Cordon Bleugh Chef

"You have to try my latest treat

A jellyfish inside a beet!"
—Arthur's dad, "Leftovers Goulash", "Arthur's Almost Live Not Real Music Festival", Arthur

The Cordon Bleugh Chef is a "chef" who does know how to cook but they seem to be willing to combine foods that should never be used in the same dish or, in the worst cases, even in the same universe. If the resulting dish doesn't cause an urge to purge with just the taste, finding out what was in it surely will. At the very least, many of those eating will comment that it tastes like something the dish has no right to be tasting like given its ingredients.

Some examples of disgusting dishes a Cordon Bleugh Chef might create include things like strawberry and liver pate cakes, lemon curd with ham and sardines, chocolate cod roe, parsnip brownies, fish fingers and custard, and endless other stomach emptying recipes. Occasionally though, the combination actually turns out to taste pretty good.

Cordon Bleugh Chef is not about "chefs" who make food that either looks absolutely disgusting to look at or even harmful to the one unlucky to eat it; that's Lethal Chef.

Contrast Foreign Queasine: foreign dishes such as haggis, deep-fried tarantulas and casu marzu which are fairly popular in their own country but would be thought of as too disgusting to try by many people in other countries.

Examples of Cordon Bleugh Chef include:

Anime and Manga

  • Bleach: Orihime is very fond of putting ingredients together in ways that stop the hearts of everyone listening to her recipes. As a result, very few people have ever had the courage to actually try her dishes. Those that do discover she's actually an excellent cook who makes the food, against the odds, taste wonderful, as confirmed both by Rangiku in the manga and the databooks. She eventually gets a part-time job in a bakery, and settles down for bakery products like bread and pastries. The Anime, however, deviates from the manga solely for comedy purposes to create a Running Gag about Orihime's food being stomach-churning.
  • Taeko of Ai Yori Aoshi. Three words: "Strawberry jam curry." Or try her tomato-in-chocolate tempura.
  • Yamada Ayumi from Honey and Clover specializes in things like apple and mint curry.
  • Akane Tendo is on the border between this and Lethal Chef. While she is generally impatient and unskilled, she also seems to consider written recipes "boring", or perhaps considers herself too good to need them, and so has a bad habit of discarding them to make things up as she goes along. The fact she doesn't pay attention to what she's using only makes things worse: intending to use white wine in curry, then finding out she added vinegar instead is the first example in the series. A similar goof happens during the "Mrs. Tendo's Recipe Book" storyline, where she goes to pour white wine over stir-fried carrots, but uses vegetable oil instead. And that's not even discussing things like adding horseradish, pineapple and mayonnaise to her vinegar curry, or making a batch of cookie dough containing watermelon, cherry, cinnamon and garlic. The tendency of Akane's cooking to be Lethal Chef pushed Up to Eleven has pretty much become Fanon thanks to many Ranma ½ Fan Fictions.
  • In the Negima!? anime, Takahata attempts to make "World Delicacy Noodles" by combining foods from all around the world into one bowl of ramen. It's very effective at rendering other characters unconscious.
  • Cecile Croomy from Code Geass is one of these, much to the dismay of anyone who tries to eat her food, especially her boss Lloyd and their subordinate Suzaku (who's too nice to say anything).
    • And Nina, too. That hot dog sauce... [shiver]
  • Kalinin of Full Metal Panic! cooked a borscht with ingredients such as cocoa powder and miso paste. He enjoys it since he's trying to recreate the cooking of his late wife out of nostalgia, but no one else does. There's also a subtle implication that his wife intentionally made the borscht bad to punish him for being married to the job and away so often. Kalinin doesn't notice.
  • An extreme case is presented in Misato Katsuragi of Evangelion (one of its occasional uses of comedy staples as a counterpoint to its main plot, which is one of the bleakest and darkest things ever animated). As an example, she makes a habit of mixing ramen with curry. She's often flanderized into a Lethal Chef in Fanon, however.
    • How bad is it? In Girlfriend of Steel Rei, the stoic, heroic death seeker, isn't game enough to try it until she's seen that it's okay.
    • Tasting it results in a Pastel-Chalked Freeze-Frame played for laughs. The only exception is PenPen who instantly passes out upon sampling it.
    • Rather horrifically deconstructed in Aeon Natum Engel: the reason Misato is such a horrible cook is because years before the start of the story, nerve damage from a nasty head injury pretty much robbed her of her senses of taste and smell...she has to spice her food to near-toxic levels to be able to enjoy it. She just hasn't learned to cook other people their own portions.
    • In canon, the reason is implied to be a combination of Misato's Bottle Fairy nature, her general slobbishness, and, most of all, her reliance on buying only the cheapest instant food she can get and mixing it together in an imitation of finer cuisine. How well she cooks when she actually uses fresh ingredients is never shown.
  • From Lost Universe, Millie's cooking actually IS excellent: in spite of producing such horrible-sounding concoctions as bacon ice cream and raisin jerky pizza, everyone likes it if they try it. On the other hand she is something of a Lethal Chef... Due to obliterating the kitchen in fiery explosions every time she cooks, explosions which nonetheless leave the fruits of her labor unblemished.
  • The "Magical Cooking" one-shot of the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Comic A la Carte official anthology book featured Vivio baking some cookies for Einhart. While she's normally a pretty decent chef, she kinda oversold her abilities, and now she felt that she had to bake something more impressive than usual. So she took an ordinary cookie recipe, added some powdered milk, filled it with caviar before baking it, smothered it with a bottle of brandy...
  • In Durarara!!, Dennis, the Chief Chef of Russian Sushi, sees to it that his restaurant delivers a rather...unique menu. While he's entirely capable of making normal, edible sushi, sometimes customers have to contend with strange concoctions.
    • Also Celty, who doesn't have a head and thus, a sense of taste. Her roommate Shinra tried to eat it... but he started crying.
  • Kyo's uncle and adoptive father Kazuma from Fruits Basket does this. He is also incapable of making tea without messing something up.
  • While her successor, May, is a full-on Lethal Chef, Misty from Pokémon is better classified in this department. When Brock gets sick in one episode she take over cooking duties and tries to follow a recipe out of a book, but confuses salt for sugar, then overcorrects and eventually just tosses in anything she can think of. The only person able to eat the result is Jessie. Conversely, Misty did pretty well in brewing up a cure for stun spore during the Orange Islands, a trading card issued during the that time had her cooking stew, and it is also implied that during the 13 days that Misty and Ash were stuck in Viridian Forest (according to "Showdown at Pewter City") that Misty did the cooking before Brock joined (They were stranded for thirteen days in Viridian Forest, with no stores nearby, and given how Ash's very first day as a trainer went (one disaster after another), it's highly unlikely he would have known how to cook, and the only person travelling with him prior to Brock joining is Misty, so... yeah. And she'd have to be decent enough of a cook to last through the 13 days stuck in Viridian Forest). It could well be that she panicked in the face of cooking solo at an unexpected time.
  • In the Digimon Adventure movie, Taichi and Hikari's mom Yuuko has come up with such original dishes as spinach cookies, potato juice and beef jerky shakes. Somehow Koushirou likes all of it.

Comic Books

  • Gaston Lagaffe is sometimes this. One example of his culinary experiments was something like sardines with whipped cream.
    • His signature recipe, the strawberry cod, is apparently good but the cooking odors are obnoxious.
  • In Archie Comics the Lodge family chef (also named Gaston) absolutely loves when Jughead comes over, because then he can "experiment" with someone who will truly appreciate it.
  • The titular character from Socker-Conny is one of these. The stews mentioned in the album contain "veal, lemon and everything else that was in the fridge", and "Kiwi fruit! Paté! Lingonberry jam and garlic salt! Mash, rice, juice, sweetbreads, onion, kalops (Swedish stew quite similar to Bouef Bourgnion) and raisins! "
  • In The Beano comic, The Bash Street Kids' cook, Olive, is notorious for having terrible cooking, including custard so thick you have to cut it with a knife.
  • Subverted in one Batman comic when Alfred and Batman were briefly stranded at a Swiss chalet. While Batman worked on sending out a call for pick-up, Alfred took stock of the provisions and cooked up a spinach fajita. Batman asked quizzically why, in Switzerland, Alfred hadn't used chocolate instead of spinach. Alfred replied that "A chocolate fajita would be barbarian." However, he later stared at his own portion of the spinach fajita with disfavor and said, "It may have been a mistake. Perhaps the chocolate could work."
  • In the Lucky Luke album "Dalton City", Averell takes up cooking and it turns out no one can find out what his dishes are actually supposed to be (though to his credit, most actually taste good). This culminates in him preparing the Jumping Out of a Cake trick, but the end product is concrete-hard.
  • Asterix being sold as a slave to the wrong family, tries to be this in The Laurel Wreath. Unfortunately for him the recipe appears to be a miraculous hangover cure, much to the joy of said family's son.


Film

  • In Four Weddings and a Funeral, Matthew mentions his recently deceased lover Gareth's fondness for strange experimental cooking. "The recipe for Duck a la Banana, fortunately, goes with him to his grave."


Literature

  • Rincewind becomes one of these when drunk, with such concoctions as "spaghetti custard" and "alcoholic runny-bread soup with vegetables and a pile of salt, cooked down until it could be spread on a sandwich" ("beer soup" just isn't descriptive enough). In short, he accidentally invents Vegemite.
    • The Igor in Unseen Academicals gives Mr. Nutt a tuna, spaghetti and jam sandwich. With sprinkles.
  • Not the case for Nabab Yeo, in Walter Moers' The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear. While he does combine flavours that probably shouldn't be mixed out of a belief that the more flavours in a meal the better, he's still considered a very good cook.
  • Bella's mother is apparently this. To quote, "My mother was an imaginative cook, but her experiments weren't always edible."
  • Nozdryov's cook in Dead Souls, who has an Egregious approach to cooking - he throws in everything that is standing around, it seems.


Live Action TV

  • Top Chef: Bacon ice cream. Which is then subverted by Richard Blais in the finale of Top Chef: Chicago. His bacon ice cream was generally very well-received. Blais himself would seem to fit the trope at first glance, but his food overall was often among the judges' favorites throughout the season.
    • Lampshaded earlier in the season by the judges' panel when Blaise served them smoked salmon with a white chocolate-wasabi sauce. One judge's comment to him (paraphrased) was "When you described the dish, my immediate reaction was 'White chocolate and wasabi? What were you thinking'?" In the final judging, though, every single judge deemed that dish far and away the best of the night.
    • Season 2 actually had a challenge to create a unique flavor of ice cream. Marcel decided to make a Bacon and Avocado ice cream. That dish was considered to be one of the worst dishes ever to be served on the show. From the same season, Sam mixed watermelon and bleu cheese in a gnocci, and Ilan made a chocolate ganache with chicken liver. Both these dishes... didn't go over so well with the judges either.
    • Note to Dale of season 4: Butterscotch is WAY too sweet to put on scallops. That dish was so bad that Dale got sent home despite another chef screwing up TWO dishes.
  • The Japanese Iron Chef had a turkey battle. Offerings included turkey sashimi, which is this to American audience since it's not common to find any kind of poultry served uncooked, due to the risk of salmonella poisoning. Maybe this is not an issue in Japan. In the U.S., food handlers are required to serve poultry fully cooked, and not to allow the utensils used to cook it to come into contact with other food.
    • Far more memorable: tuna sorbet. For the rest of the series, whenever a chef headed for the ice cream maker, the commentators would recall it.
    • Subverted with some crab ice cream, which the judges enjoyed. It was described as something along the lines of "sweet, with a hint of crab, not at all fishy, and surprisingly good!"
    • Also subverted with some beer ice cream in the US edition. The beer wasn't the surprising part, it was the caramelized bacon on top of the ice cream that threw people off. And yet the judges loved it.
    • Cod soft roe ice cream. Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai was chastised by the entire tasting panel for it. He later proved he didn't learn his lesson by making trout ice cream on one of the US edition pilots.
  • In the British series, The Vicar of Dibley, Letitia Cropley has a fondness for mixing revolting combinations of ingredients together such as parsnip brownies, tripe salad and cakes topped with strawberries and ketchup. Her reputation for disgusting recipes was so famous in Dibley, she was known as The Queen of Cordon Bleurgh, thus making her the Trope Namer.
    • This extended into other areas too. She once put pineapples in the church flower arrangements.
  • Dawn in Buffy the Vampire Slayer has some questionable food choices, including anchovy and pineapple pizza.
  • Gaki no Tsukai Ya Arahende has an old section called "Zettai ni Oishii" (Absolutely Delicious) Series. These are basically Iron Chef in reverse; they are provided with a food type as their end target (mochi, pizza, tempura, pasta, etc), but they have freedom in ingredients. Some efforts are laudable (as in Yamazaki's petit tomato tempura which ended up getting 2/10 simply because tomato can be very hot), while some fall squarely to this trope. For example, Endou's insistence on using Frisk, a very hot breath mint par Fisherman's Friend Extra Strong for his cooking, like Frisk Pizza or Frisk Tempura. Matsumoto settles on using very unusual ingredients, such as a whole tuna head for pizza, cake for flavored rice, and watermelon-and-milk-cream pasta. The ultimate example would be the toothpaste and mouthwash pasta. On a scale of 1 to 10 hearts and 1-2 skull marks, that one gets two full skeletons as a rating.
  • In an early post-beard episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Riker invites a few officers over to his quarters for hand-made omelets, having taken up cooking as a hobby to pass the time. The results are (politely) declared inedible by all present... except for Worf, who shovels it down with gusto. Riker then proceeds to blame the ingredients.
  • After giving up on nearly every other food combination following his completely altered taste buds, the Doctor in the Doctor Who episode "The Eleventh Hour" settles on the combination of fish fingers... and custard, which several sources state tastes quite good.
  • Food Network competition show Chopped occasionally throws bizarre ingredients together; sometimes a main challenge to the contestants is to avoid becoming a Cordon Bleugh Chef with the combinations they've been given. Possibly the most Egregious was when the mystery box for a dessert contained hot dogs.
    • But because Food Network always has to out-do itself, the recent Halloween special, an episode wherein both the Appetizer and Entrée baskets contained a candy item, the Dessert basket gave us grasshoppers.
  • Barbra Jean from Reba is usually a good cook, but in one episode she takes the concept of healthy eating a tad too far by baking a sugar-free bran cake with cottage cheese as frosting. No one present is interested in devouring it.
  • Cliff Huxtable on an early episode of The Cosby Show is shown cooking exotic dishes for his family which taste great, but then he horrifies them by telling them the ingredients. Theo makes a peanut butter, mint jelly, liverwurst and onion sandwich, just so he can eat something with familiar ingredients.

Claire: What is it, chicken?
Cliff: Nope.
Claire: Well, it's not veal.
Cliff: No, no.
Claire: Lamb.
Cliff: Wrong! See, I was in bazaars, and I saw this jar had green sauce and I picked it up. You know, the International Gourmet? And it was "Sliced Turtle's Feet".
(Claire wipes her mouth, takes a drink of water & gets up from the table)
Cliff: You want some crackers? (Claire shakes her head no) Well, where you going?
Claire: I'm going upstairs. I'm gonna get some of Theo's sandwich.

    • Later in the ep, he makes them a stew flavored with cow tongue and shows it to them. Rudy nearly bolts.
  • In an episode of Radio Enfer (the show that inspired Radio Active), Jean-Lou Duval tries cooking after some advice from his mother and he messes up every recipes he tries. The main reason is that he often run out of ingredients (before he even starts) and tries to find similar-looking replacement ingredients like pieces of garlic for white chocolate chips and bacon for almonds (that's not even mentioning adding a cup of fertilizer to a shepherd pie to make it taste more farm-like)

Carl: (after tasting the garlic cookies) Congratulations, Jean-Lou. You've just invented the Bad Breath Cookies.

  • In an episode of Home Improvement, Tim and Al take part in a cooking contest on Tool Time to create an innovative new dish and Tim ends up making this kind of dish: caramel flounder with chocalate chip chutney.
  • One challenge on Cupcake Wars involved making cupcakes based around ingredients from the concession stand at Dodger Stadium. One chef's choice for her primary ingredient? Hot dogs. To the surprise of absolutely no one, she was the first one eliminated from that episode.
  • An accidental example on Friends. Because the pages of an English cookbook were stuck together Rachel ended up combining a trifle and a steak kidney pie. All her friends felt obliged to eat it anyway (except Phoebe who got out because she's a vegetarian). Joey ended up liking it anyway. 'Jello? good. Meat?. Good'.
  • Sandra Lee from the Food Network show Semi-Homemade Cooking, who is a literal Cordon Bleugh chef, having attended a short course at one of Le Cordon Bleu's satellite schools in Canada. Her food (known for its excessive reliance on prepackaged products and sketchy seasoning mixes) is uniformly considered horrifying by nearly everyone who aspires to anything better than TV dinners, although her cocktails may be a bit better, seeing as how a pitcher of one of those is likely to obliterate any memory of the preceding meal. (Her habit of ham-handed cultural ineptitude has also lead to frequent Foreign Queasine moments, mostly for the people accustomed to the cuisines she's attempting to emulate.)

Newspaper Comics

  • Many examples from Garfield involving Jon:
    • In one strip, he can't figure out how to get the meatloaf inside the danish...
    • In another, he makes "wienie gelatin", which is hot dogs in a Jello mold. After Garfield ate it, he said his mouth liked it, but his stomach was still trying to make up its mind.
    • In one strip Irma gives Garfield and Jon what looks like ice cream cones. It's actually scoops of mashed potatoes in cones.
  • Andy from FoxTrot is a perfectly competent cook, but she constantly insists on making "healthy" dishes that always end up inedible.
    • Andy has actually lowered her family's expectations to the point that in one strip, Roger tastes the contents of a pot on the stove and gushes about how much better than her normal cooking it is, begging to know what he just tasted. It turns out to be grout for the cracks in the driveway-and also a ticket to the couch for Roger.
  • In some early strips of For Better or For Worse, Elly makes casseroles that fit this trope, most notably a version of Shepherd's Pie made with sliced hot dogs. According to her, her mother Marian was even worse.

Video Games

  • For all that he's The Ace, Flynn Scifo in Tales of Vesperia is revealed as one in the cooking competition sidequest. Yuri notes that he's great when he sticks to the recipe, but his sense of taste is so terrible that when he modifies a recipe, he ruins it.
  • Raine Sage from Tales of Symphonia. She wouldn't be the worst chef in the game if not for her nasty habit of experimenting with cooking. For example: everyone makes sweet cake; chocolate, vanilla, carrot, it's always sweet. So Raine decides to be a pioneer and bake a spicy cake.[1] Or how about lemon rice cooked inside a lemon, and topped with garam masala?
  • El Fuerte is the fighting chef in Street Fighter IV who tried to combine chanko nabe and borscht together to create the ultimate dish. It's pretty good at turning faces blue.
    • He does it again by putting a whole carrot, a whole fish, fishbones, a rotten tomato, aojiru (kale juice, which is rich in nutrients but bitter to taste) and baker's chocolate in chili soup.
  • Pretty much all the girls in Persona 4 are this, in addition to being Lethal Chefs. When making a list of ingredients for curry, Yukiko and Chie include such things as radishes, kimchi, chocolate, and yogurt. Later, Rise uses foie gras in an omelette. The main character can also be this if the player selects the wrong options when making lunch.
    • The main problem with Yukiko and Chie's ingredient choices is that they seem to have gotten the wrong end of the stick. Chocolate and yoghurt are both perfectly reasonable ingredients in a curry... but they should be plain yoghurt and dark cooking chocolate (90%+ cocoa). However they decided to use fruit yoghurt and mint chocolate.
    • Rise, meanwhile, seems to be okay on ingredients, but makes her food way too spicy, at one point producing something that knocks poor Yukiko out in one mouthful.
    • Even the protagonist has the option to be this if the player chooses the wrong options while cooking. You have the option to spray cologne on creme caramel, of all things.
  • In Portal, the Logic Core knows how to make a lovely-looking Cake out of such everyday ingredients as coconut-pecan frosting, semi-sweet chocolate chips, granulated sugar, fiberglass surface resins, rhubarb (on fire), fish-shaped volatile organic compounds, and sediment-shaped sediment.
  • Although it's never mentioned in the games, the manga of Kingdom Hearts depicts Aerith as one, infamous for adding things like salt to lemonade and milk to soda.
  • Aurica of Ar tonelico makes decent healing items with food such as "BBQ Soda" and a surprisingly good purple dish in Cross Edge... even if none of the ingredients they had available could make purple.
  • In the Mother series, there's an item called Strawberry Tofu, which was meant as a joke on bad combinations of food. Well, someone literally made it and Itoi tried it and it does not work well. There's a video on youtube of someone suffering while trying to eat it.
    • Since Americans would be much less likely to show revulsion from it (particularly if familiar with tofu-based vegan ice cream), Nintendo translated the item as "trout ice cream" in EarthBound. Hilarious in Hindsight for fans of the game that later went on to watch Iron Chef.
  • Contrary to what you might expect, Kyouko actually can cook in Eien no Aselia. It just looks like an absolute horrible catastrophe waiting to happen. Helion did not help in that respect despite her best efforts. Read: Put flowers into the mouths of fish or turning things purple.
  • A major part of Kingdom of Loathing is combining items into edible foods. Sometimes the combinations are obvious, like putting sausage on a pizza, but some of the combinations are things that are only going to be found by trial and error, like combining batgut with spices to make bat haggis. And yes, in-universe, that is a good food.
  • Do tomato, tuna and soy sauce pancake sandwiches sound good to you? No? They sound good to Hatsune in Kara no Shoujo. And they're surprisingly edible.
  • Lufia 2 Rise of the Sinistrals has Selan experimenting a new dish for her husband, deep fried jelly in olive oil, which sends Maxim into wondering if it's edible.
  • A sidequest in Solatorobo has Red collecting ingredients for a big stew. You're told to pick whatever you think looks good, and at one point you have the option of putting a poisonous barnacle into the pot. If you do, it turns the whole thing purple (and then a bunch of other weird colours), but it smells delicious and turns out to be fantastic, so much so you get a bonus!
  • With the "Survival" skill in Fallout: New Vegas, you can concoct food from such lovely ingredients as mutant flies, mutant ants, mutant goats, and whatever 200-year-old TV dinners you can find. Not only that, but in the DLC Dead Money, you can get a recipe for a "Sierra Madre Martini", made from mixing mashed-up potato chips with toxic residue in a tin can. Bottoms up!
  • Deadly Premonition gives us The Sinner's Sandwich, supposedly only eaten by the guilty. Or by people who legitimately enjoy it.
  • Hanako Ikezawa from Katawa Shoujo is technically an okay chef. According to Lilly, however, she likes to experiment once in a while, and whenever that happens...
  • Purposely Subverted in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Link can cook some pretty potent Power-Up Food when he follows his recipes, but if he tries to cook ingredients that obviously shouldn't go together, like put bat wings in with apples and rice, all he'll get is a barely edible mess. Putting more than one stat enhancing ingredient in one dish will likely ruin it too.
  • In The World Ends With You, the owner of Ramen Don, Ken Doi, temporarily becomes this when his business gets temporarily upstaged by a new, very flashy restaurant, attempting stuff like "dessert ramen" and a dish that look like a full trash bag was dump within the soup and noodles in a futile attempt to bring his business back to form. To the main characters' surprise, these concoctions actually taste well, but they still must convince Doi of getting back to classic ramen as it is what the blog influencer that can drives the business back actually craves.

Web Original

  • Loading Ready Run has the Iron Stomach challenge which crosses this with Masochist's Meal. One notable challenge was the Banana Onion Juice.
  • Many "Gross Foods" on Neopets are combinations of food that should not be combined, like "Bacon and Eggs Ice Cream", "Hot Dog Flavoured Yoghurt" and "Mashed Potatoes with Strawberry Sauce". The rest include things that shouldn't be in food at all, like slime, snot, dung and maggots. Your pet will also comment on how horrible it tastes if you feed these foods to them.
  • Homestar Runner has so many mixed-up foods, ranging from reasonably edible to downright disgusting/dangerous, that its respective wiki has a whole page dedicated to them.


Webcomics

  • Crystal, the local bartender from Sluggy Freelance, does this with mixed drinks. One of her creations is the "Cheeseburger Margarita."
  • This xkcd.
  • One sub-arc in the Credomar arc of Schlock Mercenary featured Schlock and Ebbirnoth's adventures in 31st-century human cuisine (which, by that point, has stagnated to the point that they've resorted to combining things in ways that should never have been). The crowning moment for this comes with smutto, a combination of huitlacoche or "corn smut" and natto, which overlaps with Lethal Chef because man was never meant to eat corn smut (diseased corn) or natto (fermented soybeans) in the first place.[2]
    • While not a Cordon Bleugh ingredient combination (by virtue of having only one ingredient), the Chupaqueso is another Schlock example of Cordon Bleugh cooking techniques. Literally 'cheese sucker', this mexican... ish... dish is most accurately described as 'melted cheese wrapped in fried cheese, garnished with cheese'. It should be noted that Howard Taylor makes these at home.
  • today i put.....JELLY on this hot god
  • In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, the Doc's mom, Mitzi, is an otherwise excellent cook, but she has a peculiar specialty in her pickled beets, which are apparently too vile to choke down even when they aren't poisoned as part of Training from Hell.


Western Animation

  • From Arthur: "Arthur's dad is actually fairly good at it [cooking], when he doesn't experiment." Oddly enough, he actually is a professional chef and he it for a living, but he tries experimenting at home so much that we mostly hear of the gross stuff, including "experiments" that look bad enough to make you sick, and there's a song devoted to his abominations in the Musical Episode. When he makes something good it becomes the centerpiece of an entire episode.
    • Arthur's grandmother (who is Arthur's dad's mother) is usually this as well, and only Buster, who has Iron clad stomach, would eat the cookies she made for the bakesale. Perhaps Mr. Reed learned to cook early on because of this.
    • Buster himself seems like a subversion of this trope, as he actively creates weird combinations of food, but due to his aforementioned ironclad stomach, actually enjoys it and never seems to understand why others don't.
  • Shaggy and Scooby Doo,but only because they love food like this, if they had to cook for someone else they would probably spare them from eating something like chocolate covered Eggplant burgers. (with hot sauce!)

Velma: Yech! His stomach must be made of scrap iron!

  • In the episode "Something Smells", SpongeBob SquarePants makes a sundae out of available ingredients: ketchup, onions, and peanuts growing on the window sill of his bathroom. The resulting concoction gives him epic bad breath.
  • On Ben 10, Grandpa Max's survival-skiil recipes and other exotic dishes make his grandkids regard him this way, with aspects of Foreign Queasine mixed in.
  • In the Family Guy episode "When You Wish upon a Weinstein", Peter invites his new Jewish friend Max Weinstein for dinner. However, when Max sees that Lois has made marshmallow and fish casserole, he tries to politely tell her he can't eat it. Luckily for him, she assumes it's because it's not kosher, and, after a long sideways look at the "dish", Max agrees.
  • Kitty Pryde from X-Men: Evolution is this with her cookies.


Other

  • British comedian Peter Cook played a fictional character, Arthur Streeb-Greebling, the proprietor of "The Frog and Peach" restaurant featuring two specialty items: "Frog à la Peche" and "Peche à la Frog"—nauseating and positively revolting, respectively.
  • Frog à la Peche is a CD of avant-garde[3] electronic music by Charles Carpenter, written in the Bohlen-Pierce scale. Two of the tracks are named after the restaurant entries above, and the cover has an illustration of the title menu item.
  • An Italian radio sketch comedy show known as "610" (a punny title[4]) makes fun of this kind of guy with one of its sketches, "Il tempio del gusto" ("The temple of taste"), that is, a fictional convention where cooks create new kinds of recipes. So, they act as if there's a reporter there, and we get to hear the latter while he enthusiastically tries the most conceptually nauseating "creation" ever conceived... and then we get to hear his inevitable disgusted reaction. By the end of the sketch, when the reporter is finished spitting up (or throwing up, depending on what he ate), usually the hosts of the show ask him if he spit up, and the reporter, rather than admitting his disgust, he first comes up with some kind of excuse, then he thanks the chef, and finally - without caring about the hosts asking for explanation - greets them too.


Real Life

  • The cooks in the short Food Network show Worst Cooks in America were this at the start.
  • To its detractors, some of the more experimental manifestations of 1980s fancy restaurant cooking fell into this. Lobster with vanilla sauce, anyone?
  • On Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, a couple of the many interesting dishes the titular chef encountered at one failing restaurant were chocolate covered prawns, and chicken with banana filling.
  • One of the hottest terms in cuisine for the past 10 years or so has been molecular gastronomy which uses science to figure out combinations of flavors that would taste good, no matter how weird they sound, often using some pretty cool gadgets to do it. Some of its more notable exponents are:
    • Heston Blumenthal has a reputation for experimental cooking, although as with a number of other examples on this page the results are often less Cordon Bleugh and more Crazy Awesome; besides molecular gastronomy's focus on the science of why things taste good (and thus why, for instance, bacon ice cream would actually work—he also made a well-received version), Blumenthal is also very interested in psychology and messing with people's expectations. Here's a good article about him.
    • Ferran Adria is another molecular gastronomist (gastronomer?), and also very good at making odd combinations of ingredients work as a dish. He thinks of it as deconstructivist. The Kellogg's paella (Rice Krispies, shrimp heads, and vanilla flavoured mashed potatoes) is a good example of what he does.
  • Usually averted in Chopped, despite the show's whole gimmick being mystery baskets containing ingredients that don't go well together.
  • Students, by reputation, tend to either be this or junk food addicts. While not as common as the stereotype would have it, most graduates remember one such person.
  • Chefs in general run into this sooner or later in their careers. Part of being a chef is experimenting with ingredients to attempt to come up with a new dish. And not every chef gets it right the first time, every time. They also generally have the sense of testing it on a small scale before larger testing or unveiling at their restaurants, of course. Pretty much every one has at least one horror story along these lines. Whether they'll tell them is another question entirely.
  • To professional chefs and foodies, anyone who uses any kind of pre-packaged ingredients in their cooking.
  • Michigan State University's on-campus Dairy Store has a tradition of maintaining a flavor for each member of the Big Ten Conference (including hated rivals Michigan). When the University of Nebraska joined, the store had to come up with a new flavor; because Nebraska is the Cornhuskers, they decided to make the flavor with sweet corn including whole grains of corn. The reaction in East Lansing was puzzlement when the flavor was announced, and then general approval when it was released.
  • The pirate Blackbeard was famous for mixing gunpowder into his rum, either because it actually tasted good, or to make himself look more badass.
    • Not that he's the only one, mixing gunpowder with alcoholic drinks (specially brandy or plain wine) once was pretty common among military grunts.
  • Experiments of this variety occasionally turn out to be really, really good. The cold foie gras and ice cream experiment comes to mind.


  1. ↑ There are, in fact, such things as "spice cakes". They are not, however, supposed to be "spicy" in the same manner as, say, curry
  2. ↑ And yet if one ventures onto Youtube and searches for smutto, a video can be found by 'Cooking with the Old Wolf' of a fellow who actually dared eat the inedible, and pronounced it to not be wretched
  3. ↑ That's the polite term.
  4. ↑ spelling 610 in Italian results in "Sei Uno Zero", which - if translated in English outside of its numerical meaning - turns out to mean "You're a zero"
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