A Brief History of Culinary Crimes

There are certain photographs that history tries very hard to hide. Not wars or scandals or political embarrassments. Those survive quite nicely. No, the images that seem to slip mysteriously through the cracks are the ones showing a perfectly respectable gathering of adults smiling proudly beside a molded ring of lime gelatin containing suspended vegetables and what appears to be an entire seafood department. Somewhere, in a forgotten album tucked inside a cedar chest, there is undoubtedly a black-and-white photograph of Aunt Marge presenting such a creation to her family with the same expression of triumph normally associated with moon landings and successful heart surgery.

One imagines that every age believes itself to have reached the summit of refinement. The Romans reclined on couches and discussed philosophy while servants replenished their wine. The Victorians conducted entire social campaigns around proper table manners. Mid-century Americans looked upon a casserole fortified with canned soup and considered the matter of civilization largely settled. Across centuries, empires have risen, currencies have collapsed, and borders have shifted, yet humanity's confidence in its own culinary judgment has remained almost comically indestructible.

This confidence survives evidence that would cripple lesser institutions. A fish preserved until it resembles translucent jelly. A sandwich containing liver and raisins. A pie decorated with protruding fish heads. Each arrived not as a prank or a dare, but as a sincere contribution to the advancement of lunch. Someone purchased the ingredients. Someone assembled them. Someone served them to guests. Most astonishingly of all, someone asked for the recipe. The historical record suggests that our species possesses an extraordinary ability to mistake novelty for genius, particularly when a kitchen is involved.

Which brings us to a rather uncomfortable realization. The culinary crimes of the past are easy to mock precisely because they are safely in the past. We laugh at tuna suspended in gelatin while standing in line to purchase charcoal-infused croissants, gold-covered desserts, and hamburgers stacked high enough to qualify for their own zip code. The truth is that every generation creates its own edible absurdities. History merely changes the menu.

When Modern Meant Putting Dinner in Gelatin

There was a time when gelatin was impressive. Before refrigeration and packets of powdered gelatin, producing a clear savory jelly required boiling animal bones and feet for hours, clarifying the resulting liquid, and possessing considerably more patience than anyone preparing Tuesday dinner should reasonably be expected to have. Aspic therefore carried a certain elegance. Then industrial gelatin arrived, refrigerators entered ordinary homes, and suddenly something once difficult became easy. Humans responded exactly as humans tend to respond when given a new technology: we used far too much of it. By the 1920s, gelatin was turning up regularly in salads, and by mid-century cooks were enthusiastically suspending meat, fish, vegetables, eggs, and occasionally what appears to have been the entire contents of the refrigerator inside shimmering molds.

One of the more celebrated examples was Perfection Salad, a combination of cabbage, celery, peppers, vinegar, and other salad ingredients imprisoned in gelatin. It won a recipe competition in the early twentieth century and became enormously popular, which is useful evidence that the word "perfection" has always benefited from flexible standards.

The appeal, however, wasn't simply taste. Molded food looked modern, precise, hygienic, and sophisticated. It could be prepared ahead, displayed beautifully, and presented to guests as evidence that the household had embraced the future. The fact that the future occasionally contained shrimp floating in translucent jelly was apparently considered a manageable flaw.

We still do this. Today's fashionable restaurant may replace the gelatin mold with foams, spheres, edible smoke, flavored air, or a dish arriving beneath a glass dome that the waiter removes with the solemnity of someone opening King Tut's tomb. None of those techniques is inherently ridiculous; in talented hands, many are extraordinary. The trouble begins when technique stops serving the food and the food starts serving the technique. Somewhere between dinner and performance art, you find yourself admiring a beetroot sphere and wondering whether anyone remembered that you came here because you were hungry.

That’s the first enduring law of culinary crime: new technology arrives, we become intoxicated by what it allows us to do, and for a while nobody asks whether we should do it. Our grandparents put tuna in gelatin because gelatin was exciting. We put dinner inside clouds of aromatic smoke because apparently, we have learned nothing.

The Great Art of Making One Thing Pretend to Be Another

Imitation has an even longer culinary rap sheet. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, turtle soup became an expensive status dish, particularly among the wealthy. Genuine green turtle was difficult and costly to obtain, so cooks developed mock turtle soup, commonly using a calf's head - with skin, tongue and assorted other contributions from the unfortunate calf - to reproduce the various textures of turtle meat.

It became so familiar that Lewis Carroll eventually gave the Mock Turtle a starring role in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Victorians had essentially created an analogue meat substitute, although the marketing department wisely decided against calling it Calf Pretending to Be Reptile.

The instinct survives. Supermarkets now contain plant-based burgers engineered to bleed, vegetarian chicken that’s never encountered a chicken, cauliflower impersonating rice, zucchini masquerading as spaghetti, and mushrooms that have been given responsibilities traditionally assigned to steak. Technology has taken the ambition considerably further: cultivated meat proposes producing actual animal tissue without raising the whole animal. The motivations today - animal welfare, environmental concerns, health, cost, curiosity - are very different from those behind mock turtle soup. But the underlying culinary challenge would be instantly recognizable to a nineteenth century cook: people want something they cannot, will not, or would rather not eat, so we find another ingredient and persuade it to audition for the role.

Sometimes the disguise travels in the opposite direction. Mince pies were once far more literal about the word "mince," combining meat or suet with dried fruit and spices before gradually evolving toward the sweet versions familiar today. What sounds peculiar to modern ears made perfect sense in a culinary world where sweet and savory were not separated by the border controls we later imposed upon them. Modern salted caramel, chili chocolate, bacon doughnuts, cheese tea, and fried chicken with waffles suggest that those border guards have once again gone for lunch.

We like to believe cuisine advances by discovering harmonious combinations. Just as often, it advances because someone looks at two perfectly satisfactory foods and wonders what would happen if they were forced to share a plate. Occasionally the result is genius. Occasionally it’s the Liveraisin Sandwich, a genuine 1928 recipe combining chopped liver and raisins between slices of bread. Progress has always involved a certain amount of collateral damage.

It's Good for You, So Stop Complaining

Bad food becomes considerably harder to argue with once someone declares it healthy. Victorian cookbooks devoted entire sections to "invalid cookery," food designed for people whose digestive systems were assumed to require almost aggressive blandness. Beef tea, gruels and various milk preparations appeared regularly. Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management even offered the toast sandwich: a slice of toast placed between two slices of bread and seasoned with salt and pepper. This was published as an actual recipe in 1861, although in fairness Beeton suggested that the extravagant might add a little cold meat.

The toast sandwich sounds absurd until you understand its purpose. It wasn't created by a chef trying to impress anyone; it was inexpensive, mild food for someone who was ill. Much historical strangeness makes more sense once necessity enters the room. Fermenting, salting, drying and pickling kept people alive before refrigeration. Blood sausage used parts of an animal that could not afford to be wasted. Fermented fish, preserved eggs, and organ meats weren't devised so that twenty-first-century tourists could make faces at them on YouTube. They were solutions - to climate, scarcity, preservation and the fairly important business of not starving.

What’s changed is our ability to turn necessity into aspiration. Bone broth, fermented drinks, organ meats and ancient grains can now reappear with elegant packaging, wellness claims, and prices their original consumers would find hilarious. Alongside them comes an endless procession of detox juices, wellness shots, functional waters, gut-health concoctions and smoothies containing enough ingredients to require an index. Some have genuine nutritional value; others rely a bit more heavily on the persuasive powers of typography and the color green. The recurring promise is ancient: consume this unpleasant thing today and tomorrow you will become a better version of yourself.

Every age seems to require food that behaves slightly like medicine. The Victorians had beef tea and arrowroot gruel. We have turmeric shots and beverages promising to support functions of the human body most of us were unaware required beverages.

The ingredients change. The bargain does not: health is waiting at the bottom of the glass, and apparently it isn't supposed to taste very nice.

When Lunch Became Show Business

Of course, not every culinary crime can be blamed on necessity, health, or technological enthusiasm. Some food is strange for the oldest reason in commerce: strange gets attention. Cornwall's Stargazy Pie, with fish heads protruding through the pastry and staring upward, is an old regional dish with traditions behind its theatrical appearance. Today's equivalent is less likely to commemorate local history than to commemorate the moment someone realized that customers carrying smartphones had become unpaid advertising executives.

And so, food grew taller, brighter, blacker, shinier and increasingly more difficult to eat. Burgers became vertical construction projects. Bagels acquired the color palette of children's television. Croissants and ice cream turned black with activated charcoal. Desserts arrived coated in edible gold, perhaps the most efficient method ever devised for increasing the price of something without altering its flavor. Milkshakes appeared crowned with slices of cake, doughnuts, biscuits and enough confectionery to make the actual milkshake seem almost incidental. The question was no longer simply, "Does this taste good?" It was, "Will someone photograph it?"

There is something wonderfully familiar about all this. The 1930s hostess arranging vegetables inside a perfect gelatin mold and the modern chef placing gold leaf on a steak are separated by decades, technology, geography and several revolutions in food.

Yet both understand the same basic truth: eating has never been only about hunger. Food signals wealth, fashion, health, sophistication, belonging and occasionally our willingness to pay a surprising amount of money for something because it’s temporarily famous. Social media didn’t invent conspicuous food. It merely gave conspicuous food a much larger dining room.

Which should make us slightly kinder when confronted with the culinary evidence left behind by previous generations. Their aspic molds and Liveraisin Sandwiches look ridiculous because fashion has moved on and taken their dignity with it. Ours still look perfectly reasonable because we are standing too close to them. Somewhere in the future, people may be staring at photographs of gold-covered steaks, charcoal croissants and rainbow bagels with exactly the expression we reserve for tuna suspended in gelatin. And one of them will inevitably ask the question every generation eventually asks about the one before it: What on earth were they thinking?

A Brief History of Culinary Crimes

There is, of course, an uncomfortable possibility we haven't considered: maybe there are no culinary crimes. Maybe there are only things we haven't grown up eating, things we’ve stopped eating, and things we are currently eating with such enthusiasm that nobody has yet had the courage to tell us how ridiculous we look. Food has always been geography, poverty, abundance, religion, technology, fashion, and survival served on a plate. Mock turtle soup existed because turtle was expensive. Aspic became glamorous because refrigeration and gelatin once represented progress. People ate every usable part of an animal because throwing food away was a luxury they couldn't afford. Context has a remarkable way of turning lunacy back into lunch.

And besides, some of the world's greatest foods must have sounded like terrible ideas the first time somebody suggested them. Let milk go bad deliberately. Bury cabbage in salt and wait. Allow grapes to rot, fish to ferment, cheese to grow mold, dough to fill with invisible organisms, meat to hang around considerably longer than seems prudent. Human cuisine is largely the story of someone doing something alarming to food while everyone else backs slowly toward the door. Sometimes the result is a disaster. Sometimes it's Roquefort.

That's why we should probably resist feeling too superior to the people who came before us. They had their gelatin molds and toast sandwiches; we have our charcoal croissants and gold-covered steaks. Fifty years from now, someone will discover an old photograph of a rainbow bagel and stare at it with the baffled fascination we reserve for a 1950s cookbook. They'll wonder why we did it. They'll wonder why anyone paid for it. And, because history has a sense of humor, they'll probably be eating something far stranger while they ask.

So, eat what makes you happy. Try the strange thing. Respect the dish whose appeal you don't understand, because somewhere there is someone equally bewildered by yours. Food was never meant to remain still and thank heavens for that. We’ll experiment, imitate, ferment, deconstruct, reconstruct, photograph, gild, pickle, smoke, foam, and occasionally ruin perfectly good ingredients in the process. Most of it will disappear. A few things will become classics. And every now and then, against all reason and good judgment, somebody will put liver and raisins between two slices of bread - and remind us that civilization has always been a work in progress.

Authors Note: If all this talk of calf's heads, gelatin molds, Liveraisin sandwiches, and gold-covered dinners has left you hungry - or merely concerned about what humanity might put on a plate next - here are three ways to continue the investigation.

Fannie Farmer 1896 Cook Book Take a culinary trip back to 1896 

Long before recipe websites made you scroll through someone's childhood memories to discover how much flour you need, Fannie Farmer was helping bring order to the kitchen. This reproduction of her landmark 1896 cookbook contains 1,380 recipes, along with instructions covering everything from setting a proper table to preparing a calf's head. It's part cookbook, part time machine, and excellent evidence that our ancestors took dinner very seriously indeed.

A Cook's Tour — Anthony Bourdain Travel and eat with Bourdain 

Bourdain understood something this post has been circling all along: strange food is usually only strange when it belongs to somebody else. In A Cook's Tour, he travels in search of the "perfect meal" and finds cobra, pigs, vodka, home cooking, hospitality, and the people and cultures that give food its meaning. Funny, curious, occasionally reckless, and never interested in making the unfamiliar seem ridiculous simply because it is unfamiliar.

Edible Gold Leaf Sheets Make dinner unnecessarily expensive 

And finally, for anyone who reached the section on edible gold and thought, Yes, that's exactly what my dinner is missing. These food-grade gold leaf sheets allow you to gild cakes, chocolates, cocktails, steaks, or anything else suffering from the unfortunate condition of not being shiny enough. They contribute essentially nothing to the flavor - which, when you think about it, is precisely the point. Somewhere, a future food historian is already preparing your exhibit.

As always, any purchases made through these links help support the continued production of essays examining the thin and increasingly questionable line between human civilization and organized nonsense.

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