Last month, I unwisely downloaded TikTok. I quickly found myself watching what can only be described as a series of culinary hate crimes. I couldn’t look away. In one video, for nearly two mesmerizing, stomach-churning minutes, Eli of @elis_kitchen (the self-described “evilest chef on TikTok”) smashes a packet of luncheon meat in a blender with a generous dollop of whipped cream. They whisk the resulting slurry until it has the texture of stiff vomit, then sieve it before spreading the pale pink paste onto a prepackaged Danish, garnishing it with blueberries and taking a bite while giving a cheery thumbs-up to the viewers.
Eli’s nasty but perversely inventive posts, which are revamps of the processed foods of the modern American food system, are part of a popular and oddly compelling subgenre on TikTok. In a space where likes and views are everything, posting nasty recipes is a good way to get attention, as the more shocking the better. We now know that what happens when you mix a tube of Pringles into flour, mix it with oil and water, and make it into a substitute pastry, or make a terrine with cottage cheese and raspberry jelly, is not for the faint of heart.
These projects may seem distinctly 21st-century, but there is a rich history of impossible, improbable, and anti-recipes. Professional chefs have long been churning out believable recipes, either guiltily or with glee. The first cookbook manuscript written in English was Curie’s FormThe Chef de Richard II, written around 1390, contains recipes for dishes served by “the Chef de Richard II.” Among the 196 dishes are some ordinary-sounding pies and roasts, but also some bizarre recipes, such as a recipe for a “cockagris,” which involves cutting a rooster and a pig in half, stuffing the carcass with minced meat, sewing the two halves together, and serving the hybrid animal roasted and covered in gold and silver leaf.
Fantastic foods were similarly described some 270 years later by Robert May, a professional chef who had been trained in France. In the preface to his book in 1660 he wrote: Skilled ChefMay fondly recalls the joys of feasting before the rise of the spongy Puritans. The table was decorated with a life-size pastry deer, hollowed out, filled with claret wine and pierced with an arrow, and two pies, one with a live bird and the other with a live frog. Guests were asked to pull the arrows out of the deer, and the claret wine flowed “like blood from the wound”, before opening the pies and releasing “flying birds and hopping frogs” that “gave much joy and merriment to all”.
The spectacular concoctions May describes were not made to be eaten, but rather presented as culinary theatre intended to amuse and entertain people at medieval banquets, in the same way that the recipe for Shock Tock is meant to rebel and astonish.
Yet recipes for the very wealthy often blur the lines between what is feasible and what is possible. French cuisineMarie-Antoine Carême, the godfather of haute cuisine, wrote a book called Recipes for Cooking that details some incredibly complicated dishes. Parisian-style gloss meringue It would take a professional chef about 30 hours to perfect, and of course, that’s part of the point: recipes that require an army of skilled chefs sweating in front of the stove cost staff, status, and extra income. Design trumps content.
Molecular gastronomy advocates have continued this trend for decades by publishing cookbooks in which recipes run for pages and require high-tech equipment and obscure ingredients. The hernia-inducing recipes in Heston Blumenthal’s 2008 magnum opus are The Fat Duck CookbookFor example, “N-Zorbit M (tapioca maltodextrin)” and “Douglas fir essential oil” are called for. Not exactly regular supplies. The 2022 cookbook created by René Redzepi and his team is Noma 2.0Noma’s website explains that, “This book is a cookbook, but it’s not necessarily about cooking,” and is not pretentious in any way. Rather, it is “intended to help inspire your own unique creative spark.”
It’s easy to get annoyed by these chef-like suggestions, but making the recipe is only part of the recipe’s purpose. A recipe is first and foremost a vehicle through which an author asserts their worldview. A recipe is an invitation to plan your life in a particular way, according to the author’s vision, expertise, and biases. When you open a cookbook, you temporarily step into the author’s world. This is why so many of us buy piles of cookbooks that we may never actually cook, and why I keep piles of cookbooks on my bedside table. Dreaming about what you could cook, rather than deciding what to cook, is an effortless pleasure that requires absolutely no effort. Heaven!
This is why cookbooks are such an incredible source of information for understanding the past. While studying modern or historical recipes can tell us very little about what people actually cooked or ate, they can reveal an awful lot about the desires, anxieties, and concerns of their authors and their world. It also explains why cookbook writers often go to the trouble of including recipes that they don’t want their readers to make. As he wrote in the preface to his 1747 book, “The Cookbook,” The art of cooking made easy and simpleFor example, Hannah Glass expressed her dislike of French cuisine: “[i]”If a gentleman employs a French cook, he must pay for French style work.” To emphasize her point, she includes in her collection of highly practical recipes “Partridge French Style,” which uses butter, bacon, wine, and truffles. “This dish,” she tells her reader, “is a queer mixture of rubbish that I do not recommend.” The recipes here are not practical, but intended to prove a point.
Lady Bertrand Russell’s Cooking Recipes Maintaining a good suffrage speaker.”Printed at a fundraiser in 1912 Women’s Suffrage Cookbooktakes this a step further. Other recipes in the book, contributed by suffragettes across Britain, speak of creativity, practicality and constraints in everyday domestic life. Mrs Phelps of Scorton serves up a “sponge crust pudding”, while Russell’s recipes instruct readers to “keep buttered with a stamped addressed envelope when you ask the speaker to come”, “keep greased a dish with the speaker’s expenses paid in full”, and “keep whisked for her with a sanguine spoon”. Russell’s contribution is decidedly humorous rather than culinary, but like the rest of the book, it calls for imagining an alternative world in which women could take part in politics.
Rejection of the political status quo was also one of the more eccentric recipes included by Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in his 1932 book, Cooking Recipes. Futurist Cookbookwhich he tried to achieve. A member of the Futurist and Nationalist movements, Marinetti’s recipes could never be cooked, but they provided material for imagining a new social order. He embraced technology and rejected all forms of tradition. He proposed “destroying all kinds of museums, libraries and academies” to free the country from attachment to the past. Perhaps most radically, Marinetti called for a “total renewal of the diet” and declared war on the country’s national dish, pasta. According to Marinetti, pasta was the cause of the “incurable sadness” and castration of Italian men.
Marinetti’s recipes not only reject Italy’s national cuisine, but also paint pictures and describe scenarios rather than providing detailed instructions. “A Heroic Winter Dinner,” for example, describes a recipe for feeding a group of soldiers who “have to go to war at 4 a.m. or get on an airplane and bomb a city.” When the soldiers go to war, they “swallow a throat bomb, a solid liquid made of grains of Parmesan cheese soaked in Marsala wine.”
Marinetti’s impossible recipes offer a proto-fascist, nationalistic feast that’s as unappealing and dystopian as the culinary hellscapes TikTok presents us with. Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954) champions the embrace of sensual pleasures: “The Hen with the Golden Eggs” is mashed potatoes formed into eggs, fried in butter, and then stuffed into chicken. For Toklas, the recipe’s primary purpose is both a practical command to cook, and a generous invitation for the reader to experience the avant-garde life of her and her partner Gertrude Stein.
If Toklas’s recipes feel like generous invitations, the outrageous recipes in Salvador Dalí’s lavishly illustrated cookbooks confirm the artist’s eccentric nature. The recipe for “Pierced Hearts,” made with beef, minced pork and cheese, smeared with tomato puree and cream and served on a mushroom bread biscuit, seems as contrived and unlikely as Dalí himself, as does the recipe for “Eggs on a Skewer,” a skewer of scrambled eggs with blood sausage skewered into a hollowed-out egg shell.
Dali’s eggs reminded me of a recipe for “monster eggs” that appears in the 1877 book “Monster Eggs.” Kettner’s Cooking BookThis involves cooking 24 egg yolks in a small pig’s bladder, placing the egg whites in a larger bladder, adding the cooked yolks, tying it up and boiling until set. Whether anyone has actually attempted to recreate this monster egg, Dali’s pierced heart or the bleeding pastry deer that May fondly recalls, is largely irrelevant.
The joy of an impossible recipe is that you don’t have to go to the effort and expense of actually making it—and, by extension, eating it. This may be a blessing when it comes to many of the ones that grace our phone screens (though if you want to try it at home, there’s nothing stopping you). But to some extent, this is true of all recipes, even the most mundane ones. The vast majority of recipes in any cookbook have probably never been tried. For more than 20 years, I’ve been obsessed with Joyce Molyneux’s recipe for “Turbot with Ginger-Lime Hollandaise.” Carved Angel Cookbook But I know I’ll never be able to make it. But that doesn’t matter. I can be so content just daydreaming about it. The recipe exists not only on my plate, but in my mind too.
Polly Russell is director of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and a food historian.
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