Gagging for it

The search for the worst recipe of all times is over. The people have spoken.

- STEVE BRAUNIAS

In a recent Listener column devoted to the subject of terrible meals, I invited readers to hold their noses and take a deep dive into crimes against food by sharing recipes that have haunted them like screams and whimpers in the night. “Present a meal,” I implored, “that could maim or kill.”

It was a very popular appeal. I received dozens of emails. Many were historic in nature, reaching back to another time in the New Zealand story. They remembered or sourced slop that was regularly served on the tables of the nation during the 19th and 20th centuries—we think of the Victorian decades as the early-settler period for Pākehā but the emails were a reminder that New Zealand took a hell of a long time to get settled.

The food was as bad in the 1950s as it was in the 1850s. We remained a land of mutton and three vege boiled for hours until they surrendered all taste. Town and country were the same: city folk ate as badly as peasants farming the land. To live in an egalitarian society was to sit down and eat food that looked like an assault.

BOILED EVERYTHING

A good example was this atrocity, described by Karina. She wrote, “Boiled rolled tongue in aspic used to appear on my Irish grandmother's table as a cold luncheon meat. She was a widow who raised eight kids and ran a farm in Kerepehi, and we, her townie grandkids from Hamilton, ate it before we were old enough to know better. I have a vivid memory when I was older of my sister eating it on a dare. It was a dairy farm so possibly it was a cow's tongue. God, it just gets worse.”