Unusual Foods People Used To Eat

Take a peek at Instagram on any given day, and you'll find it's full of delicious creations and quite a few strange ones. Modern-day chefs and culinary artists are always looking to put their own spin on things, whether it's glitter coffee or making the biggest, baddest freakshake you can imagine.

Food trends are a way of life now, and some of them get pretty strange. But even today's weirdest food trends have nothing on the strange things people used to eat. From blood soup, to cute critters, and everything in between, the diets of yesterday would be hard to stomach today.

We're looking as far back as Ancient Rome, and as recently as the Depression-era to uncover the oddest foods to grace their dinner tables. One glance at this list, and you'll thank your lucky stars for the McDonald's down the street.

Pancakes and waffles are definitely delicious, and they're still a favorite in countless homes today. But starting somewhere around the 16th century, English diners were eating a different sort of pancake than what we're used to — and there was a huge problem with them. Their pancakes were called tansies, and they were made from a batter of eggs, vinegar, and liquid made from ground and crushed flowers that included the tansy, violets, feverfew, and herbs like parsley.

Atlas Obscura says most people served them during Lent and the Easter season, and there were a few things at work here. They were a welcome addition to the restrictive meals of Lent, and they were thought to have medicinal benefits like relieving digestive pains.

Tansies disappeared in the early 20th century, and now we know that far from being medicinal, the tansy flower is poisonous. According to the Government of Alberta, tansies produce alkaloids that are toxic to animals and people alike. So, for hundreds of years, people were eating poison pancakes.

The Great Depression was a dark time in American history, and it was one when families across the nation needed to get creative when it came to feeding their families. According to The Atlantic, there was an entire branch of the USDA — the Bureau of Home Economics — dedicated to helping people survive on the little food they had. There were plenty of beans, prunes, and mystery stews, but some of the foods were even more heartbreaking.

There are a few different versions of the song "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow," made popular by O Brother, Where Art Thou? Some versions — including one called "I Am a Girl of Constant Sorrow" — makes mention of bulldog gravy. What is that? According to The Culinary Sleuth, it was a Depression-era Appalachian dish made from water, flour, and grease. It was usually served with a "water sandwich," which was nothing more than stale bread that had been soaked in a mix of lard and water. Even with that meager food, many families were forced to reduce their meals to an every-other-day schedule.

What do beaver tails and baby rabbits have in common? They were once all seen as completely acceptable, "meat-free" meal options during Lent.

Let's start with beavers. Medieval reasoning said any animal who needed to take shelter on Noah's Ark for their survival was off-limits during Lent and other fasting days, but fish — who could fend for themselves during the flood — were fine to eat. That's great for people in coastal towns, but for inland cities? Not so much, says Atlas Obscura. That's where the Catholic Church stepped in. In the 17th century, the Bishop of Quebec started a movement that got the semi-aquatic beaver (and the capybara, another semi-aquatic mammal and the world's largest rodent) declared fishy enough to be an acceptable Lenten meal. (The capybara still is, in some parts of the world, says Scientific American.)

Bizarrely — and disturbingly — practicing Catholics in medieval Europe were allowed to eat unborn bunny babies during Lent, too. Suddenly, fish isn't looking so bad.

Ambergris has been a prized commodity for centuries, usually in perfume-making where it acts as a fixing agent to help the scent last longer. It comes from whales, and while it's not precisely whale poop, it is whale excrement of a sort. When whales eat squid and the beaks get stuck in their system, a fatty fluid buildup starts to congeal around the mass, which is eventually ejected, likely from the rear end of the whale — that's ambergris.

And people absolutely ate it, particularly in ancient Persia and India. The Manuscript Cookbooks Survey says it was often used as an additive, and after being such an integral part of medieval Arab culture it eventually spread to Europe and became popular in Italy and France first, then finally England.

It was a common ingredient in candies, pastries, whipped cream, puddings, cheesecakes, and even the occasional alcoholic beverage, adding a flavor described as "earthy" and "musky." If that wasn't bad enough, Atlas Obscura says ambergris was also used to make a 17th century ice cream some people described as "floral and mossy," and that others described as "barnyard and armpit."

Necessity is the mother of invention, and when it comes to finding ways to keep your family's bellies full when times are tight, people tend to get super creative. During World War II, people left behind on the home front struggled as resources were diverted to the war effort. Rationing meant cooks needed to find alternatives, and according to Cooks Info, so many people resorted to replacing cooking fat with paraffin wax that the British Ministry of Food needed to restrict it for medicinal purchases only — after all, it was a well-known laxative, so using it in your cooking had negative side effects for everyone at your table.

According to the BBC, liquid paraffin was substituted in a ton of dishes. Fried foods were no longer fried in oil, but in the melted, oil-based wax. It was also lumped into pastries and baked goods like the paraffin cake. The BBC's People's War archive of World War II memories include a recipe for paraffin cake, baked with flour, sugar, dried egg, baking powder, lemon essence, just enough milk to mix, and a few tablespoons of paraffin.

In 2018, The Guardian reported that food waste was reaching crisis levels, and if things continue on the same path, about 73 tons of food will be thrown away every second as we approach 2030. It wasn't always like that — throughout history, families used each and every bit of food they had. Nothing went to waste, and it gave rise to dishes like calf's foot jelly.

That's exactly what it sounds like, says Food History News's Sandra Oliver (via NPR). In the 19th century, it wasn't uncommon for cooks to use calf's feet to make a jelly. The process was pretty simple, and involved boiling the feet until the mixture reduced, then removing the fat and adding wine, lemon juice, and eggs. It could be sweetened to taste, Oliver says, and she also says that anyone cringing should know that the gelatin that's used in foods today is made by much the same process. We might not think about eating byproducts of the slaughterhouse industry, but we do: out of sight, out of mind.