Your ancestors ate plenty of food that no one touches today, and in most cases, those foods died out for good reason. For example, we no longer bulk up every meal with scoops of mayonnaise because we can afford to eat what we want without needing to add a bunch of filler. We no longer eat coffee-flavored Jell-O because no one ever liked coffee-flavored Jell-O, making it a mistake from day one.
Some of those old foods, however, deserve a second chance, even if they sound a little disgusting.
Popcorn and Milk
Popcorn was already a popular snack in 19th-century America, with most fans of the food popping corn themselves at home over the stove. And so, there now spread a recipe for a dessert known as popcorn pudding. Despite the name, popcorn pudding sometimes contained no stiff custard but simply consisted of popcorn dumped into a bowl of milk.
That sounds like a fine method of ruining popcorn. Popcorn isn’t supposed to be soggy. Popcorn would get destroyed when you soak it, just as surely as cotton candy would. And while some of the most famous popcorn toppings (butter, cheese) are dairy products, those salty flavors wouldn’t go well with milk at all.
But popcorn and milk was not salted. It was sweetened, and we actually eat sweetened corn with milk regularly today, in the form of breakfast cereal. We eat cornflakes and Corn Pops and corn mixed with crunch berries. Popcorn and milk was like those and tasted just as good. In fact, the Kellogg family, who invented cornflakes, tried popcorn and milk first and loved it. They likely based their later invention on it.
The one reason cornflakes won out over popcorn and milk was that flakes were easier to market. People could so easily pop their own corn at home that Kellogg’s was unable to convince us to buy the stuff readymade, but they were able to convince us to buy flakes, which seemed like the more novel product.
Today, cornflakes are the mundane choice, so we dare you to instead give popcorn and sweet milk a try. To quote Los Angeles grocer George Stockwell, who we’re sure was totally unbiased in this matter, “If any person lives who has never eaten popcorn and milk or, better, popcorn and cream, he or she has missed one of the great luxuries — one of the daintiest luxuries of life!”
Peanut ‘N’ Ham Spread
A recipe from the 1950s urged homemakers to chop up peanuts by hand (a somewhat laborious step) and to blend the result with “ham spread” (a mixture of ham and mayonnaise that everyone was presumed to already have handy). The modern equivalent would perhaps instead mix chopped ham with peanut butter. Either option sounds like someone desperately combining whatever ingredients they find in their kitchen without any regard for how well they work together.
But we suggest you give peanuts and ham a chance. Despite how sweet peanut butter or peanut candy are, peanuts work great in savory dishes, such as pad thai, so why shouldn’t you try combining them with ham and serving the result on crackers?
“It’s delightfully different and delicious,” promised one 1952 ad sharing the recipe. RC Cola put out this ad. The recipe does not actually incorporate RC Cola, so they couldn’t have offered it just to trick people into using up more of their product. No, we have to assume they offered this recipe because they thought people really would enjoy the resulting snack (and would resultantly trust RC Cola and buy more of their product).
Hot Dr. Pepper
This next recipe was also advertised by a soda company, but this one very much was designed to use up the company’s own product. “Just heat Dr. Pepper or Diet Dr. Pepper till it steams,” urged the below-1960s ad. “Then pour over a thin slice of lemon and serve piping hot.”
Hot Dr. Pepper is “distinctly different,” the ad boasted. Regular Dr. Pepper, however, was itself so unusual that the ad needed to explain what it was. “Dr. Pepper is not a cola, not a root beer,” it said, “but a blend of deep fruit flavors. That’s why hot Dr. Pepper is the happy holiday idea that pleases everyone.”
Hot soda does not, in fact, please everyone. Soda should be ice cold, according to popular consensus. But Dr. Pepper suggested this alternate route for winter, which is why you’ll hear a few notes of “Jingle Bells” play during the ad.
Hot Dr. Pepper went on to find a place in recipe books, particularly in the South. The South, of course, doesn’t experience the coldest winters America has to offer, but this also means that central heating was less universal there, which made the need for hot beverages in the winter all the more strong.
Modern adventurers who’ve tried making the drink vary in how they rate it, with some saying, “I wouldn’t do this to me on purpose,” while others declare it to be good, and it might be even better with a little whiskey. You should try it this winter, if for no other reason than we really otherwise don’t have that many different options when it comes to hot drinks.
Caffeine Bush
As we said, you don’t have that many different hot drinks to choose from. You have countless different varieties of coffee and tea, but they ultimately still do come down to “coffee” or “tea,” derived from Coffea or Camellia plants. That raises a question: Aren’t there any other plants out there naturally packed with caffeine that we can brew into hot beverages?
There are. For example, there’s Ilex vomitoria, also known as yaupon, a type of bush whose leaves and stems are used to create a beverage known as “black drink.” Yaupon is a type of holly, which makes yaupon tea especially fitting for the holiday season.
Yaupon, unlike Coffea or Camellia plants, grows natively in the Americas. Europeans noticed a great many indigenous tribes brewing yaupon tea, and the drink was set to be a major competitor to coffee and conventional tea, both in the colonies and back in Europe. There was just one problem. The drink made people throw up. This prompted the scientific name they assigned to the plant, Ilex vomitoria.
However, every alcoholic beverage will also make you throw up if you drink too much of it, and people still indulge. It seems that the people who vomited after imbibing the black drink only did so because they drank it on an empty stomach. Plus, many native drinkers deliberately wanted to throw up, for ritualistic reasons. Otherwise, they would have avoided doing so by drinking the stuff with food. It’s also possible that they deliberately vomited as a learned skill, and no component of the drink triggered the emetic response.
The very name Ilex vomitoria might have been a smear campaign to overemphasize the vomit aspect, as British interests did not want a new tea competitor to succeed. Luckily, though the black drink died out during the last few centuries, some activists are trying to revive it now, so you can hunt them down and buy a glass from them.
The Hallucinogenic Fish
Rituals are a great excuse to eat food that no one would otherwise touch. Polynesian people have ceremonially eaten a fish that we today call the salema porgy but that used to be called “the fish that makes dreams.” People in the Mediterranean ate it as well during the time of the Roman Empire, and always, the goal was to induce hallucinations. This hallucinatory state is referred to as ichthyoallyeinotoxism.
Should you hunt down some salema porgy yourself to experience those auditory and visual hallucinations? You arguably should not. As that very long word ichthyoallyeinotoxism suggests, the fish is toxic, and hallucinations are just one symptom of this state.
You’ll also start with a little sore throat and heartburn, then move on to feelings of impending death, along with pain and diarrhea. And if you are looking for hallucinations, maybe recreational drugs will do the trick more safely because the ones from salema porgy last 36 hours.
On the other hand, for some of us, pain and a feeling of impending death are things we have to experience every day, no matter what. That means 36 hours of getting cut off from the real world might be looked upon as a good thing.