🎩 Just Plain Weird
Harmless, baffling, and printed in complete earnest.
10 recipes, worst first.
To Catch Wild Ducks or Geese Alive
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.”
Buckeye Cookery · 1880
To Keep Oysters Alive and Fatten
Stand the oysters in a tub “with their mouths upwards” and feed them salt water “by dipping in a broom and frequently passing over their mouths.” Add meal to fatten.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia · 1879
Bearnaise Sauce (invalid version)
Four tablespoons of shortening creamed into four egg yolks, with tarragon vinegar and onion juice. A béarnaise for patients, made with Crisco.
Modernistic Recipe-Menu Book · 1929
The goodly terms of Carving
Kettner reprints the carving vocabulary from Wynkyn de Worde's 1508 “Booke of Kervinge,” where every creature has its own verb.
Kettner's Book of the Table · 1877
Pickle for Corning Beef
Three gallons of water, 6¾ pounds of salt, 2½ pounds of sugar, a pint of molasses — and “1 ounce pearlash.” Sufficient for fifty pounds of beef.
Mrs. Fryer's Loose Leaf Cook Book · 1922
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
Toast Sandwiches for Invalids
“Toast carefully a very thin slice of bread… lay it between two slices of thin bread and butter,” each seasoned with a very little mustard and salt. That is the recipe.
The British Cookery Book · 1864
Good Mincemeat Without Intoxicants
Five pounds of beef, twice the apple, a quart of boiled cider and no spirits at all. The title does the framing; the canning method does the damage.
Good Housekeeping's Cook Book · 1909
Adulteration (the trade's defense)
A trade encyclopedia mounts the defence: “at least half the accusations are unfounded,” and mustard cut with flour is “not only harmless but… perfectly proper and justifiable.”
The Grocer's Encyclopedia · 1911
Boiled Eggs at the Soda Fountain
“Several large dispensers through the West have introduced the novelty of boiling eggs at the soda fountain, to order” — served in a little silver cup, eaten from the shell.
The American Soda Book of Receipts and Suggestions, 1905 · 1905