Tasting History's Top 20 Worst Recipes

TL;DR

Max Miller ranks his 20 worst historical recipes by taste, texture, difficulty, or disgust — with leather topping the list.

Key Points

• 1.Numbers 20–16 feature unpleasant flavors and textures from ancient and wartime recipes. White ketchup (#20) was pungently salty with anchovies and horseradish; Vitellian peas (#19) had strong Roman garum flavors and mushy texture; Tang Pie (#18) was offensively sour and caused a pet emergency when a kitten ate it; Greek liver skewers (#17) had a rubbery, porous texture Max despised; WWII Italian chestnut cake (#16) was dense, dry, and gummy with no sugar.
• 2.Numbers 15–11 range from visually disturbing to physically painful to eat. Spartan black blood broth (#15) was off-putting purely due to its black color from pork blood; Victorian hardtack hash (#14) was so bland and mushy it was physically hard to swallow; Viking dragon heart (#13) was rubbery and sinewy from improper roasting; spiced kangaroo (#12) tasted like dirt and cost $110 for a small piece; Kykeon (#11), an ancient Greek magic potion, was salty wine porridge Max visibly struggled to swallow.
• 3.Haggis (#10) was a logistical nightmare requiring a trip to Scotland. True haggis requires sheep's lung, which is illegal to cook in the US, so Max flew to Scotland to make a 14th-century recipe — which turned out bland and flavorless without modern spices.
• 4.Hardtack (#9) earned its spot through sheer tedium, not just taste. It takes long to make, has zero flavor, can break teeth, and became a channel meme — meaning Max must eat it far more often than any modern person should.
• 5.Hildegard von Bingen's Cookies of Joy (#8) were medicinal wafers, not real cookies. Their spiced, sugarless recipe turned from crisp to gummy dough mid-chew; Max notes most online versions modernize them into sugar cookies because the authentic recipe is essentially medicine.
• 6.Garum (#7) took three months to make and involved fermenting fish guts in LA heat. Max feared botulism and consulted food historian Sally Granger for safety; despite the horror of making it, the original garum video is what made the channel famous.
• 7.Numbers 6–4 are dominated by failed ingredient combinations and revolting textures. Depression-era tomato peanut soup (#6) had flavors that never melded; 1950s Spam loaf (#5) was cold, slimy, and extra-salty with a cream-cheese filling that kept falling apart; 1950s fish pudding (#4) made the whole house reek and had a jiggly-yet-disintegrating texture.
• 8.The jellyfish frittata (#3) and Kikatsugan (#2) represent the worst of texture and time investment. The jellyfish frittata, dyed black with cuttlefish ink for Domitian's black banquet, combined rubbery jellyfish with egg and garum textures Max finds repulsive; Kikatsugan took 3 years to ferment and tasted bitter, dry, and horrible regardless of preparation method.
• 9.Leather is the undisputed #1 worst, with two honorable mentions for laborious-but-tasty recipes. Max boiled actual leather for a PBS pirate episode — it was unchewable and potentially contained formaldehyde; honorable mentions go to the Cockentrice (half-pig, half-rooster Frankenstein roast that flopped despite huge effort) and sugar plums (delicious but coated the entire kitchen in hardened gum arabic for nearly a year).