30 Old-School Recipes Everyone Used to Love (But Can't Stand Now)

It's easy to forget food trends as we race to try the latest one. Here are a few old-school recipes from over the decades that we forgot for good reason.

As any kid who grew up in the '50s or '60s knows, mothers insisted they eat their liver to get their dose of vitamins A, D, E, K, B12, and folic acid. And as these kids grew up and discovered multivitamins, they still avoid this stuff like the plague.

While eaten on pizzas, in Caesar salad, or on toast, anchovies only became part of the American diet when Italian immigrants started adding them to restaurant menus. While they're a great source of fish oil, people tend to be squeamish about little fish in their food. That said, there has been a recent resurgence of enthusiasm for tinned seafood, including anchovies, sardines, and more, though it tends to be more of the gourmet variety.

Featuring inexpensive and easy-to-find ingredients, tuna noodle casserole rose to fame in the 1950s, but as eating food from a can lost some allure, this became less of a staple.

When iceboxes (and later, refrigerators) popped up in American kitchens, cooks developed new recipes using gelatin. In 1897, a carpenter in upstate New York developed a gelatin dessert he named Jell-O. It wasn't very popular until 1904, when the company passed out free cookbooks featuring Jell-O recipes.

This meat jelly is similar to Jell-O but is the savory, not sweet version. It became popular in the 1950s but by the '60s the trend has faded, likely because the stuff people tossed in aspic — turkey, peas, and assorted meats — looked pretty gross in a glutinous, gooey mass.

This is a British trend that dates back to the Middle Ages, when Christians needed a meat substitute for Lent. Fish pies that taste bland (or worse, fishy) have likely killed demand.

This is a British dish of sausages cooked into Yorkshire pudding batter but soon became confused with a similar dish of an egg cooked inside a hole in a piece of toast. These days, most people think of toad-in-the-hole as being the latter, not the former.

Steak Diane, which initially featured venison, became popular in the 1950s and '60s, particularly in New York. Steak is cooked in a buttered pan, cognac is used to deglaze it, and it's flambéed before being turned into a sauce. This was a theatrical way to impress diners at fancy restaurants, but, as one Quora user put it, "it was messy, consuming, and not worth the trouble."

Steak and kidney pudding may not sound particularly appetizing, but it has been an English staple since the mid-18th century. A move away from organ meats meant meant this quickly faded from U.S. plates but is still a favorite in the U.K.

A deep-fried omelette stuffed with meat and vegetables, egg fu young was created by Chinese immigrants to serve in Chinese restaurants in the US. While popular for a while, an interest in "real" Chinese food took off in the 1970s (when Nixon went to China) and interest in Americanized dishes faded. 

While this creamy dip looked fun in its fishy form, the heavy, creamy dip had gone out of fashion by the 1970s. The gelatin and canned fish wasn't a hit for long.

Spam became popular after World War II when the U.S. government supplied about 15 million cans a week to Allied troops. Soldiers joked about Spam, calling it "ham that didn't pass its physical" and refused to eat it after the war. However, countries facing food rationing after the war came to appreciate the stuff, and it's still considered a luxury item in South Korea. 

This marshmallow-based dessert became most popular in the '50s and '60s, though it dates back to the late 1800s. And why did it go out of favor? Some of the home cooks' twists on the salad were not so delightful, such as lime Jell-O and pineapple. "It was the grossest looking and tasting thing ever. Ever," says one man interviewed on NPR. "It was like eating a mouthful of something squishy and sugary and oddly rather airy. It was just electric green. What else more do I have to say?"

Rumaki, or bacon-wrapped water chestnuts and chicken liver marinated in soy sauce and brown sugar, became part of the Polynesian craze of the 1950s — and when that died, so did demand for rumaki. 

Popular in the 1950s to the 1970s, fondue was the ultimate party meal. Everyone gathered around a pot of melted cheese and dipped in pieces of bread (or fruit, if you chose melted chocolate). It was a trend, and then it wasn't. But for those who want to try it, there are still Melting Pot restaurants across the country. 

While chicken Kyiv became popular in the 1940s when a chef tried to tap the Russian immigrant population, but it didn't travel much out of fancy restaurants due to its labor-intensive nature. To make chicken Kiev, you need to pound and bread a chicken breast, roll it up, and fill it with butter and herbs. Nuking some chicken nuggets is much easier.

A German street food, also known as currywurst, these curry-soaked sausage slices were a trend in the '60s but faded quickly. However, that's just in the U.S. — in Germany, you can still grab curried sausages at many eateries (and even at some German restaurants in the U.S.).

A French dessert that currently features meringue floating in a sea of cream, it's been around since the 17th century and even appeared in Benjamin Franklin's diary. It was trendy in the middle of the 1900s but faded when people tired of whisking and the tedious process of making custard. 

Christmas pudding (also known as plum pudding) dates back to the 14th century. This blend of flour, bread crumbs, suet, eggs, carrot, apple, brown sugar, chopped blanched almonds, stem ginger, ground almonds, cherries, raisins, currants, golden raisins, mixed peel, plums, lemon juice and zest, mixed spice, baking powder and the booze of your choice is rich but probably for those who like fruit cake. While still popular in the U.K., though it was on tables in the 20th century, it's no longer a trend.

With origins in Germany, Scandinavia, and Belgium, meatloaf turned up in American kitchens toward the end of the 19th century and was popular during the Depression and WWII as a way to stretch out meat supplies. It's still served but not as much as it used to be.

Corned beef and cabbage came to the U.S. in the 19th century and by the 1950s was associated with Ireland — whether or not that was true. It's also a meat-heavy dish that most people save for St. Patrick's Day in the 21st century.

While still a huge hit at IKEA, Swedish meatballs date back to the Ottoman empire. They were trendy in the '50s but their labor-intensive quality made home chefs back off. The horse meat scandal surrounding IKEA's meatballs in Europe didn't help sales there, either. 

Inspired by German and Austrian cuisine, chicken fried steak was created by immigrants in Western Texas and Oklahoma. While this is still popular in some restaurants, its heart-attack-on-a-plate quality plus the use of subpar meat may have softened demand. 

Beef stroganoff is a Russian dish that took off stateside in the '50s following World War II. Though created in Russia for the Stroganov family, it was perfect for midcentury diners with its rich sour cream sauce. That's become less appealing to waistline-watching diners.

Beef Wellington, an English dish named for the First Duke of Wellington, became a classic menu item in American restaurants in the mid-19th century. While you can still find it, it's notoriously hard to make (just ask any chef who's been on a Gordon Ramsay show) so it's a trend chefs gladly turned from.

A flaming dessert of ice cream, cake, and meringue wheeled out on a tray gets plenty of oohs and aahs, or at least it did in 1867, when a chef at Delmonico's in New York created it. But it's not easy to make, and chefs gladly left it off the menu when the trend no longer blazed (though it still holds a special place in our hearts). 

While it's not exactly clear where chicken pot pie came from, no one has had to make it since 1951, when Swanson launched a frozen version. Those hoping for one they didn't need to cook could get it from KFC in the '90s. It's largely considered a homey comfort food that's surprisingly high in calories and sodium.

When Julia Child added a recipe for this beef dish to her book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," in 1961, beef bourguignon became red hot. But as home chefs looked for quicker ways to get dinner on the table, this dish's slow cooking style (and glug of cognac) grew out of favor. 

This no-bake pie was hugely popular in the 1960s, after the grasshopper cocktail (which also had creme de menth and creme de cacao) was also trend. But confusion about whether the pie had real grasshoppers (it didn't) or alcohol (it does) tempered enthusiasm. 

While breakfast cereal is still around, it's not the staple it used to be. Consumption went up by 5.2% during the pandemic, then dropped a whopping 8.7% in 2021. According to a 2018 Mintel survey, almost 40% of millennials say cereal is an inconvenient breakfast choice because of the cleanup and prefer options like yogurt or fast-food breakfasts.