What’s the point of an impossible recipe?

Last month, against my better judgment, I downloaded TikTok. Within moments I found myself watching what I can only describe as a series of culinary hate crimes. I could not look away. In one video, over the course of nearly two spellbinding, stomach-churning minutes, Eli of @elis_kitchen, self-described as the “most evil chef on TikTok”, takes a packet of luncheon meat and pulverises it in a blender with a generous slug of whipping cream. They whisk the resulting slurry to the texture of stiff vomit, then strain it through a sieve before spreading the pale-pink paste over a pre-packaged Danish pastry, garnishing it with blueberries and taking a big bite with a cheery thumbs-up for viewers.

Eli’s revolting but perversely ingenious posts, which rework the processed products of the modern American food system, are part of a popular and strangely compelling sub-genre on TikTok. In a space where likes and views are everything, posting disgusting recipes, the more shocking the better, is a good way to get attention. I now know what happens when a tube of Pringles is blended into a flour, mixed with oil and water, and turned into an ersatz pastry, and that creating a terrine made from cottage cheese and raspberry jelly is not for the faint-hearted.

These projects might appear distinctly 21st century, but the impossible, improbable, anti-recipe has a rich history. Professional chefs have long been guiltily or gleefully producing recipes that nudge at the edges of credulity. The first culinary manuscript in the English language, The Forme of Cury, written around 1390, lists the recipes served by the “chief Master cooks of Richard II”. Among the 196 dishes described, there are ordinary sounding pies and roasts, but there are bizarre recipes too. One for “cokagrys”, for example, involves cutting a capon and pig in half, stuffing the body cavities with forcemeat and sewing the two halves together, before roasting and serving the hybrid beast gilded with gold and silver leaf.

Fantastical foods were similarly described by the French-trained professional chef Robert May, some 270 years later. In the introduction to his 1660 book, The Accomplisht Cook, May remembers with nostalgia the delights of feasting before the fun-sponge Puritans took over. He describes a table decorated with a life-size pastry stag, hollowed out, filled with claret and speared with an arrow, along with two pies, one containing live birds and the other live frogs. A guest was invited to pull the arrow from the stag so that the claret poured out, “as blood runneth out of a wound”, and the pie lids were lifted to release “the flying Birds, the skipping Frogs” to “cause much delight and pleasure to the whole company”.

The spectacular concoctions described by May were not designed for eating, they were served up as culinary theatre, meant to delight and entertain at a medieval banquet, just as the shock-Tok recipes are intended to revolt and amaze.

Still, recipes intended for the very affluent often blur the lines of what might be practicable or possible. The 1828 French Cookery, written by the godfather of haute cuisine, Marie‑Antoine Carême, details dishes of outrageous complexity. On quick estimation, his recipe for grosse meringue à la Parisienne would take a professional chef about 30 hours to complete. This, of course, is part of the point. A recipe that demands legions of skilled chefs sweating at the stove screams staff, status and surplus income. It’s design over substance.

In recent decades, the molecular gastronomy crowd have continued this trend by producing cookery books where a single recipe might extend across many pages, require high-tech equipment and esoteric ingredients. The recipes in Heston Blumenthal’s huge, hernia-inducing 2008 The Fat Duck Cookbook, for example, call for “N-Zorbit M (tapioca maltodextrin)” and “Douglas fir essential oil”. Not exactly store-cupboard staples. The 2022 cookery book produced by René Redzepi and his team, Noma 2.0, dispensed with any pretence: “This book is a cookbook, but it is not necessarily meant to be cooked from,” the Noma website explains. Instead it should, “help catalyse that unique creative spark for each reader.”

It’s tempting to find these concoctions exasperating, but making is only part of the point of a recipe

It’s tempting to find these chef-y propositions exasperating, but making is only ever part of the point of a recipe. They are first and foremost a vehicle for an author to assert their vision of the world. A recipe is an invitation to organise your life a certain way, according to the vision, expertise and prejudices of the author. When we open a cookery book, we temporarily enter into the author’s universe. This is why so many of us hoard piles of cookery books we may never actually cook from, and why I keep a pile of cookery books on my bedside table. Dreaming about what I could cook rather than determining what I will cook is an effortless pleasure requiring absolutely no labour. Heaven!

This is also why cookery books are such fantastic sources for understanding the past. Rooting through recipes — contemporary or historical — tells us very little about what people actually cook and eat, but they reveal so much about the aspirations, anxieties and preoccupations of their author and their world. It also explains why, on occasion, cookery writers offer up recipes they expressly do not want the reader to cook. In the preface to her 1747 The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, Hannah Glasse, for instance, establishes her disapproval of French cookery: “[i]f gentleman will have French cooks, they must pay for French tricks.” To emphasise her point, she includes, in a collection of otherwise notably practical recipes, “A French Way of Dressing Partridge” with butter, bacon, wine and truffle. “This dish,” she tells readers, “I do not recommend, for I think it an odd jumble of trash.” The recipe here is not a practical offering, it exists to prove a point.

Mrs Bertrand Russell’s “Recipe for Cooking and Preserving A Good Suffrage Speaker”, printed in the 1912 fundraising The Women’s Suffrage Cookery Book, takes this a step further. The book’s other recipes, donated by suffrage campaigners from across the United Kingdom, speak to the creativity, practicality and constraints of everyday domestic life. Mrs Phelps from Scorton offers up “Sponge Crust Pudding”. Russell’s recipe, meanwhile, instructs the reader to: “Butter the speaker, when asking her to come, with a stamped addressed envelope . . . ”, “Grease the dish by paying all the speaker’s expenses” and “Beat her to a froth with an optimistic spoon”. Russell’s contribution is obviously comical not culinary, but it shares with the rest of the book an invocation to imagine a different world, one where women are politically enfranchised.

Rejecting the political status quo was also what Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s outlandish recipes, included in his 1932 Futurist Cookbook, set out to achieve. A member of the futurist, nationalist movement, Marinetti’s recipes could never be cooked, but provide the ingredients for imagining a new social order. He embraced technology and rejected all forms of tradition. He proposed to “destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind” in a bid to free the nation from an obsession with the past. Perhaps most radical of all, Marinetti called for a “total renewal in our way of eating”, and declared war on the nation’s national dish, pasta. According to Marinetti, pasta was responsible for the “incurable sadness” and emasculation of Italian men.

Alongside the rejection of Italy’s national dish, Marinetti’s recipes paint pictures and describe scenarios rather than set out detailed instructions. For a “Heroic Winter Dinner”, for example, he describes a recipe to feed a group of soldiers who will “have to . . . enter the line of fire at four . . . or go up in an aeroplane to bomb cities”. When the soldiers leave for battle, they “swallow the Throat-Explosion, a solid liquid consisting of a pellet of Parmesan cheese steeped in Marsala.”

Marinetti’s impossible recipes offer up a proto-fascist, nationalist feast, as unappealing and dystopian as the culinary hellscape TikTok invites us to witness. By contrast, the sometimes improbable recipes described in the surrealist Alice B Toklas Cook Book (1954) champion an embrace of sensuous pleasure. “Hen with golden eggs” involves mashed potatoes shaped into eggs, fried in butter and then stuffed into a chicken. The recipe’s primary purpose for Toklas is a generous invitation to the reader to experience something of her and her partner Gertrude Stein’s avant-garde lives, as much as an actual command to cook.

If Toklas’s recipes feel like a generous invitation, the outrageous recipes in Salvador Dalí’s lavishly illustrated cookery book are there to confirm the artist’s wacky persona. The recipe for “pierced heart” — fashioned from beef, minced pork and cheese and then painted with tomato purée and cream and served on a mushroom bread biscuit — seems as confected and unlikely as Dalí himself, as does a recipe for “eggs on spit” involving emptied egg shells stuffed with blood sausage scrambled eggs on a skewer.

Dalí’s eggs reminded me of the recipe for a “Monster Egg” which appears in the 1877 Kettner’s Book of the Table. This involves cooking 24 egg yolks in a small pig’s bladder then placing the egg whites in a larger bladder, adding the cooked yolks, tying up and boiling until hard. Whether anyone ever actually attempted to reproduce this monster egg, Dalí’s confected pierced heart or the bleeding pastry stag May remembered wistfully is kind of irrelevant.

The joy of impossible recipes is that you don’t have to actually go through the labour and expense of making them. Nor, by extension, do you have to eat them — which could be a blessing when it comes to many of the offerings that grace our phone screens (although if you wanted to try them at home, there’s nothing to stop you). But to some extent, this is really the case with all recipes, even the most prosaic. The majority in any given cookery book are most likely never attempted. For more than two decades, I have salivated over Joyce Molyneux’s recipe for turbot with ginger lime hollandaise in The Carved Angel Cookery Book but I know I’m never going to make it. It doesn’t matter; the fantasy is gratifying enough. Recipes exist as much in the mind as they do on the plate.

Polly Russell is the head of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and a food historian

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