7 More Disgusting Foods Your Grandparents Ate (Taste-Tested)
Can you hear them? The thundering hoofbeats? Yes, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are here: Pestilence, War, and Death. But Famine? Famine's taking a mental health day, because it's time for another Cracked installment of "Let's make some guy eat the worst foods from the '50s, '60s, and '70s." That's right -- the following article is like some AM radio Oldies channel that makes literal vomit come out of your car stereo.
As usual, we asked Cracked writer Evan Symon to commit gastrointestinal seppuku by cooking the grossest old-timey vittles and then eating them. In the past, he's consumed such latrine delicacies as banana meatloaf and a pineapple made entirely out of liverwurst. What sins of the past will he be forced to digest now?
The Cranberry-Mayo Candle Salad
Ha ha! It's time to eat a candle. Fuck everything!
If you've ever dreamed of eating a Pottery Barn, start off by mixing cranberry sauce with orange Jell-O and lemon juice. It smells awesome ... until you add the Hellmann's, which just takes everything straight to hell, man. You then add cranberries, orange, and walnuts, and pour your bologna-smoothie-like concoction into molds. Refrigerate them until they resemble ogre chodes.
If you see lumps, consult your ogre urologist.
Once they're turgid enough for consumption, shove a candle down the center. Voila! You have now made a birthday cake for a child who is an asshole. Several of the smaller chodes rebelled against their sad existence as decorative tubes of berry grease, promptly collapsing as soon as they were pierced with the candle. I tossed the degenerate lumps around Cranberry Candle Prometheus as gelatin worshippers.
They genuflected before their only brother worthy enough to carry the flame.
Surprisingly, it wasn't bad for a chunky, slimy Fruit Roll-Up. Imagine if Ocean Spray attempted to make deli products, or if the Kool-Aid Man sold his own sweetbreads for cash. I did not eat the fire, so I cannot recommend it one way or the other.
Sandwich Loaf
Hailing from 1973, the Sandwich Loaf resembles a Carvel Cake made out of uranium-enriched toothpaste, or perhaps something from that scene in Hook in which the Lost Boys eat a pile of glue. It's easy to make! Just find a shit-ton of bread crusts and gloop them with salmon-lemon-juice-mayo-celery-scallion paste, cream-cheese-onion-walnut-sour-cream filling, hard-boiled-egg-pimento-mayo, and olive cream cheese until it looks a Dagwood Bumstead sandwich, if the comic strip Blondie was about an adult man whose only pleasure in life was having sex with large sandwiches instead of his hot wife.
You know those people who like sandwiches without crusts? Here's why.
Don't forget to frost your loaf with green and yellow cream cheese to facilitate future pinching!
It looks like cake, but the cake is a lie.
The end result resembled Guy Fieri if he was hit with some sort of science fiction devolution ray and assumed the biological form of a sea cucumber. Did you know that sea cucumbers can shit out their internal organs in case of an emergency? That's the closest parallel to the sandwich loaf that works: free-floating sea cucumber intestines. If Guy Fieri were a sea cucumber, his shit-organs would come out tempura-battered, with a side dish of Yee-Ha-Aloha Chipotle Tabasco poi.
Jellied Tomato Refresher
After eating a sour cream pinata sandwich, I needed to cleanse my palate with some jellied tomato refresher, a Weight Watchers concoction which in a perfect world would look like goblets full of cubed steak.
Fortunately, this recipe was far easier than the previous diarrhea rainbow: heat up some clear gelatin, then add tomato juice, garlic salt, broth mix, lemon juice, green pepper flakes, and cloves, then chill and carve. Congratulations, you're now serving your guests frozen spaghetti sauce, like Dracula's sad brother Roycula, who collects Hummel figurines and goes to bed at midnight even though he wakes up at 9:30 p.m.
"Would you want to be awake while digesting this?"
Yes, this was maybe the most pointless recipe ever. I think you're supposed to lose weight by being so massively unsatisfied with your Spaghetti-O sorbet that you eat the cup. Glass has zero calories, true believers.
Prawn-Stuffed Apples
If candy apples are given out on Halloween and apple pie is served on Thanksgiving, then prawn-stuffed apples are served on, uh, garbage day?
If H.R. Giger decided to become a homemaker instead of drawing penis landscapes and riding hilariously tiny trains, he'd probably have dreamt up this 1967 recipe, which unites the fertility of the orchard with crustaceans of the ocean. First, you scoop out apples and fill them with an amalgam of mayo, tomato puree, Tabasco, gherkins, olives, shrimp, parsley, and prayer. Garnish each with another prawn crouched over them, like decapod gargoyles on pomaceous cathedrals. If any still have heads, manipulate their rostrums and maxillipeds so that they look deliciously surprised to be piloting land fruit.
Old joke - Q: What's worse than finding a worm in an apple?
A: This.
As far as the flavor went, imagine if God made the Garden of Eden, but had ridiculously low expectations for humans, so he just kind of half-assed paradise. The shrimp-apple tree would stand next to the pond of dusty Zima, the moon would be shaped like your least favorite algebra teacher's head, and the only animals besides Adam and Eve would be 800 Canadian geese who kept shitting everywhere.
Frankfurter Spectacular
You know that when a recipe specifically warns "DO NOT ALLOW 2 OUNCES FOR SHRINKAGE" and resembles a prolapsed dog colon giving birth to a palm tree, you're in for the treat of the century.
Fuck "dramatic service." This'll be awesome on its own.
The Frankfurter Spectacular was no Liverwurst Pineapple -- few things are -- but it was a far better nickname for one's genitals, so it deserved consideration. I began by slicing and broiling wieners while cooking spiced and seasoned apple, carrot, and pineapple in a skillet. I then acquainted the hot dogs with my UN General Assembly of disco flavors.
Later came the disco flavors war crimes tribunal.
Here's how it ended up looking. I didn't try to construct the meatapple, as the sausage origami proved far too daunting.
So I had to settle for sausage bukkake.
The good news was the hot dogs tasted like hot dogs. (Nitrates and hog's cheek are reliable like that.) The bad news was that everything else tasted like a grease fire in an abandoned supermarket's spice aisle. If I were a 1970s recipe critic, I would sum up my review as "FRANKFURTER MEDIOCRE: 0 LARGE COCAINE PILES OUT OF 1 LARGE COCAINE PILE."
Oriental Shrimp Sandwich Roll
Behold the Oriental Shrimp Sandwich Roll, a ghastly tube which contains enough cream cheese for the past 500 years of Chinese cooking. I dumped shrimp, pecans, pineapple, walnuts, and water chestnuts into a paste that looked like the contents of a Red Lobster dumpster -- or Cthulhu's diaper. I rolled up this barely-Asian slurry into a starchy roll (which immediately fell apart) and plastered it with more cream cheese. After chilling it in my increasingly angered fridge, I took it out. It didn't smell too bad, so I decided to try some. This was a mistake.
You have to close your eyes when unwrapping it, Raiders-style.
Remember how in Ratatouille, that rat controlled that chef by sitting under his hat? This was exactly like that, only my motor functions were being usurped by the racist ghost of a 1950s housewife. (Fuck you, Myrna, I'm not telling your great-grandchildren where you buried those savings bonds).
Aspic Aquarium
Behold the Aspic Aquarium, an artifact from a bygone era when it was socially acceptable to serve your dinner guests the crude facsimile of several gallons of kelpy poop water. I managed to make a blue-dyed, no-flavor jello mixture. When it was nearly firm, I plopped in macaroni shells, cauliflower coral, carrot fish, parsley seaweed, and shrimp shrimp. The result? Firm and radiant, like a freshly-carved cube of Pripyat pond water.
Lean close, and a crab sings to a reggae beat.
If that doesn't convince you, maybe some close-ups will.
If this doesn't look cool, you were never a child, so shut up, you logical impossibility.
After I had enough footage to fake a marine biology grant request, I had to eat my underwater kingdom, like Poseidon damning his flawed creation. As long as you are comfortable eating a shit-ton of bland blue Jell-O, this is surprisingly inoffensive for a salad suspension. When an edible doppelganger of boring pets somehow manages to be the least terrible thing you made, it's time to call it a day.
I am a merciful god, but lunchtime is lunchtime.
Evan V. Symon is the interview-finder guy for Cracked. If you have a terrible vintage recipe you would like him to consume for your amusement, email him here.
Click here and here for previous installments of Cracked's barf-inducing vintage recipe series.
