What’s ‘Priest Strangler’? Or ‘Camel Spit’? The 15 Most Bizarrely Named Foods in the World

Strozzapreti translates to “priest strangler pasta” and is an elongated, twisted tube-shaped pasta invented centuries ago to show resentment toward the all-powerful Catholic Church and its clergy. Supposedly, women cursed as they rolled the tubes by hand, fervently hoping gluttonous priests would choke on it.

A specialty of northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria, and the Marches was created during the 17th-century when the Papal States ruled this region, from the Mediterranean to Adriatic Seas. One version is made with flour, water, and eggs, and one is made without eggs because, as the story goes, the Church didn’t allow people in Emilia-Romagna to use eggs.

Variants exist (like “strangled bishops” with cheese and fennel). An annual strozzapreti festival took place in Tuscany’s Maremma coastal region in July for decades, in a tiny village within Roccastrada, the Sagra degli Sticciano Scalo. Here, the egg-less pasta style is served in various ways, such as with meat ragu or “fake sauce,” made with basil, parsley, carrots, and red wine.

Kai look keuy are hard-boiled and deep-fried eggs tossed in tamarind, chili, and cilantro sauce. Kids love “son-in-law eggs” because it’s sweet and crispy, but a more adult version is spicier, using more chili. Several stories explain the name. One warns sons-in-law what may happen to their own “eggs” (i.e. have them boiled and fried) if they don’t treat their wives well, explains Luke Charny of A Chef’s Tour, which offers food tours of Thailand.

Another less ominous story says a mother-in-law was making a surprise visit, and the easy dish was the only thing the guy could cobble together to impress her. In another story, it’s prepared for a potential son-in-law, and if he likes it, he’s a keeper. While it’s eaten all over Thailand, Charny thinks its origin is Central Thailand, where they prefer sweet dishes, and a lot of palm sugar goes into “son-in-law eggs.”

Fun fact: there is a Thai TV drama inspired by a 1980 film named for the dish. Kai Look Keuy is about a woman whose mother tries to find her a husband upon her return from studying in the United States.

Flygande Jacob is a casserole of chicken, bananas, Heinz chili sauce, whipped cream, and Italian salad spices, topped with peanuts and bacon. The dish is named after the air-freight employee who invented it on a whim. Food snobs, horrified by its offbeat ingredients combo (and orange color), are often shocked to find it quite tasty with a mix of sweet, spicy, smooth, crunchy, and salty flavors and textures.

It seems Ove Jacobsson, invited to bring potluck to a neighborhood dinner party, threw together a mishmash of ingredients he had on hand. After rave reviews, he submitted the recipe to a food magazine, Allt om Mat (All About Food), which published it in 1976 and named it in his honor. The dish became so sensationally popular, groceries later sold frozen food and baby food versions. It’s far from the only banana-based dinner entrée in Sweden (there’s a pork, banana, spicy peppers, and cream casserole; and fish with almonds and bananas). It reflects a Swedish fondness for fruits served with savory foods, like lingonberries with venison or pork roast with prunes. The magazine reprinted the original recipe in 2014.

“Flygande Jacob isn’t a dish you often find at restaurants (probably because it’s considered lowbrow and more of a kid’s food), but I think a lot of adults enjoy it and it’s easy to make at home. Those serving it tend to be lunch places that serve traditional home-cooked Swedish food, which is interesting because its ingredients are usually not part of traditional Swedish cooking,” says Melinda Martino, a spokesperson for Visit Sweden. “My mom used to make it, and I think she served it at one of my birthday parties. I like it!”

Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson of the now-closed Michelin two-star Faviken and Netflix series Chef’s Table (Season 3), even praised it as “emblematic” of Sweden’s contemporary food culture.    

Po’Boy (meaning poor boy) is a signature New Orleans sandwich that is often served with fried seafood or meat tucked inside crunchy French bread. The sandwich was born during the city’s 1929 streetcar strike, when Martin Brothers Restaurant decided to feed the hungry strikers for free, enlisting a local baker to create a cheap and filling meal. As the story goes, each time a striker claimed a sandwich, someone said, “Here’s another poor boy.”

Tons of eateries and bars have served them ever since and are even known for certain po’boy specialties. Red Fish Grill in the French Quarter is acclaimed for its BBQ Oyster Po Boy, seasoned with Crystal BBQ sauce and blue cheese dressing. Liuzza’s On the Track in Mid-City is famed for its BBQ Shrimp Po Boy, made with tart Worcestershire sauce, butter, and garlic. Ye Olde College Inn in Carrollton has its Oyster, Bacon, and Havarti Cheese Po Boy. The annual Oak Street Po Boy Festival features dozens of vendors, many offering creative twists on the beloved sandwich.

Oreilles de crises are crispy pork rinds and a traditional Quebec dish eaten at rural “sugar shacks,” where maple syrup is boiled from tree sap and made into tasty foods. It’s an addictive treat and a salty deep-fried contrast to the sweet maple syrup, comparable to Latin America’s chicharrones. Some Quebecois and folklorists say the “ears of Christ” name reflects the French Canadian penchant for poking fun at the Catholic religion that once dominated them, but others disagree.

“It’s more an image and a sound, called Oreilles, because it looks like a curled ear, and de crisse because they make a crissement (screeching sound) when they are deep-fried. We use the word as a derivative of Christ (spelled the same way in French and English), but it’s not the sense here,” explains Rose Boissonneault, director at Le Chemin du Roy, a “sugar shack” that serves the dish at brunch and dinner.

Imam bayildi is a popular dish made from a whole eggplant that is hollowed out and stuffed with tomatoes and onions and then cooked in olive oil. The dish got its name after an imam’s wife supposedly cooked him a new dish that he loved so much he swooned in delight. But according to other stories, the Muslim cleric fainted in shock due to the amount and price of the olive oil used; further shock came when he learned that his wife, who happened to be the daughter of an olive oil trader, used all the olive oil and there wasn’t any left, explains Karhan Karakoyunn of Istanbul on Food. In another version of the story, his wife’s dowry was 12 jars of olive oil. After she cooked an eggplant dish the imam adored, he asked her to cook it every night. But by the 13th night, all the olive oil had been consumed and he couldn’t have his eggplant. Overcome by the bad news, he fainted.

Pets de nonne, which means “nun’s farts,” are bite-sized round fluffy puffs, deep-fried until golden, then rolled in sugar, about 1 ½” wide. The tasty morsels are made from choux pastry dough (eggs, butter, flour, and water), which puffs up due to steam from lots of moisture, rather than a leavening agent. As one legend goes, in an abbey kitchen in the Loire Valley centuries ago, nuns were preparing a meal for the Archbishop of Tours when a novice named Agnes was, er, flatulent. After the other nuns laughed, she dropped some choux dough into hot oil by accident, says Irina Totterman of Baking Like a Chef, whose blog is devoted to mostly French desserts.

Another legend says a nun offered the recipe for Paix-de-Nonne (nun’s peace, but pronounced the same way in French) to an enemy convent as a peace offering. Other names are nun’s puffs, beignets souffles, and pets de vieille (meaning “old lady farts”) called pets de bieillo in Aveyron, a department in southern France’s Occitanie region that has the ten most beautiful villages in France.

The pastry is similar to the New Orleans beignet served at Café du Monde, but those are made from yeasted dough, doused in powdered sugar, and unaccountably square. Oddly, a French-Canadian variation on the pastry with the same meaning, Pets de Soeurs (Catholic nuns are called sisters or soeurs), looks more like a cinnamon roll. Made from leftover pie dough with cinnamon, brown sugar, and butter layered in a spiral shape, it’s baked after being blanketed in milk and more brown sugar.

Whole sausages cooked in Yorkshire pudding is a classic English dish. “No one quite knows where the name comes from, but most agree it’s because the sausages peek out in the same way that toads do in holes while they wait for prey,” explains Luke Charny of A Chef’s Tour, a London-based food tour operator.

“Toad in the Hole” is generally served with onion gravy and vegetables. In this video, Jamie Oliver, the British chef and best-selling cookbook author, makes his pudding batter with flour, wheat beer, eggs, milk, and adds a touch of rosemary and mustard. “Happy days,” exclaims The Naked Chef star, noting he loves the dish, calling it ideal when you’re hungry, and the weather is miserable.

Prego or nail is thin-sliced juicy beef in a garlicky paste, served in a sandwich form inside a round warmed bun or on a plate, usually seasoned with mustard or hot sauce. The beloved steak sandwich or platter is served nationwide and also has a pork version. Supposedly, it got its name because chopped garlic is pounded into the meat like nails.

In the Alentejo region of southern Portugal, bifana do prego is pork loin cooked with garlic, white wine, and bay leaf inside warmed papo seco bread, created in the town of Vendas Novas. Many eateries serve this specialty in Vendas Novas, located about midway between Evora—a walled UNESCO Heritage-designated town—and Setubal on the Lisbon coast.

The unappetizing name honors Manuel Dias Prego, whose tavern was renowned for serving sliced fried or roasted veal wrapped in warmed bread, says Jayme Simoes, a spokesman for  Visit Alentejo. So, the food entered popular slang in the early 20th-century since its inventor’s last name meant nail, notes Simoes. Prego is even eaten as dessert after a seafood meal.

Spaghetti all’assassina, or assassin spaghetti, is a dish in southern Italian states like Puglia and Basilicata. The spaghetti is fried in tomato sauce with the spiciest chili peppers and garlic topped by chili powder and (yes) more chili peppers. A local restaurant owner invented the dish in Bari, a port on Puglia’s Adriatic coast, in the 1970s, determined to show some northern Italian customers, whose diet is devoid of tomato sauce, the taste of spicy southern Italian cuisine.

Today, purists at Bari’s Assassin Academy uphold the correct way to make it: add dry spaghetti (without boiling it first) to sauce in the pan, add water gradually once it absorbs the liquid, and use an iron pan that you clean with newspaper, instead of washing it, to keep it greasy. Don’t be afraid of burning it, as crispy bits add to its charm, and don’t drink water with it. Variants include killer spaghetti made with seafood, fried olives, and broccoli rabe, and Stracciatella cheese.