Think the secret to great cooking is simply following a recipe? How about when that recipe tells you to use asbestos in your baked goods – or catnip in your puddings? Once upon a time, this was real advice offered in good faith to home cooks. Our list counts down the worst cooking tips of all time, including disastrous kitchen hacks from the Middle Ages and terrible pointers from world-famous cookbooks and celebrity chefs. Approach these pearls of gastronomic 'wisdom' with extreme caution...
Click or scroll through our gallery to discover the worst cooking advice in history.
We've based our ranking on the opinions of our well-travelled (and well-fed) team. The list is unavoidably subjective.
In 1796 Amelia Simmons wrote American Cookery – the first known cookbook penned by a US author. The recipes inside were very precise. The best way to make a fine syllabub, Simmons said, was to 'milk your cow into your liquor' midway through the process. The creamy and boozy dessert was finished with sugar, grated nutmeg and 'the sweetest cream you can get'. It’s alleged that England's King Charles II kept cows near Buckingham Palace for this purpose.
Although it’s unlikely that France’s first superstar chef, Guillaume 'Taillevent' Tirel, penned cookbook Le Viandier himself, it contained plenty of detailed tips he'd gleaned working with luxury ingredients in the 13th and 14th centuries. Among them is a bemusing solution for disguising gone-off wine as fresh. All you had to do was mix the wine with ginger and turmeric, boil for two hours, then let the mixture settle before drinking.
The Forme of Cury – or The Method of Cookery – appeared in around 1400 and is one of the oldest known English-language cookery books. According to the British Library’s translation, some of its 196 recipes can be seen as precursors to modern dishes. However, these days you’re more likely to see your 'tostee' topped with marmalade rather than a sweet-and-savoury jelly made from ‘wyne, hony and gyngur’ (wine, honey and ginger) and seasoned with salt and pepper.
The advice in Amelia Simmons' 1796 book American Cookery extended not just to cooking, but to storing and buying ingredients. In the preface, Simmons noted that one should only buy veal that had been brought to the market in carriages and not in bags 'flouncing on a sweaty horse'. She also said that salmon – 'the noblest and richest fish taken in freshwater' – is better after four days out of the water only if 'kept from heat and the moon, which has much more injurious effects than the sun'.
In 1393 the medieval household manual Le Ménagier de Paris, sometimes known as The Good Wife's Guide, encapsulated the era’s everyday excesses. Its advice – written from the perspective of an older husband – ranges from tips on hiring servants to hacks for hosting lavish feasts. Meanwhile, one of its 14th-century culinary cheats was to make a sweet flan using the mashed flesh of boiled eels mixed with saffron, white wine and sugar.
We had a love affair with all things Italian in the 1990s. Pesto, sun-dried tomatoes and balsamic vinegar were just a few of the ingredients that became store-cupboard staples – but the idea of authenticity had yet to catch on. Enter the pizza bagel, smeared with store-bought sauce and topped with bouncy mozzarella. The perfect post-school snack or a culinary abomination? You decide.
Before the electric whisk was invented, making cakes was tough work. In her 1747 book, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, author Hannah Glasse recommended giving yourself two hours to beat together all of the ingredients required for a seed cake. The recipe called for 35 eggs, the 'finest flour' and double-refined sugar. After all that beating, it was just a case of putting the cake in the oven... for three hours.
In 1896, Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book revolutionised home cooking. The book was the first to introduce step-by-step instructions and standardised measurements, making it an instant bestseller. But not all its edicts have stood the test of time. "Cheese in the raw state is difficult of digestion," she noted. "This is somewhat overcome by cooking and adding a small amount of bicarbonate of soda."
Marie T. Smith’s 1986 cookbook Microwave Cooking for One has a title so bleak that it’s made several pop-culture cameos, including on US TV sitcom The Mindy Project. On the plus side, Smith’s recipes for blueberry cake and French toast heralded an era of mug cakes decades before the trend took hold. However, on the negative side, she also advocated microwaving cornflakes and milk until lukewarm.
Despite Fannie Farmer's sometimes offbeat advice, her 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book became a classic; a version called The Fannie Farmer Cookbook was published as recently as 1990. Plenty of her ideas were ahead of their time, and she championed everything from coconut butter to frappé coffees – or, if you prefer a savoury kick, a clam frappé made with half a dozen boiled clams and 3 tbsp water. Move over, Starbucks!
“I suppose this riff, in a way, is like a little culinary joke,” Nigella Lawson said of the infamous reinvented Caesar salad she made on her show Simply Nigella in 2015. If you’re picturing lettuce lavishly dressed with croutons, anchovies and Parmesan, think again. This recipe was a little simpler – and a lot less appealing. It involved roasting half a romaine lettuce and topping it with a runny fried egg. Toast on the side was optional.
Although it was invented years earlier, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the microwave became a kitchen staple. A whole new world of simple recipes opened up for home cooks, but traditional roast dinners presented a problem. How do you brown a joint of beef without an oven? Gail Duff’s solution in her 1984 book, Microwave Cookery, was simply to paint the meat with a combination of Worcestershire sauce and mushroom ketchup. Delicious?
Celebrity memoirs never disappoint when it comes to curious cooking advice, but few are quite as eccentric as Elizabeth Taylor’s Elizabeth Takes Off. In 1988, the Hollywood star revealed that she started her day with fruit topped with a mixture of cottage cheese and sour cream, and that she enjoyed peanut butter and steak sandwiches for dinner. She favoured a similarly unlikely flavour combination when it came to hamburgers, serving the patties smeared with a hearty serving of peanut butter.
Necessity was the mother of invention during the Depression, when money and fresh produce were scarce. For the canny marketers behind Ritz crackers, it also presented an opportunity. A recipe for 'mock apple pie' that appeared on the side of a cracker box in the 1930s became popular during the war years. No apples were harmed in the making of this dessert; the filling contained nothing more than crushed Ritz crackers, water, cream of tartar, lemon and cinnamon.
A potentially dangerous trend reared its head in the 1940s: dieting tips. Mid-20th century advice for staying slim was unconventional, to say the least, but it was occasionally surprisingly appealing. You won’t have any trouble guessing what advice underpinned Marion White’s 1946 book, Ice Cream Diets. That's right – add scoops of ice cream to two meals a day. Its pages also included handy diets 'for the social butterfly' and tips on how to 'diet at the soda fountain'.
In 1951, Poppy Cannon helped fuel a new generation of women 'engaged in frying as well as bringing home the bacon' with The Can-Opener Cookbook. Even food writer Ruth Reichl claimed it was her mother’s go-to cookery bible. The book claimed to include 'mouth-watering dishes' to be 'prepared in a minimum of time'. But while canned food can be tasty, quick fixes such as Cannon's casserole à la king – tinned chicken and tinned macaroni cooked, layered, then grilled with a scattering of breadcrumbs – are questionable.
Alice B. Toklas wrote her eponymous cookbook, now published as Murder in the Kitchen, in 1954. Witty and unconventional, it blended recipes with insights into the author’s life with her partner Gertrude Stein. The most famous recipes to grace the pages were Toklas' spiked fudge ('an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club') and 'gigot de la clinique'. This leg of lamb was marinated for a week, with no mention of refrigeration, and injected daily with a hypodermic needle containing cognac and orange juice.
Julia Child’s straight-talking cookery advice mostly remains just as relevant and reliable today as it was when her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking was first published in 1961. An exception? Her insistence that washing raw chicken is 'the safest thing to do'. It’s since been proven that this spreads bacteria, including salmonella and campylobacter, with infected water droplets travelling up to half a metre from the sink. The most recent advice is to avoid the practice altogether.
We have the McCall's Great American Recipe Card Collection to thank for the most disgusting cooking advice to come out of the 1970s. What could possess anybody to try making eggs Benedict with bananas instead of English muffins? Called ham and bananas Hollandaise, the dish served six – allowing for a generous portion of two baked, Hollandaise-smothered bananas apiece. No, thank you.
No other book has shaped American cuisine like Irma S. Rombauer's Joy of Cooking, first published in 1931. However, given its long history, some recipes have aged better than others. Take the book’s version of mock chicken, for example, made with veal and pork. Carefully shaping these faux drumsticks might have been logical when chicken was the more expensive meat, but today it’s a perplexing idea for a substitute.
Hannah Glasse’s Georgian tome The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy was renowned for its approachability. A servant herself, she wrote in simple terms that other cooks would understand. Her most famous invention was the 'hamburgh sausage', a recipe that's thought to have formed the basis for the modern hamburger. She noted that the dish was best either boiled in pease porridge – a traditional English dish made from lentils – roasted on top of a slice of toast, or served in an omelette.
Here's another culinary catastrophe courtesy of America's most-loved TV chef, Julia Child. In her memoir, Child revealed that an edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking recommended baking bread on asbestos tiles. Thankfully, this example of her husband Paul’s 'ingenuity' was struck from subsequent editions of the book after asbestos was found to be a carcinogen. A regular floor tile proved a far better choice.
It might not come as a surprise that the 1980s were a bumper time for questionable culinary advice. Niche trends of the decade even included crisp cookery. According to Cooking With Crisps, blending crushed crisps into mashed potatoes makes the perfect crunchy topping for a fish pie. If you choose to follow the more recent Potato Chips Cookbook: 101 Recipes With Potato Chips, the snacks can be added to 'yummy, home-cooked dishes like chicken crunch salad', too.
No one delivers culinary mishaps quite like Betty Crocker, the fictional home cook dreamed up by the Washburn-Crosby Company. In the mid-20th century, dinner parties simply weren’t complete without a few of her towering aspic creations. One of her finest feats – a monstrous gelatine centrepiece made from pineapple, cream cheese, cream and celery, all set in a lime jelly mould – was published in the 1982 Betty Crocker Christmas Cookbook.
Despite the apparent lack of science underpinning many bestselling cookery titles, only a few have actually been recalled. Among those to receive this dubious honour is Woman's Day Crockery Cuisine by Sylvia Vaughn Thompson, published by Random House in 1978. Its recipe for silky caramel slices recommended heating a sealed can of condensed milk in a dry slow cooker for four hours. This could have resulted in the can exploding, destroying the pan – and potentially wrecking the unwitting baker’s kitchen, too.
Tips on how to shop for ingredients were common in early cookbooks, including Richard Briggs’ 1788 The English Art of Cookery. The one-time chef at London’s Globe Tavern and Temple Coffee House advised that 'to choose eggs properly, you must put the thick end to your tongue'. Warm eggs were said to be fresh, and cold eggs stale – but unless the eggs had just been laid, quite how this technique worked is hard to say.
Victorian Britain's most celebrated book was Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, published in 1861. In its first year, it outsold Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, introducing the general public to bizarre concoctions such as the toast-in-bread sandwich, egg wine and raw beef tea. The latter was made by steeping lean beef and salt in cold water, and it was said to supply 'all that is necessary to sustain life during long periods of illness or inactivity'.
Crudités are another unwitting staple that got the Elizabeth Taylor treatment in the Elizabeth Takes Off cookbook. Cucumber wasn’t served raw, but peeled, sliced into rounds, seasoned with dill, salt and lemon pepper, and steamed 'until just slightly crisp'. Taylor also reserved one day each week for pigging out on her 'wildest food fantasies' – somewhat more conventional dishes like an entire pizza followed by a hot fudge sundae.
The medieval household manual Le Ménagier de Paris includes recipes for the likes of spit-roast porpoise, and hedgehog with wild duck sauce. It wasn't the kind of recipe book that had any concern for your cholesterol levels – just check its basic omelette recipe for proof. Eight eggs (both whites and yolks) were combined with the leaves of sweet marjoram, fennel, parsley, celery, mint and sage to make the hefty dish.
Outside the kitchen, the turbocharged cars of the 1980s typified the extravagance and consumerism of the decade. In 1989, there was even an essential recipe collection for petrol heads: Manifold Destiny by Chris Maynard and Bill Scheller, one of the strangest cookbooks ever published. The world's first (and only) 'guide to cooking on your car engine' professed that with a little bit of ingenuity and 'a whole lot of aluminium foil' you could do anything from making chicken thighs on the Thruway to poaching fish in a Pontiac.
The 19th-century kitchen manual The Cook and Housewife's Manual: A Practical System of Modern Domestic Cookery and Family Management contained plenty of eyebrow-raising uses for cows’ udders. "Beef-udder may be boiled, sliced, and served with tomato or onion sauce," it noted, adding, "salted udder is eaten sliced cold with oil and vinegar. It should be very slowly simmered."
Richard Briggs’ 1788 book The English Art of Cookery has plenty of ideas for how to cook eggs. However, while creations like buttered eggs on toast and 'aumlet' (omelette) with Parmesan could be straight out of a modern recipe book, 'eggs fried as round as balls' are a little further removed from today’s brunch staples. These unusual eats were deep-fried in clarified butter, left to sit for half an hour, then garnished with slices of Seville orange.
While great culinary strides were being made in the mid-20th century, some food fads were still downright dangerous. Between 1931 and 1936, German company Burk & Braun promoted and exported Radium Schokolade (chocolate made with radium water). Unbelievably, this highly radioactive treat – to be eaten in squares or melted into hot chocolate – was claimed to have miraculous powers of rejuvenation.
'Chef sorry for poison plant error' is the headline no restaurateur wants to be associated with. Unfortunately, British TV regular Antony Worrall Thompson’s 2008 mix-up between henbane (a hallucinogen causing drowsiness, disorientation, seizures and death) and fat hen (an edible wild herb) had the press in uproar. For the record, if you find the former, you should under no circumstances 'use its leaves in salads like spinach, make tea and eat the roots'.
Butter is probably the last thing you might expect archaeologists to find buried in a bog. However, more than 300 buried butter pats have been dug up in bogs across Ireland and Scotland in recent years. It’s thought that this ancient preservation technique dates back to 600 BC, although more recent finds come from the 1600s and 1700s. The butter might have been preserved in the bogs to protect it from thieves, or as an offering to the gods. No one really knows.
By the mid-1700s, aphrodisiacs were on the menu. In 1742, Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife became the first cookbook to be printed in the United States, following its London debut some 20 years earlier. Its soups, puddings, cakes and conserves went on to become American staples. However, numerous medicines and salves are also featured in its pages, including an unlikely tonic to 'promote breeding': three pints of good ale spiked with catnip, dates, raisins and three whole nutmeg seeds.
Influencer Johnna Holmgren, the creator of whimsical lifestyle brand Fox Meets Bear, fell from grace when her debut cookbook for foragers and 'adventurous eaters' was cancelled by her publisher. Her dangerous suggestions included serving uncooked wild rice, munching on acorns (which are inedible when raw) and coating raw morels in chocolate (which is likely to cause nausea and vomiting). It might not look as good on Instagram, but sometimes it’s safer to stick to the supermarket.
Who better to look to for cooking advice than French chef Guillaume Tirel, one of the founders of haute cuisine? His acclaimed 14th-century recipe collection, Le Viandier, transformed feasting at the Court of France and had a lasting influence on French cooking. Yet its pages advocate roasting peacock and swan – and keeping cooked meat for a month. Just 'remove the mould and you will find it white, good and solid underneath'.
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Last updated by Luke Paton.