Who better to look to for cooking advice than French chef Guillaume Tirel, better known as Taillevent, and credited as one of the founders of haute cuisine? His acclaimed 14th-century recipe collection, Le Viandier, transformed feasting at the French court. Not only do its pages advocate roasting peacock and swan, but keeping cooked meat for a month: just "remove the mould and you will find it white, good and solid underneath".
Although it’s unlikely France’s first superstar chef penned Le Viandier himself, it contained plenty of detailed tips he had gleaned working with the luxury ingredients of the time. Among them a bemusing solution for disguising gone-off wine as fresh by beating in ground ginger and turmeric, then letting the mixture settle before drinking.
Around the same time in the late 1300s, cookery advice was also put into print in Medieval household manual Le Ménagier de Paris, sometimes known as The Good Wife's Guide. Said to have been compiled by an ageing Parisian for his fifteen-year-old bride, it encapsulates the era’s everyday excess. The instructions for a basic omelette? Eight eggs (both whites and yolks) combined with the leaves of sweet marjoram, fennel, parsley, celery, mint and sage.
The other chapters in Le Ménagier de Paris range from tips on hiring servants to hosting lavish feasts, and include recipes for the likes of spit-roast porpoise and hedgehog with wild duck sauce. Perhaps equally perturbing are 14th-century versions of culinary "hacks", such as substituting the mashed flesh of boiled eels mixed with saffron, white wine and sugar for eggs to make a sweet flan during lent.
Around 1440, fifty years after the first cookbooks were created in France, 180 or so recipes were recorded in The Forme of Cury, the oldest known English-language cookery book. According to the British Library’s translation, several can be seen as precursors to modern dishes. Although luckily these days you’re more likely to see your "tostee" topped with marmalade than a sweet-and-savoury jelly made from ‘wyne, hony and gyngur’ (wine, honey and ginger) and seasoned with salt and pepper.
By the mid-1700s, aphrodisiacs were on the menu. Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife was the first cookbook to be printed in the United States in 1742, following its London debut some twenty years earlier. Its soups, puddings, cakes and conserves went on to become American staples. Numerous medicines and salves also featured on its pages, including this unlikely tonic to "promote breeding": three pints of good ale, spiked with catnip, dates, raisins and three whole nutmegs.
Before the electric whisk was invented, making cakes was tough work – although it’s hard to believe the two hours of beating Hannah Glasse recommended for a seed cake in her 1747 book The Art of Cookery was really necessary. The recipe also called for 35 eggs and three hours in the oven, as well as the "finest flour" and double-refined sugar.
Tips on how to shop for ingredients were common in early cookbooks, including Richard Briggs’ 1788 The English Art of Cookery. The one-time chef of London’s Globe Tavern and Temple Coffee House advised that "to choose eggs properly, you must put the thick end to your tongue". Warm eggs were said to be fresh and cold eggs stale – although unless the eggs were just laid, quite how this technique worked is hard to say.
Popularised in the US shortly after The Compleat Housewife in 1796, The First American Cookbook is the first known cookbook to have been both written and published in America. Its advice extended not just to cooking, but to storing ingredients. Salmon, it is noted in the preface, is not only "ameliorated by being three or four days out of water" but should be kept away from heat and the moon, which "has much more injurious effect than the sun".
When it comes to cookery techniques, The First American Cookbook’s author Amelia Simmons is just as precise. The best way to make a fine syllabub, she counsels, is to directly "milk your cow into your liquor" mid-way through the recipe. This creamy and boozy dessert is then finished with sugar, grated nutmeg and "the sweetest cream you can get". Back in England, it’s even alleged Charles II kept cows near Buckingham Palace for this purpose.
You only need to look to eighteenth-century kitchen manual A Practical System of Modern Domestic Cookery, published around the same time as The First American Cookbook, to discover another use for cows’ udders. It recommends stuffing the "fleshy part" of the udders with marrow, breadcrumbs and herbs, then serving alongside roast veal. Missing a finishing touch? Garnish with sliced lemon peel.
Victorian Britain was no less revolutionary in the kitchen. The most celebrated book of the time was Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, published in 1861. In its first year it outsold Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, introducing health-giving concoctions like the toast-in-toast sandwich, egg wine and raw beef tea. The latter was made by steeping lean beef and salt in cold water and was said to "supply all that is necessary to sustain life during long periods of illness or inactivity".
Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management went on to sell almost almost two million copies by 1868, but the first edition was met with accusations of plagiarism and inaccuracy. Among the eyebrow-raising advice was for a Victorian take on macaroni and cheese, to be served as part of a cheese course. While her topping of bubbling parmesan or Cheshire cheese hit the spot, the one and a half hours to boil the macaroni "until quite tender" is enough to make any nineteenth-century Italian turn in their grave.
In 1896, Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book revolutionised home cooking, introducing step-by-step instructions and standardised measurements for the first time. But not all its edicts have stood the test of time. "Cheese in the raw state is difficult of digestion", she notes, recommending adding a small amount of bicarbonate of soda to rich cheese to make it more palatable.
Despite Fannie’s sometimes offbeat advice, her book went on to become a classic (you can still buy it today as The Original Fannie Farmer Cookbook). Plenty of her ideas were ahead of their time, and she championed everything from coconut butter to frappé coffees – or, if you prefer a savoury kick, a clam frappé made with half a dozen boiled clams and three tablespoons of water. Move over, Starbucks, there’s a new cult drink in town.
If you managed to steer clear of radioactive chocolate, even more dangerous trends awaited in the 1940s: dieting tips. Mid-century advice for staying slim was unconventional to say the least, although occasionally surprisingly appealing. You won’t have any trouble guessing what advice underpinned Marion White’s 1946 book, Ice Cream Diets: scoop after scoop of ice cream added to two meals a day. Its pages also included handy diets "for the social butterfly" and tips for how to "diet at the soda fountain".
In the 1950s, convenience foods ruled. Poppy Cannon was one of the earliest proponents, writing The Can Opener Cookbook in 1951. Even Ruth Reichl claims it was her mother’s go-to cookery bible, with quick-fixes like casserole à la king (tinned chicken and tinned macaroni grilled with a scattering of breadcrumbs) among the "mouthwatering dishes" to be "prepared in a minimum of time". While the book helped fuel a new generation of women "engaged in frying as well as bringing home the bacon", the recipes themselves aren't as appetising as those you'll find in our canned foods guide here.
Poppy Cannon’s one-time collaborator Alice B. Toklas wrote her own eponymous cookbook in 1954 (now published as Murder in the Kitchen). Witty and unconventional, it blended recipes with insights into the author’s life with her partner Gertrude Stein. Most famous are her hashish fudge ("an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club") and gigot de la clinique. This leg of lamb was marinated for a week, with no mention of refrigeration, and injected daily with cognac and orange juice through a medical-grade hypodermic needle.
Even America’s most-loved TV chef Julia Child isn’t exempt from the culinary catastrophe hall of fame. In her memoir she revealed that the first edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking recommended baking bread on asbestos tiles. Thankfully this example of her husband Paul’s "usual Yankee ingenuity" was struck from subsequent editions after asbestos was found to be a carcinogen. A regular floor tile proved to be quite sufficient to get the baking surface to her required temperature.
Asbestos aside, Julia Child’s straight-talking cookery advice mostly remains just as relevant and reliable today as it was when Mastering the Art of French Cooking was first published in the 1960s. The exception? Her insistence that washing raw chicken is "the safest thing to do". It’s since been proven that this spreads bacteria, including salmonella and campylobacter, with infected water droplets travelling up to half a metre from the sink. The most recent advice is to avoid the practice altogether.
No other book has shaped American cuisine like the encyclopaedic Joy of Cooking, first published in 1931 and now on its eighth edition. Given its long history, some recipes have aged better than others. Take the book’s 1975 version of mock chicken, for example, made with veal and pork. Carefully shaping these faux drumsticks might have been logical when chicken was the more expensive meat, but today it’s a perplexing idea for a substitute.
Despite the apparent lack of science underpinning many bestselling cookery titles, only a few have actually been recalled. Among those to receive this dubious honour was Woman's Day Crockery Cuisine, published by Random House in 1978. Its recipe for caramel slices recommended heating a sealed can of condensed milk in a dry crock pot for four hours, by which time it would have exploded destroying the pan – and potentially the unwitting baker’s kitchen.
It might not come as a surprise that the Eighties were a bumper time for questionable culinary advice. Niche trends of the decade even included crisp cookery. According to Cooking With Crisps, blending crushed crisps into mashed potato makes the perfect crunchy topping for a fish pie, or if you choose to follow the Potato Chips Cookbook: 101 Recipes With Potato Chips, they can even be added to "yummy, home-cooked dishes like chicken crunch salad".
No-one represents Eighties culinary mishaps like Betty Crocker, the fictional home cook dreamed up by the Washburn Crosby Company. Dinner parties simply weren’t complete without a few of her towering aspics. One of her finest creations was published in the 1983 Betty Crocker Christmas Cookbook, a monstrous gelatine centrepiece made from pineapple, cream cheese, cream and celery, all set in a lime jelly mould.
Although it was invented years earlier, it wasn’t until the Eighties that the microwave became a kitchen staple. A whole new world of simple recipes opened up to home cooks, but traditional roast dinners presented a problem. How do you brown a joint of beef without an oven? Gail Duff’s solution in her 1984 book Microwave Cookery was simply to paint the meat with a combination of Worcestershire sauce and mushroom ketchup. Delicious.
Even cereal wasn’t exempt from a quick zap in the microwave. Marie Smith’s 1986 Microwave Cooking for One (a title so bleak it’s made several pop culture cameos, including on The Mindy Project) advocated microwaving cornflakes and milk until lukewarm. On the brighter side, her recipes for blueberry cake and French toast heralded an era of mug cakes decades before the trend took hold.
Celebrity memoirs never disappoint when it comes to curious cooking advice, but few are quite as barmy as Elizabeth Taylor’s Elizabeth Takes Off. In 1988, the Hollywood star revealed she started her day with a mixture of cottage cheese and sour cream on fruit, then enjoyed peanut butter and steak sandwiches for dinner. She favoured a similarly unlikely flavour combination with hamburgers, serving the patties with peanut butter and bacon inside a scooped-out French baguette.
Outside the kitchen, the turbocharged cars of the Eighties typified the extravagance and consumerism of decade. By 1989, there was even an essential recipe collection for petrol heads: Manifold Destiny, one of the strangest cookbooks ever published. The "one and only guide to cooking on your car engine" professed that with a little bit of ingenuity and "a whole lot of aluminium foil" you could do anything from make s'mores in a Scion to poach fish in a Pontiac.
"Chef sorry for poison plant error" is the headline no restaurateur wants to read. Unfortunately TV regular Antony Worrall Thompson’s 2008 confusion between henbane (a hallucinogen causing drowsiness, disorientation, seizures and death) and fat hen (an edible wild herb) had the press in uproar. For the record, if you find the former you should never "use its leaves in salads like spinach, make tea and eat the roots".
Launched in 2008, Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop lifestyle site has faced criticism from health and nutrition professionals. One of the most dubious ideas published on her lifestyle site, Goop, was a 2015 recipe for a "quick and potent chocolate recipe" called "sex bark". Hidden in the ingredients of the "Sex Dust" mixed with coconut oil, ghee and cacao nibs was the supplement ho shou wu, not only believed to cause liver damage but also to act as a laxative. Thanks, GP, but we’re not convinced this is romance at its finest.
Check out these retro foods that deserve a comeback.
“I suppose this riff, in a way, is like a little culinary joke”, Nigella Lawson said of the infamous reinvented caesar salad she made on her show Simply Nigella in 2015. If you’re picturing lettuce lavishly dressed with croutons, anchovies and parmesan, think again. This recipe was a little simpler and a lot less appealing: iceberg lettuce baked until wilted and topped with a runny fried egg.
Influencer Johnna Holmgren, creator of whimsical lifestyle brand Fox Meets Bear fell from grace when her debut cookbook for foragers and "adventurous eaters" was cancelled by her publisher. Among her suggestions were serving uncooked wild rice, munching on acorns (inedible when raw) and coating raw morels in chocolate (likely to cause nausea and vomiting). It might not look as good on Instagram, but sometimes it’s safer to stick to the supermarket.
Now read: 17 of the strangest foods in history.