Many Canadians go to great lengths to seek them out, traipsing through the forest with pocket knives at the ready as soon as the snow begins to melt. Yet, fiddleheads have their fair share of detractors. Canada’s spring delicacy joins Finnish blood dumplings, an Italian cartilage-and-tendon salad and a halved Icelandic sheep’s head on TasteAtlas’s 100 Worst Rated Foods in the World list.
Boiled fiddleheads, which came in at No. 61, is a simple dish involving boiling the tightly coiled ostrich ferns in salted water or steaming them until tender, adding melted butter and seasoning them with salt. (Health Canada recommends a 15-minute boiling time or 10-12 minutes of steaming before eating them or adding them to other dishes, whether sautéing for pasta or baking on a pizza.)
If TasteAtlas’s list is anything to go by, we can assume that these potentially toxic ferns are an acquired taste. One that people in every province and territory have come by naturally — especially in New Brunswick, southern Ontario and southern Quebec, where fiddleheads are most abundant.
Vegetable dishes like Canada’s are in the minority on TasteAtlas’s worst-of-the-worst ranking. Animal blood, insects and offal loom large. The No. 1 worst-rated food is Swedish blodplättar (blood pancakes), which feature pork or beef blood (reindeer for the Sami people) and often a sweet lingonberry topping. Blodpalt, a specialty of Lapland, Finland, came in at No. 2. Cooks traditionally made the barley-and-rye-based dumplings with reindeer blood and accompanied them with bacon or pork, butter and lingonberry jam. According to TasteAtlas, they use the blood of various animals today.
No. 3 surely stretches the definition of a “pizza.” An invention of the Tre Kronor restaurant in Skellefteå, Sweden, the calskrove is a colossal meal: a calzone stuffed with burgers (in their buns with all the fixings) and fries. According to @burgerspotting, who rated it 2/10 on Instagram, “Looks nasty and frankly it is nasty, soggy bun (and) warm lettuce, sauce and just too much of everything.”
The New Nordic food movement may have swept the globe in the 2010s, but Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden were well-represented on the list with 13 entries. The same goes for Spain, which often dominates world’s best restaurant rankings but serves up poorly rated foods such as faves a la Catalana (No. 16), bocadillo de carne de caballo (No. 18) and angulas a la cazuela (No. 19).
TasteAtlas based its list on 602,523 audience ratings, of which 389,802 were “legitimate.” It determines the legitimacy of the ratings using systems that recognize actual audience members and ignore “bot, nationalist or local patriotic ratings, and give additional value to the ratings of users that the system recognizes as knowledgeable.”
The online guide to the world’s traditional foods notes that it doesn’t intend for people to interpret its lists as definitive. “Their purpose is to promote excellent local foods, instill pride in traditional dishes, and arouse curiosity about dishes you haven’t tried.”
TasteAtlas’s top 10 worst-rated foods in the world
- Blodplättar — Sweden
- Blodpalt — Lapland, Finland
- Calskrove — Skellefteå, Sweden
- Svið — Iceland
- Deep-fried silk worms (hon mhai) — Thailand
- Chapalele — Chiloé Island, Chile
- Jellied eels — London, England
- Ramen burger — New York City, United States
- Thai fish entrails sour curry (kaeng tai pla) — southern Thailand
- Aginares salata — Crete, Greece
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