15 recipes you should never cook
Fifteen of the worst ideas ever set in type, from a shelf of books that meant every word.
Every recipe below was published as instruction. Not satire, not a curiosity — a working direction to a home cook, a confectioner or a nurse, in a book somebody paid money for. Most are quoted here word for word.
They didn’t know. That’s the story.
Read them, don't make them.
5 of the 15 below contain something now regulated as a poison. Every one of them is quoted from a real book and linked to the scanned original, so you can check us — and then not do it.
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1
Kill a peacock with a quill through the brain.
“Kill a peacock by thrusting a quill into his brain.” Roast it, sew it back into its own feathered skin over iron wires, set burning camphor in its beak. The quill isn’t cruelty for its own sake — bleeding through the brain leaves the plumage unmarked, and the plumage is what’s being served. Camphor is neurotoxic, and it’s on fire, inches from dinner.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, 1912 Read the recipe → -
2
Milk the cow directly into the punch bowl.
Sugar, lemon, a pint of sherry and a glass of brandy go in the bowl, and then you “take it to the dairymaid, and let her milk the cow into the bowl until it is quite full.” Milking from a height is what whips air into the wine; you cannot get that foam from a jug. Then it stands overnight.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, 1912 Read the recipe → -
3
A summer drink made of sulphuric acid.
Dilute sulphuric acid, orange syrup, two gallons of water. The book’s verdict: “entirely harmless, even if taken in considerable quantities.” Acid drinks were already suspected of stripping enamel, which does not grow back. And “dilute sulphuric acid” then meant a labelled 10% pharmacy preparation. Anything sold under that name now is battery acid.
The 20th Century Home Cook Book, 1906 Read the recipe → -
4
Four frogs, stewed in a pound of butter.
Boil a pound of butter, add “four common green frogs,” cook until dry, stir in an ounce of alum, and swab it inside a mouth that is already ulcerated. Pronounced infallible — mouth canker mostly clears on its own in a week or two, which is how a remedy earns that word.
The House-Keeper's Guide and Indian Doctor, 1851 Read the recipe → -
5
Climb inside a whale.
The American whalemen’s cure for rheumatism: open a freshly killed whale “while the interior of the carcase still retains some warmth” and sink the patient in from the loins down. It is documented at Australian shore stations too, patients staying in for hours. Warmth genuinely eases joint pain for as long as it lasts, which is how a treatment like this collects testimonials.
Meals Medicinal, 1905 Read the recipe → -
6
Tell a deadly mushroom by salting it.
“The best rule”: sprinkle salt on the gills. Yellow means poisonous, black means edible. It is a coin flip. No kitchen test identifies a poisonous mushroom — not colour, not smell, not bruising, not the silver spoon. Amanita phalloides tastes pleasant and produces no symptoms for six to twenty-four hours, by which time the liver damage is under way.
Household Discoveries and Mrs. Curtis's Cook Book, 1914 Read the recipe → -
7
Cast children’s sweets in lead.
“Provide leaden moulds… oiled with oil of sweet almonds.” Boiling syrup goes straight into the lead, and the almond oil is a release agent, not a barrier. Lead melted low, held fine detail and cost little; confectioners used it because it worked. What has aged worst is who the sweets were for.
Mackenzie's Ten Thousand Receipts, 1867 Read the recipe → -
8
Ten pounds of bitter almonds.
“Nutmegs, 8 oz., bitter almonds, 10 lbs., Lisbon sugar, 8 lbs., ambergris, 10 grs.” — bruised, then steeped three days in ten gallons of spirit. Bruising and wetting bitter almonds releases hydrogen cyanide, and nothing here drives it off: no heat, only maceration and a flannel filter, and a filter removes solids.
Mackenzie's Ten Thousand Receipts, 1867 Read the recipe → -
9
Curry powder that begins with opium.
“One pound and a half of Papaver Somniferum. Two pounds of Turmeric…” — the opium poppy, named by species, heading the ingredient list, to be sourced from “any large wholesale druggist.” Ripe poppy seed is an ordinary food; the capsule and straw are not. The sourcing line is the tell. You do not visit a wholesale druggist for a spice.
High-Class Cookery Recipes, 1906 Read the recipe → -
10
Eight songbirds baked inside onions.
Eight larks, boned and baked inside four hollowed Spanish onions, glazed, then served with the heads put back on — “from which the eyes should be removed.” Beeton isn’t being macabre; that is a practical note about a presentation her readers would have recognised. Larks were netted and sold by the hundred, which is why they are protected now.
Mrs. Beeton's All About Cookery, 1907 Read the recipe → -
11
Mayonnaise made with laxative.
“Mineral oil… has no food value. It may be used to make mayonnaise dressing.” The book adds: “Mineral oil is mildly laxative, an added advantage.” The reducing logic is airtight and horrible — it passes through undigested, so it counts for nothing, so eat freely. On the way past it dissolves vitamins A, D, E and K and takes them with it.
Modernistic Recipe-Menu Book, 1929 Read the recipe → -
12
Get the geese drunk.
The entire recipe: “Soak wheat in strong alcohol, and scatter where they are in the habit of feeding, and take them while they are drunk.” No quantities, no soaking time. It more or less works, which is the funny part. It is also a federal offence — baiting migratory waterfowl has been prohibited since the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
Buckeye Cookery, 1880 Read the recipe → -
13
Keep oysters as pets and feed them with a broom.
Stand them in a tub “with their mouths upwards,” then feed them salt water “by dipping in a broom and frequently passing over their mouths.” Add meal to fatten. Commercial beds really did move oysters to less saline water to plump them; this is the domestic version, in a tub of standing water.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, 1879 Read the recipe → -
14
A fowl inside a goose inside a wall of game.
A boned fowl sewn inside a goose, packed round with pigeon, partridge and hare, under a hot-water crust stiff enough to stand on its own. Entirely safe and entirely mad; the only hazard is structural, and Kettner records an 1832 specimen that broke down under its own weight.
Kettner's Book of the Table, 1877 Read the recipe → -
15
And a sandwich filled with toast.
“Toast carefully a very thin slice of bread… lay it between two slices of thin bread and butter,” each with a very little mustard and salt. That is the whole recipe. Bread, filled with bread. There is nothing wrong with it and no way to improve it — and it was entirely serious, written as invalid cookery for someone who could manage almost nothing else.
The British Cookery Book, 1864 Read the recipe →
Almost all of these sit a page or two from perfectly good recipes. That is the part worth sitting with: the lead moulds and the sound advice on blanching onions came from the same author, in the same voice, with the same confidence.
There are 129 more where these came from. Every one quoted in full, with the book it was printed in.
Browse all 144 →