Anything deep fried in oil. And onions and garlic, the smallest shred! The smell seems to get absorbed into the walls or something, it stays for days and days even if I open up every window to air the place out. This is why there are restaurants that serve deep-fried whatevers, this is why KFC does big business. IMO. Blooming onions and such are best left to professionals.
Burned garlic.
We deliver meals on wheels and for some reason, whenever they are serving cooked green beans, I have to have the windows open in the car.
Beets.
Cooked canned spinach.
My wife makes a slaw recipe where the dressing, which contains vinegar and sugar, has to be boiled. Nothing gets to me like the smell of boiling vinegar.
Clams.
Sauerkraut.
Browning meat can get pretty bad. Especially ground deer meat. So far it hasn’t made me sick. Maybe a really, really big pan would.
Helps having some onion in the pan. I prefer onion smell over the meat cooking.
You know that maple cured bacon? Cook that with onions. Vomit. My dad loves it.
Liver and onions.
My first roommate ever loved liver and onions and she made it 2 or 3 times a week. I was pregnant, and having morning sickness morning, noon and night, and the wall o’stench would get me and I would have to leave, and no matter how much she aired the place out, it always lingered. Finally she stopped after she was complaining to me on the phone that the smell wasn’t there so I could come home, I walked in the door and threw up on her.
Took me almost 10 years before I could eat sauteed onions on a steak … but to this day the stench of liver and onions makes me want to hurl.
I must have a touch of synaesthesia because when I smell turnips frying in butter I have a zap down my spine and have a sensation like those blinking lights on top of tall buildings. Strange and very unpleasant.
When I was pregnant I couldn’t tolerate the smell of frying meat.
[ul]
[li]cabbage[/li][li]turnips[/li][li]popcorn[/li][/ul]
Many, many years ago I opened the door of the dishwasher and encountered the stench of the sausage-frying pan. It hadn’t been in there long at all, but the smell was bad enough that I threw up in the dishwasher.
Microwave popcorn that has artificial butter flavoring makes the office smell like old pee.
Coffee
The smell of a milk-based sauce with sweet peppers in it. Particularly, Turkey a la King. I can’t eat such dishes, either. I’m not a picky eater–but I can’t swallow that combination.
My morning sickness brought on an aversion to the smell of cooking eggs and cooking meat.
I second popcorn. Gross smell while cooking, but loved to eat it (back when I did)
Don’t mind the smell of fried eggs, but not scrambled eggs. Unfortunately the SO likes scrambled better than the way the Universe intended, fried, so I gotta deal with it.
Heating in coconut oil. I can’t stand frying anything in the stuff, smells like plastic. I have to take my CO straight, and just pretend there’s chocolate around it.
Wow - I feel sorry for you guys.
I can’t think of a single think being cooked that I don’t love. I just adore the smell of food being prepared…
Artichokes. They smell horrible during the cooking process.
Dried chilis briefly boiled.
When I make chili, I usually use a generous amount of dried ancho, guajillo and serrano. To reconstitute before adding to the chili pot, I’ll bring a pot of water to a slow boil, toss in the chilis, then kill the heat after 1-2 minutes. From there the chilis plus a bit of the water go through the food processor to give a chili purée / paste. This goes in the chili pot.
Gah, the water though - to me, it smells like stale rot. Plus it’s irritating from all the hot capsaicin vapors.
Delicious in the final product, but nasty in the prep.
Nobody here has mentioned beef tripe. My grandma used to make tripe stew two to three times a year before I stopped her. It smelled like a power outage at the morgue in the entire house. To this day I have never tried a bite of it; my nose hasn’t steered me wrong before!
Anything that lives under water. Coffee. Broccoli. I’m not crazy about microwave popcorn (the “butter” smells like rubber so often) Corned beef and cabbage. I could probably make myself vomit right now if I imagined the smell of that too realistically.
I don’t mind smelling or eating mushy overcooked cabbage. I cooked some with onions until it was a nice brown goo. Yummy smelling and tasty.
For me it’s cumin. For some reason it smells like rancid armpit to me. Tastes fine though.
Restaurant – the smell of Subway gags me. Smells like vomit.
Home cooking – hardboiled eggs, probably.