What was the worst food you ate at someone's home?

Years ago a co-worker invited a few of us over for her famous mac n cheese. Her famous mac n cheese was doctored up Kraft Mac n Cheese with tuna in it that tasted like cat food smells. Revolting.

OP, that sounds authentic. Sorry your grandma doesn’t cook Olive Garden.

When I was living in Italy, tripe in tomato, tripe on a roll with green sauce...loved it.

I don't like tripe often, but I make it every couple of years. It could be bad if it wasn't soaked or cooked long enough, but I think your nonna knew what she was doing.

Pussy

Dick

I’ve always wondered, guys: how well cooked is the tripe?

Cuz with our menudo we prefer a soft consistency. Really tender on biting it.

How is it cooked Italian style?

Shepherd's pie made with instant mashed potatoes, very fatty hamburger meat, cheddar cheese and very cheap gravy.

Made by the sister of some guy I dated. She was a prison guard in Texas.

“I know what I’m doing here, trust the process!”

Blood pudding for breakfast. Smelled vile and looked like stool. Just thinking about taste and consistency makes gag.

Tainted oysters.

R7 - I cook it in salted water with some onion, celery, carrot, a few whole cloves, some peppercorns, and a bay leaf for about and hour. Meanwhile, I start some tomato sauce with onions, garlic, crushed red pepper, passata, and rosemary. Then I take it out of the water, slice it into strips, add it to the tomato sauce and cook for another 45 minutes, to an hour, adding water as necessary. I don't like a really thick sauce.

Mashwi R’as - roasted sheep's head. The brains are the "best part" and absolutely vomitous.

Homemade "sushi" from some unknown fish from a muddy stream...sick for days.

Some kind of string pasta. It was like eating a spider web.

I suppose I was a horrible little Nellie Prisspot, but it wasn't the food, it was the attractiveness of the people serving it, and the cleanliness/shape of the homes I was in that made the experience a living hell. I was being babysat by my homely cousin and his fat, ugly wife, who made me chocolate milk. It had lumps of Hershey's Quick that had not been stirred at all correctly, and the house smelled musty and old!

At my childhood friend Angie's birthday party, I declined the cake because her ugly mother's kitchen had a layer of grease on everything, and there was dirt in the refrigerator.

Charred goat-head meat cut off with a machete and boiled plantains. 🇨🇲

Janssons frestelse at a friend’s Christmas dinner. She is Swedish and invited a small group to treat us to a “special” holiday dinner. This Swedish dish is basically scalloped potatoes with onions, cream, and pickled, bone-in, sardine-like fish. Truly vomitous. I think that among all seven of us guests, maybe four teaspoonsful were actually consumed. The rest was pushed around on plates and left in the casserole dish.

Horse meat.

I didn't know that's what it was. I thought I was eating beef.

This was always a joke in my family: I spent the night with a friend and plain unseasoned hamburger on top of Fritos with Campbell tomato soup poured over it was “Mexican-type” food.

As an adult I can appreciate the tripe dish, as a kid the texture made me gag and I thought it was the worst thing ever.

A friend made Chicken Maryland for us once. I don't know how authentic it was as none of us were American or had even heard of this dish before but it was so completely revolting we still talk about it to this day. We'll be eating something and someone will quip "You know what this needs? BANANA!".

Bones in a casserole? Anyway, the versions of Jansson's temptation I've seen use anchovies, which doesn't sound half bad. But what you described does sound revolting, R18.

R22 = It took me several tried to see what Chicken Maryland was, because several recipes use the same name. I found the one with banana. The fried chicken part seems fine. The sauce does sound kind of vile.

My neighbors are big Anglophiles. I was invited to dinner at their house, and it was the blandest food I've ever had, not a bit of seasoning. It was like eating in London. It was unseasoned ham and some kind of asparagus that was like eating sticks.

Well, it was at my own place, but...

A turkey that was overcooked and dry as a bone. No about of gravy or cranberry sauce could cure it.

Dry meatballs made by an aunt by marriage

I was invited to a friend’s house for lunch. His mom (an alcoholic with a beehive do) made her special grilled cheese sandwich: Wonder Bread with Miracle Whip, a wedge of Laughing Cow cheese, cooked under a steam iron.

A limp grey boiled fatty pork roast, no sides. Just the meat. Probably unseasoned too, but I made an excuse not to eat. Still a bit ashamed of that.

A wedge of iceberg lettuce topped with dollops of mayonnaise and peanut butter. My host said it was a southern specialty. Years later I now think he was pranking all his guests.

It's a thing. I think Emmy on YouTube tried it once.

Sweet and sour ham hock. That was prepared by a friend's mother when I was staying over. She cooked other very odd things. I'd sit at the table and be anxious as the food was brought out worrying that I wouldn't be able to stomach it.

R18 - LOL - I make that every year - and yes my family is Swedish.

It's a divisive dish.

We usually make half with anchovies and half without. The side without anchovies gets devoured - it really is a great dish.

I appreciate both. Never had it with sardines.

Now - Surstromming - I had that at my cousin's. There are videos about it. It's insane how bad it is. Truly insane. But you eat it with potatoes, cream, onions, etc. Covers the taste somewhat but oh no.

R24 I'm from London and have never, ever heard of 'ham and asparagus' as a dish. It sounds more like a German thing. We get asparagus wrapped in parma or serrano ham here but that sounds like a very different thing (and not very English at all as neither parma nor serrano ham are English).

Toss up.

A friend of my grandmother served me a salad that was lettuce plopped with Miracle Whip, covered by a piece of American cheese.

Another friend of hers served stale cookies and spoiled orange juice.

My grandmother was an excellent cook. She usually had her friends over for lunch. This explains why.

As for my own friends, a friend’s mom used to boil random vegetables and mash them together. This can be good done right but this was an unseasoned mess.

I had a piece of Turkey at Thanksgiving that had that silvery shimmer of uncooked poultry.

Horse meat at my German grandmother's house. Ed, the butcher, had a source and it made its way through the neighborhood in white butcher paper like contraband. The texture was hideous.

R36 - you can find horsemeat regularly in France. If you see a butcher and there's a horse head sign on the outside - it's a horse butcher shop. Many people may not know what boucherie chevaline means.

Boucherie is butcher - people may think chevaline is a name or description. No - cheval is horse.

I've wanted to try it but never did. But a lot of people like it.

Cheez Whiz toast with pickles.

No ketchup, R38?

This is an impossible question. Can we please stick to reality ie situations that can actually occur?

Something that I will call, more than charitably, a salade composée. I was invited for lunch at some schoolfriend's house, and her mother made plates of something that was supposed to look like a person. I don't recall exactly what it looked like or if it were in open-faced sandwich form rather than just an arrangement of ingredients on a place. However, I do remember a half a canned peach half for the head and bits of other fruits and vegetables for arms and legs. The body may have been a piece of bread.

I was used to eating actual good food at home and couldn't believe what I was seeing. And I didn't like canned peaches.

^plate, not place, obviously.

fried bologna sandwich with mayonnaise

no, sir, I'm not eating it. My parents don't make me eat bologna or mayonnaise.

And, no, sir, I'm not eating it when you scrape the mayonnaise off and replace the bologna with ham. The mayonnaise is still in the bread. I can tell.

My parents let me have peanut butter and jelly on new bread.

My ex mother in law from MN made spam burgers - spam, velveta and tomato soup cooked together and served on a white bun. So SO gross. These were middle class folks too but they had the worst taste in food.

That's really gross, R44, but I wonder if it actually tasted good in a junk-food kind of way. It's got grease, cheese, salt, and seasonings. How was it?

It was terrible R45 because she didn't use the oregano or any pepper. So you got weird soupy sweet and salty gunk. I like some junky foods - fries and gravy, nachos etc but this was just awful.

My own dick. But the dog did enjoy it at least.

I was invited to a friend's house, enticed by the RAVES for his abuelita's buñuelos. Ugh! They were horrible-- rancid grease was obviously used. They were burnt! And heavily dusted with . . ..(fuck ...) BROWN SUGAR. Like trying to eat a deflated football. Except worse.

Jansson’s Temptation is made with pickled sprats. Unfortunately, the Swedish word for sprat is a cognate of English anchovy. But they are not what Americans know as anchovies, which I do not mind if they are filleted. The bones are tiny like sardines, but still noticeable and revolting.

R32 What a kind thing to do, make it without the fish!

As for surströmming — been there, done that. No matter how many add ins, it’s still fermented, rotten fish. The first time I had it I was 16. All the adults were chasing it with vodka. I chased it with Colgate and Listerine. I have brought it back home a few times as a prank. One time, however, even after I told the hostess of the party I took it to not to open it indoors, she did anyway. It sprayed surströmming juice all over the kitchen and her. That was the last time I was invited to her place.

Forced to eat a brussels sprout at a friend's house. We never had them because my father hated them. I didn't want to bite into it so I tried to swallow it whole and it got stuck in my throat.

My maternal Grandmother was one of the world worst cooks, she could ruin anything she cooked. I don't remember any particular meal because it has been so long ago but I hated it when she would invite me over for a meal. I always went because I knew she did it for the company but damn that woman was a bad cook.

At our next-door neighbors' (the Foxes) I was served fricasseed squirrel. It was actually pretty good, but Good Lord, did I have trouble swallowing any of it. The Foxes, in their turn, turned their noses up at my Mom's Cincinnati Chili.

When I was a little kid, an elderly aunt we were visiting was serving some appetizers ---including shrimp/cocktail sauce. I was just about to pick up a nice big shrimp but my mother came quickly to my side, whispering in my ear that they hadn't been cleaned, just shelled. WHAT?!

Some people may think that shrimp guts are full of nutrients, but I was revolted and always wary of her food after that. No wonder my parents usually insisted on going out to eat and/or getting take out when visiting her.

Boiled chicken with mustard and dried-out asparagus at a former teacher's home. Sara Lee for dessert.

I just remembered a Sunday dinner my maternal grandmother served when I was 6 or 7 years old. She had just purchased an Amanda Radarange, which was a huge thing that took up most of the table in her breakfast nook. No room for four there and more, just two small people could squeeze in with that contraption on the table.

Home microwave ovens were still new in 1970. Grandma cooked a big hunk of beef in the Radarange; she even used a plug-in probe of some sort stabbed into the meat. There’s a reason they’re called “roasts.” This meat was not roasted, it was unevenly irradiated, gray all through, and chewy as hell. My dad and Grandma’s husband had a blast making fun of that inedible mass. Grandma retreated to her bedroom in tears, followed my Mom and my sister. Eventually we raided the pantry and refrigerator and made sandwiches and ate potato chips and drank soda pop.

By evening the mood was better. When we were getting ready to leave, the hunk of beef was still sitting on a platter on the counter in the kitchen. Grandma lamented the failed experiment and wondered aloud what to do with that big beef roast. Dad suggested that if they had a catapult, they could lay siege on an unfriendly neighbor with it. We left in a hurry.

A British (or maybe even Scottish) female friend visited another female friend of mine and we were invited over to a dinner the Brit had made to thank her hostess, a "proper British meal". It was a burnt broiled piece of bony fish with some awful sides and ice cream for dessert but with the offer of adding some cream to it...to the ice cream. It wasn't a success and she knew it and it was all very depressing. And, very British/possibly Scottish.

Another friend was Dominican, though totally raised in the US. Her mom, from the island, was visiting and we were invited over for a special, Dominican meal. It was ghastly. Again...BONY FISH! And, some hard plantains.

I HATE BONY FISH!

Ward: just think of them as little heads of lettuce.

Beaver: but I don’t like little heads of lettuce either!

Later: I think I can find my own way home