Terrible recipes are one of life’s great joys. I collect awful cookbooks, marvelling at the meals we are expected to put in our stomachs and live, and recently picked up, from 1952, Pressure Cooking for the Modern Home by Helen M Cox. Her discovery of that gleaming marvel of the modern world, the pressure cooker saucepan, inspired “attractive and appetising meals for New Zealand homes”. Pity the New Zealand homes of the 1950s, hoeing into Cox’s recipes for Creamed Tripe with Onions, Giblet Soup, and the superbly titled Sunset Mince Roll (“3 tablespoons fat”), which threatens your ability to see another sunrise. But the peak, or trough, which I hereby nominate as the fifth-worst recipe of all time is Sausage Apples.
Terrible recipes are comedy gold. I remember interviewing once-famous radio announcer Kevin Black at his home in Onehunga. He was very proud of his bookshelves. They were filled with joke books. It was a depressing sight, a library of humourlessness; it cried out for something genuinely funny, such as the 1977 cookbook Ulcer Superdiet: Delicious Dishes for Sensitive Stomachs. The title alone brings good cheer. The meals are based on the principle of “avoiding too much movement of the stomach and intestines which could aggravate the ulcer”. But who could fail to be moved by the idea on page 76, which I hereby nominate as the fourth-worst recipe of all time, for Cauliflower Soufflé.
Terrible recipes were once standard fare. Alison Holst, mother of the nation, was a mother of severe temperament and whim. Her many cookbooks include punishing recipes – recipes that pushed the boat out on the River Styx. They were recipes of their time, one when households sat down in gloomy silence to stare at a serving of boiled leg of mutton. Holst’s 1972 cookbook Food Without Fuss features fuss-free recipes for Onion Sour Cream Cake, Curried Fish Fingers and Boiled Leg of Mutton (“Don’t be put off by the uninspiring name!”). But her comedy masterpiece, which I hereby nominate as the third-worst recipe of all time, combines pork bones simmered in water for two hours with pineapple syrup, vinegar and sugar, then reheated with onion, green pepper and pineapple pieces, in the recipe for Pineapple Pork Bones.
Terrible recipes need to be seen to be disbelieved. One of my favourite books of any genre is Great Ways with Steak & Chops from 1974. The cover is a photo of a steak with an enormous rind of fat on a red plate with potato chips and a leaf of lettuce so limp it has surrendered. Amazing. Food photography is an art and the artist of Great Ways with Steak & Chops was plainly influenced by Munch’s The Scream and Goya’s very many screaming grotesques. Such pain, such suffering in these compositions of brightly lit steak and chops, sweating beneath the garish lights; such cruelty and despair in the photo of a chop recipe that doesn’t read too badly but looks so bad that I hereby nominate it as the second-worst recipe of all time on account of the photo of a plate dumped with gravy so lumpy and brown it looks like diarrhoea as an essential ingredient of Chops with Rosemary.
Terrible recipes are in every household. I hereby invite readers to send in their vote for the very worst recipe of all time to stephen11@xtra.co.nz. Photographic evidence is welcome. It may not be in a cookbook; it may be in the darkest vaults of memory; in any case, I think it would be great to share the results in an upcoming column. There will be a prize for the recipe judged the very, very worst. Be brave. Feel the fear. Present a meal that could maim or kill.
