12 Weirdest Retro Recipes

Image Credits: Curtis Publications

The above photo is of a seafood mousse, shaped to look like an actual, smiling fish. The only way I could describe it would be to say if you approached a table where that exact dish was being served, you would walk into the room, look into its empty, smiling face, and if you had any sense of self-respect and self-preservation, would turn around and walk out immediately. But in the seventies, weird food creations like this were actually pretty common. It was a very strange time, people.

Take a gander at this list of the 12 weirdest retro recipes from Oddee. Honestly, they start off slow with the above mentioned abomination, but it only gets weirder and more gross and the list goes on. At one point, there is a recipe for a jello ring that is filled with prunes and covered in ice-cream. That sounds like something you would feed a terrorist to extract vital information.

The funny part is, people were actually making this stuff back then. Wait until you see the "meat-za". You can't unsee things like that. Hate to think how many lives were lost to these gastronomic nightmares.


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The number of cooks who actually made these dishes is not as many as you'd think from the surviving cookbooks and recipe cards. Even then we laughed at a lot of these recipes, which were blatant advertisements for Jello, Campbell's soup, and other products (like Hellman's here). A young housewife who tried to make a lovely mold for dinner would soon learn it wasn't easy or appetizing enough to be worth the effort.

There were a few really tasty and easy recipes that survive from that period, like using mushroom soup to substitute for white sauce in casserole dishes (like tuna and noodles, or that green bean stuff people have at Thanksgiving), Swiss steak, Swedish meatballs, and jello with fruit.
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