Vomit

Despite what it looks like, these Springtime Potatoes are not an example of something you’d find in a vomitorium. People spew forth from a vomitorium, not chunks of radish and cucumber in a sour cream and chive sauce. This is because to vomere is to exit, usually from an auditorum. We expect people to sleep in a dormitorium because dormaire means to sleep. Same thing. Vomit is short for vomitus, which when it involves Springtime Potatoes covered in a radish and cucumber in a sour cream and chive sauce is really emesis, for which you should take an emetic. Marijuana is a powerful anti-emetic, and can be found in most dorm rooms. Vomiting should not be confused with regurgitation, which is merely when undigested food comes back up into one’s mouth. Got it? Good.

Fix It Fast Cook Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1979

Cooties Especial

It is customary in cultures around the world to greet guests with the best hospitality one can afford. This often means bringing out the best china and linens and treating your new friends to a delicious meal of local delicacies — rather than, say, lobbing a spear at them as they disembark from their ships.

It is a little known fact that in 1492, Christopher Columbus and his men were served this very meal to welcome them to the New World by the indigenous people he met there. It truly celebrates the magnitude of the Columbian Exchange by mixing ground beef with packaged instant mashed potatoes, tomatoes, Saltine crackers, evaporated milk, onions and cheese.

After feasting on slices of this “meat loaf” the company enjoyed cigars and exchanged diseases — syphilis and influenza — which also proved to be vastly successful in their new spheres of influence. 

When bidding their foreign visitors adieu, the natives breathed a collective sigh of relief that it had all gone so well, but were frankly happy to get back to their everyday lives knowing that this would be the last they would ever see of the strange white people from afar with the large knives.

You, too, can recreate this remarkable historic meal the next time you have the neighbors over because the Ground Meat Cook Book has finally made the recipe available to the general public — but be sure to have plenty of Purell on hand, just in case, you know.

Ground Meat Cook Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1969

Also from this book: Top-Notch Turkey Loaf, Meaty Surprise!, Hamburger Helper?, Peppy-Sauced Meatloaf, Ham Strata, Tangiers Hash, King-Sized Balls