9 Deeply Disgusting Casseroles

I assure you, this isn’t going to be a list full of slams on classic American casseroles. It turns out that other countries — I’m looking at you, Scandinavia — have wrought hell we couldn’t dream of. In the interest of keeping things fair, though, we need to admit and put to rest the idea that tuna noodle casserole was ever palatable. 

Don’t yell at me about classism, either. I’m not saying it’s Kobe beef or bust. There’s nothing wrong with a dinner of canned tuna, cream of mushroom soup and frozen peas. But it costs nothing to keep them separated and not end up with a plate of vaguely Italian whale vomit.

At least we’ve learned enough that we quietly retired monstrosities like this. Now, it’s not the ingredient list that’s unsettling here, it’s the claim that no pre-cooking is necessary. You don’t have to be between classes at culinary school to realize that food doesn’t have one universal cooking time. The biggest concern here is the idea that uncooked rice at the bottom of a dish and raw ground beef at the top will somehow both end up in an edible state while occupying the same oven. 

This is a “no thanks” at best, and norovirus at worst.

I told you we were coming for you, Scandinavia and your, well, whatever the reverse of ingenuity is. Pictured here is the Finnish dish Maksalaatikko. Now, on optics alone, we’re not doing great, but you could hope for an unobtrusive if bland experience. Unfortunately, the contents prevent that. The star of this dish? Ground liver. The supporting cast consists of egg, onion and raisin. 

Imagine that you’re inventing this, are looking at the above, and your solution is to add raisins.

I am not sure who the hell this Jansson fellow is, but if this is his temptation? Buddy, you can have as much as you like. This wouldn’t tempt Gollum on a three-day fast. 

We get almost all the way through the recipe without doing anything wrong, starting with a base of potatoes, onions, bread crumbs and cream. Then the Swedes go full wild card and fill this thing with pickled sprats, which are basically sardines that you traditionally eat with bones still in. I bet some Swedish chef let out borks of joy upon making the best Jansson’s Temptation they’d ever tasted, just to realize it was because the sprats were still on the counter.

I understand that you don’t get a lot of light over there in Finland, but are you cooking in the dark? 

This mess, which looks like sweet potatoes you’d find on the table in a house that was halfway through Thanksgiving dinner when nuclear disaster struck, is made mainly of rutabagas. I’m ready to admit that this is probably entirely tolerable. It’s basically just root vegetable mush, and I’ll take blandness over tiny fishbones. Still, when you’re making food and it looks like single color sand art? You’re not done!

This dish achieves an incredible feat because it may actually taste worse than it looks. And it looks like something you’d flush out of a stadium’s nacho-cheese dispenser during the offseason. I regret to inform you that the yellow tinge in that liquid is not cheese at all, but bananas. This dish pairs chicken and bananas, which sounds like a bad basic-cable curse word censor job. In with that is cream, chili sauce, bacon and peanuts, because the only box it wasn’t checking was sending you into amyphylactic shock. 

Wikimedia Commons also helpfully provides an image of the ingredients before cooking, and it looks like something Brad Pitt would walk in on in Se7en.

Here to prove that casserole crimes are not exclusively a Eurocentric discipline is cuscuz paulista. Maybe Brazil invented this food because they needed something to make their country less sexy. Every single ingredient involved, which I would list if they weren’t all still clearly visible and identifiable, are looking their absolute worst. It looks like Pizza the Hutt's asshole.

Rakott krumpli is a dish from Hungary, which I am not anymore. 

That might have been an easy joke, but this article is having serious medical effects on me. I just ate, and now that whole meal is in jeopardy. 

To be honest, this one’s not even that bad. Potatoes, sour cream, smoked sausage and bread crumbs isn’t great but it’s not awful. Then they had to go and stuff hard-boiled eggs into it. If you’re on-board, I’d just ask you to imagine the textural sensation of biting into smoked sausage and a hard-boiled egg at the same time, on opposite sides of your mouth.

Alright, this is a fun little Halloween recipe, but I think what’s most upsetting is that it’s not even the worst-looking thing on this list. Campbell’s tried to make a creepy-crawly casserole on purpose, and Finland is like, “Why such variance in color? Why is everything fully cooked? Where are the bananas?”