Don’t Cook That: When Old Recipes Got Seriously Dangerous

There is something about an old cookbook that feels comforting. The faded pages, handwritten notes and stains from meals made decades ago make you picture Grandma standing in the kitchen, pulling an apple pie from the oven. Apples, cinnamon, sugar, butter and maybe a little nutmeg. What could go wrong? Then you turn the page and discover Grandma’s cookbook may have been trying to kill you.

I came across the Don’t Cook That site, which collects real recipes from old cookbooks that range from bizarre to downright frightening. Its collection includes 144 recipes printed in cookbooks between 1831 and 1929, including peacock roasted in its own feathers, beer made with sulfuric acid and bread leavened with hydrochloric acid. It also features an old cholera remedy containing laudanum, rhubarb, capsicum, camphor and spirits of nitre. Suddenly that apple pie is looking pretty safe.

What really gets me is how casually food, medicine and household remedies once lived side by side. The same book could tell you how to make a pie, preserve food or prepare a remedy for an illness. The kitchen wasn’t just where you made dinner. It was where you became the family doctor, pharmacist and food scientist, whether you actually knew what you were doing or not. Add a little flour, a pinch of cinnamon and, apparently, something that sounds like it belongs in a chemistry lab.

Imagine asking Grandma what’s for dinner. “Roast beef.” “Excellent.” “And after dinner I’m making the cholera remedy.” “Wonderful. Pass the salt.” You have to wonder what the grocery list looked like back then. Eggs, milk, flour, sugar, butter and whatever the pharmacist had behind the counter.

The old kitchen could be part restaurant, part pharmacy and part chemistry lab. It was a little like the early scientific world around Marie Curie, when researchers were working with substances whose risks were not yet fully understood. Except here, the chemistry set was sitting right beside the flour and sugar. People were working with the knowledge they had about food, medicine and preservation, long before today’s food-safety standards.

That’s the part that gets me. Today we complain when a food label contains an ingredient we can’t pronounce. Back then, you could probably pronounce every ingredient and still have absolutely no idea why it was in your dinner.

We love to romanticize the past, but sometimes nostalgia needs a warning label. Old kitchens weren’t always cozy places filled with harmless family recipes. They could also contain strange remedies, questionable preservation methods and instructions that sound like they came straight out of a chemistry set.

Now I understand why some older people can spend ten minutes in the grocery store reading the label on a can of soup. They’re not being difficult. They’re remembering the old days. They’ve seen what people used to put in food, and they’re not taking any chances. “What’s in this?” is no longer just a question. It’s a survival strategy.

So if you find an old cookbook at a garage sale, admire the history and enjoy the recipes, but maybe think twice before firing up the stove. Grandma may have known how to make a hell of an apple pie, but if the recipe calls for something you normally keep under the kitchen sink, maybe order pizza. Your stomach will thank you.