The first answer, and thus one that’s behind most of it, is that a lot of these originated on the back of canned goods, or other pre-packaged foods. That was sometimes more about a brand making recipes up as part of the sales push. You’d see the shit in magazines all the time when I was growing up.
The other is what applies to the non commercial recipes, or at least is what I’ve been told over in reddit by food historians. And that’s the fact that once the idea of the weird recipes got started, people adapted them, or tried to make up their own based on what they already had. So you’d run into weird shit where someone made what seemed good to them, but it was lacking something, so they added what would seem crazy if you hadn’t already had some of the strange salads already.
It works sometimes. Like the addition of pineapple to jambalaya. Or putting pickles on a peanut butter sandwich. That kind of thing where you add an ingredient that really stands out, but manages to balance things despite not necessarily going with the rest in a complementary way.
Anyway, it’s pretty amazing what kind of oddball combinations end up tasting much better than they should
There’s actually two answers to that.
The first answer, and thus one that’s behind most of it, is that a lot of these originated on the back of canned goods, or other pre-packaged foods. That was sometimes more about a brand making recipes up as part of the sales push. You’d see the shit in magazines all the time when I was growing up.
The other is what applies to the non commercial recipes, or at least is what I’ve been told over in reddit by food historians. And that’s the fact that once the idea of the weird recipes got started, people adapted them, or tried to make up their own based on what they already had. So you’d run into weird shit where someone made what seemed good to them, but it was lacking something, so they added what would seem crazy if you hadn’t already had some of the strange salads already.
It works sometimes. Like the addition of pineapple to jambalaya. Or putting pickles on a peanut butter sandwich. That kind of thing where you add an ingredient that really stands out, but manages to balance things despite not necessarily going with the rest in a complementary way.
Anyway, it’s pretty amazing what kind of oddball combinations end up tasting much better than they should
I have 2 cookbooks that are literally just, “this recipe was from the back of the box/bag for xyz product that you don’t have anymore”.