While sometimes I’ll admit people can have strange cravings for weird foods, I tend to think that as a whole, our palates are alright. Sure, perhaps we don’t have the refined taste buds of a seasoned food critic, but at least you won’t find us in the kitchen preparing weird vintage recipes. Seriously: the look of these dishes will have you losing your appetite in no time.
To be fair, everyone has different taste in food. But there comes a time when you realize that the best use for gelatin is to make jello shots — not to whip up weird wiggly dishes that are best reserved for the kids’ table. Sure, an occasional, elegant jello dessert can be a fun dish to serve — but home chefs in the 1950s had a whole different idea.
1. Vegetable And Tuna JELLO Wreath
If you’ve ever flipped through your grandmother’s old cookbooks, then you’ll know that the 1950s were a truly disturbing era for American cuisine. People liked to make flashy dishes and pair foods that should probably just never be paired.
Take this dish for instance – a Christmas tradition (that we’re all really glad didn’t make it to 2017).
2. Frosted Ribbon Loaf
Even the name is enough to make you want to projectile vomit everywhere. I don’t care what anyone says, ham, eggs, and “frosting” have no business being in a loaf. That’s just some Dr. Seuss s**t right there.
3. Jellied Tomato Refresher
I have a lot of questions about this one: are you supposed to drink it? Why did they feel the need to add gelatin to this one exactly? And what about it is refreshing? We need to know!
4. Orange Delight Pie
Am I the only one who thinks that pies just shouldn’t be a radioactive-orange color? And to make things worse, this “pie” is basically just cream cheese mixed with orange Kool-Aid powder. It’s an insult to pie-kind.
5. Christmas Candle Salad
Let’s just ignore for a second the fact that these “candles” look incredibly phallic. Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, the candles are made of bananas and the stars are cranberry JELL-O. Not so bad, right? Wait for it…the “melted wax” is made out of mayo.
6. Lime And Cheese Salad
This one might be the most disgusting thing on the list because it combines a lot of things that should never ever be combined: JELL-O (because of duh), cottage cheese, mayo, and seafood. I could barely write this down without feeling the urge to barf.
7. Tuna And JELLO Pie
You could totally make a drinking game out of this: drink every time you see a recipe that uses JELL-O, bananas, tuna or a single green olive his hidden somewhere. Just kidding. Don’t do that, because you’ll literally die.
8. Frozen Fruitcake Salad
Fruitcake was already bad enough, and they just had to go and freeze it. So now, in addition to eating something disgusting, you get to break your teeth on it too! And last time I checked, nothing about this is a “salad.”
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