14 Bizarre Delicacies From the Past

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14 Bizarre Delicacies From the Past

From weird meats to various types of slime, humans have eaten just about everything.

Published 6 months ago in Wtf

Food is subjective. What’s delicious to me you may find disgusting, and vice versa. With that said, though, it’s hard not to see some foods as just plain weird.

Food has come a long way since we started hunting and gathering, and not all of the twists and turns that path took seem that appetizing nowadays. From weird meats to various types of slime, humans have eaten just about everything. And some of it, they really, really liked.

Check out these strange foods that were extremely popular at one point in time, and if any of them grabs your fancy, consider looking up a recipe.

1
Mice
Dormice – the cutest type of mouse – were a delicacy among the upper classes of Ancient Rome. They were served stuffed with other meats, or cooked in honey and poppy seeds.

2
Torpedo fuel
Sailors in World War II enjoyed a cocktail called ‘Torpedo Juice’. It was made up of lemon, pineapple juice, and 180-proof alcohol that was used as fuel in torpedoes.

3
Blood soup
A common dish in Sparta was ‘black soup’. It was a simple broth made of just three ingredients: pig’s blood, salt, and vinegar.

4
Beaver tails
In the 17th century, the Catholic church declared that beavers counted as fish because they spent much of their time in the water. This meant that beaver meat was allowed to be eaten by Catholics during Lent, and beaver tails became a popular dish during that time.

5
Black iguana eggs
Mayans farmed black iguanas and enjoyed eating their eggs. These eggs had a leathery exterior and were all yolk on the inside. Rich and delicious.

6
Mock bananas
During the 1940s in Britain, food rationing was in effect due to the war, and many exotic fruits which were once available were scarce or nonexistent. To sate their hunger for bananas, British people would create fake bananas by adding banana essence to parsnips.

7
Cockentrice
A dish from Medieval England, Cockentrice is probably the weirdest and most unsettling food you will ever see. It consists of the upper body of a piglet sewn onto the bottom of a turkey or chicken, roasted over a spit. Truly horrific.

8
Jello salad
20th century Americans cooked up all sorts of monstrous dishes, and chief among them were various forms of savory gelatin, stuffed with chicken, tuna, vegetables, and other things that should come nowhere near jello.

9
Ambergris
A mysterious digestive byproduct from sperm whales, ambergris is more than worth its weight in gold and had a wide variety of uses throughout history. Seeing as it is basically whale excrement, it might surprise you to know that one of its uses was to add flavor to various foods, from roasted game to ice cream.

10
Roast Without Equal
If you thought Cockentrice was upsetting, you haven’t seen anything yet. Rôti Sans Pareil, or ‘Roast Without Equal’ was a 19th-century French dish that consisted of 17 birds stuffed inside of each other. The original recipe called for the following birds, in order from smallest to largest: a warbler, a bunting, a lark, a thrush, a quail, a lapwing, a plover, a partridge, a woodcock, a teal, a guinea fowl, a duck, a chicken, a pheasant, a goose, a turkey, and finally a giant bustard.

11
Garum
Garum is a fermented sauce made by leaving fish intestines and blood in the sun for up to three months. It was hugely popular in Ancient Rome, where it was only legal to make outside of cities because of how revolting it smelled. Ancient Romans added garum to everything, from eggs, to meat, to even dessert.

12
Flamingo tongues
Yet another bizarre food from Ancient Rome, the tongues of flamingos were seen as a great delicacy and luxury item for the wealthy. The body meat of the flamingo was eaten as well. It was prepared by braising, as an ancient recipe says: “Parrot is prepared in the same manner.”

13
Deep-fried maple leaves
Deep-fried maple leaves have been eaten in Japan for hundreds of years. The recipe calls for only yellow maple leaves, and specifically leaves that have not yet fallen off the tree. The leaves need to be soaked in salt water for almost a year before being fried. This delicacy is still enjoyed today.

14
Human flesh
A list like this wouldn’t be complete without a nod to cannibalism. Many cultures around the world have either resorted to or enjoyed the consumption of human flesh, including in Mesopotamia, China, Greek, Egypt, and, to this day, Papua New Guinea. Reasons for cannibalism vary; some believe that it cures various ailments, while others do it for spiritual reasons.