's cure for rheumatism: open the carcass “while the interior still retains some warmth” and put the patient in from the loins down.
Meals Medicinal · 1905
Yorkshire Christmas Pie
The true Yorkshire pie: a boned fowl sewn inside a goose, packed round with pigeon, partridge and hare in a raised crust. An 1832 specimen broke down carrying itself.
Kettner's Book of the Table · 1877
Common Ratafia
“Nutmegs, 8 oz., bitter almonds, 10 lbs., Lisbon sugar, 8 lbs., ambergris, 10 grs.” Bruised and infused three days in ten gallons of proof spirit.
Mackenzie's Ten Thousand Receipts · 1867
14 Horrifying Ways They Preserved Food Before the Fridge
Fourteen ways to keep food through the winter, from the century before anyone could check whether they worked.
Preservation of fresh meal (tainted meat) · Sulphuric-Acid Fumigation of Tainted Meat · Russian Mode of Preserving Fruit · Borated Fish · Lime-Juice Cordial · and 9 more
Every one of these is real
That is the whole trick. We don't write the recipes — we just find them and point.
Printed, not invented
Every recipe is transcribed from a real cookbook published between 1831 and 1929, and every page links to the original so you can check us.
Rated on the Yikes Scale
One dot means “odd.” Five means the recipe contains something now regulated as a poison. We are not subtle about which is which.
Told what actually happens
Under every recipe, a plain note on precisely what would go wrong — written by people who looked it up rather than guessed.