My mom was a depression baby from the midwest, and wasn’t much of a cook.
She’d combine all the leftovers from the fridge in one pot and call it “garbage soup”. All the small refrigerator containers of spaghetti, creamed corn, tamale pie remnants, and red beans and rice would be stirred together in a pot with water and served up. I’m still nauseated just thinking about it.
ETA: as far as restaurant meals, we were once in a Chinese restaurant, and a waiter walked by bearing a plate of fermented tofu. It smelled exactly like cat shit. Diners in the restaurant were covering their noses and gagging.
I have not traveled much outside the U.S. (I’ve stuck toes into Mexico and Canada) so I don’t really have an “unfamiliar ingredient” story. I do remember being about 8 years old, and was invited to stay for dinner at a playmate’s/neighbor’s house. There was NOTHING on that table that I would eat, but I did nibble at a little bit of what was probably instant rice in a watery tomato sauce, and my mother fixed me a plate when I got home and explained what had happened.
Around the same age, my church hosted a curry dinner as a fundraiser, and the adults were very excited about this. Us kids were all holding our noses when we walked into the church, and couldn’t believe the grownups were actually eating that stuff. My band director went there, and he was grinning from ear to ear with a heaping plate of it. Me? I got a small portion, and ate the rice and pineapple. I’m still not a big curry fan, except with roasted cauliflower.
Then there was the infamous 1/4" chicken. I call it that because that’s all the deeper the cooked part actually went. From there on it was pink, and on to frozen in the middle. This was because the guy cooking it had forgotten to take it out of the freezer. C’mon, man, how do you forget the main course?
This brought back memories of the time when I had dinner at my girlfriend’s home and her mother made this concoction of octopus, shrimps and eggplant braised in some kind of soy sauce broth. I like all those things separately but when combined, it gave off the most foulest of odors and the way everything came out black, it wasn’t appetizing to the eyes either. It was served family style in a big cocotte so I just declined to serve myself and saved myself from having to vomit at the dinner table.
I later asked my girlfriend what that dish was and she said it didn’t have a name. Just an original Frankenstein recipe her mother came up. She hated it too.
Oddly, my kids have become very picky eaters – like in the “kids menu” only chicken nuggets/fingers, hamburgers and fries sort of thing. The plainer, the better for them. But they somehow like curry and extra sharp cheese of any sort.
There’s a woman on another website who has said many times that “meals like your grandmother used to make” would be a mortal insult, because the one grandmother she grew up with was a really bad cook. She overboiled EVERYTHING into a tasteless mush.
A man I dated in college told me about his strangest restaurant experience; it was a, if you will, genuine Chinese restaurant and on the appetizer menu was fish lips. Yes, fish lips, and for 99 cents, they thought, what the heck? He and his companions (IIRC, his dad and stepmom) ordered it, and they brought out a platter of something that looked and tasted like gelatinous rubber bands. Oh, well, for 99 cents, it was worth it to say he’d tried fish lips.
Casserole is the work of the devil. The thought of eating rat might be disgusting but at the end of the day its just another meat. But the texture and appearance of casserole, especially tuna, is truly disgusting.
“Broccoli surprise,” served at a friend’s house when I was a child. Now, I loathe broccoli and always have, but this was a uniquely horrid take on it. It consisted solely of large broccoli chunks in a block of underdone Bisquick. I was a very polite child and so I did not complain. I gagged down (literally) as much as I could and spread the remainder around my plate.
That was even worse than the quiche made with spoiled cheese (again having dinner at a childhood friend’s place). In that case, I was saved by virtue of everyone else at the table declaring the food revolting, and so I only had to down a bite or two. The father, who had cooked the meal, got a verbal scolding from the mother for apparently being unable to smell when cheese had gone bad. Nevertheless, this was not as bad as the broccoli surprise.
My mom was a great cook. Or at least she became one after my dad’s mom taught her everything. Anyway, one evening when she was still somewhat of a newlywed, they had some very important company over. She decided to make a dessert she’d never made before, baked Alaska. But she must have gotten distracted when it was in the oven. Long story short, she had to improvise something else for dessert.
My SIL made beef stew and flank steak and fresh string beans. Her Mom was a great cook, so she never cooked before she got married. The meat completely fell apart, becoming grainy and the string beans, which were also severely overcooked, gave the stew a strange flavor. My ex and I got sick that night. The next day I asked my Dad, who and a cast iron stomach, said he was sick too. Later, when I asked my brother if he got sick, he said he did and my SIL threw the rest of the stew out. OTOH, my Mom who absolutely loved my SIL (because she was overly protective like my Mom), said she was having seconds the day. No one else ate a bite!
Worst meal I ever had given to me by someone who claimed they knew how to cook was a friend’s wife who meaned well but “cooked us” some soup when I was over the house on several occassions helping her husband fix something.
The soup was literally ramen noodles, but nuked in the microwave with the noodles still in the water the entire time. The result was the gummiest, most bland ramen noodles in lukewarm water I ever tasted. My friend acted like this was a made-from-scratch home cooked meal for whatever reason. He would brag to other friends about his “wife’s amazing soups” she made. I have no idea why he did that but it made it so I always remembered it.
Growing up in VA moms would occasionally get a hankering for some of that old school soul food.
At about the age of 7 when I smelled chitterlings being cleaned for the first time I puked, ran out of the house and didn’t return until the smell had gone away. It goes without saying that the experience left an impression. A little more than 30 years later I find myself sitting in a restaurant in Taiwan where our hosts wanted us to sample a wide variety of local cuisine and, you guessed it, some type of pig intestines was on the menu. I’m pretty sure I insulted our host when I passed on the dish but I was just happy that I didn’t start dry heaving at the table.
Years later when I was a teenager I went to see what was for dinner and there floating in a pot of almost boiling water were 2 nasty looking severed feet. The older folks couldn’t wait to tear into those pig’s feet but how anyone can eat that shit is beyond my ability to understand.
But I wouldn’t eat that. That sounds dicey. I mean, maybe a slice from the very outside…
Me. I don’t like mystery agglomerations of stuff with weird textures. That includes most casseroles. Give me a crispy fried caterpillar or a sauted rat, thanks.
But the worst food I’ve ever eaten was mystery meat. I was in the Czech republic, and couldn’t read the signs at the buffet. It was some meat on the bone in a dark sauce. It looked okay. But wow did it taste foul. I had trouble getting the taste out of my mouth. No idea what it was.
The most disgusting dish I didn’t eat was natto. Looks like lumpy gray snot and smells nasty. I tried to eat it, mostly to say I had done so. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s very popular in Japan, though. I assume it’s super-nutritious, and people develop a taste for it because their body says, “that was GOOD!”. So it was easy to give my portion to someone sitting next to me.
There was the time my MIL made us a fancy Salt Crusted steak. Only she didn’t cook it hot enough, or something… the meat was grey, soggy, and absorbed tons of the salt.
I was polite and choked my serving down. My wife rinsed her steak off in the sink.
