What's the worst meal you've ever eaten?

I like my food and am not remotely fussy, but things that stand out are:

baccala (salt cod) in an otherwise nice restaurant in northern Italy - looked, smelt and tasted like cat food

a pizzeria in a rural French town gave me a pizza with a virtually raw egg on top. I like an egg on a pizza but it has to be cooked.

some kind of slab of jellied brawn in a mountain hut in Germany

Closer to home, friends served us massive portions of slow cooked lamb (nice, but it was fatty and tendony), orzo (which I always find a bit slimy) and ratatouille, which was a bit of a weird combination and they’d run out of half the ingredients for the ratatouille so it was very bland. They also insisted we eat outside on a not particularly warm evening, so everything went stone cold in 5 minutes. It was a struggle to eat a decent amount,

have never dared try andouillette.

Someone on here years ago called andouillette 'poo sausage' and I've never forgotten

Oh god...😟

I give you andouillette and raise you andouille. Andouillette's bigger smellier chunky cousin.

A kind of hot semolina made with water, with a huge dollop of lard on top, which melted into it. Russia.

That is so miserable!
Did they even give you cutlery??

Spaghetti carbonara on holiday in a restaurant - it was disgusting, like salty slime. I have a strong gag reflex, it made me slightly vomit onto my food 🙈, the waiter came rushing over and gave us both our meals for free and a free dessert, so it wasn’t all bad!

I have been vegetarian for 45 years. Back in the early 1990s I was admitted to hospital for an emergency abdominal operation.
For my first meal afterwards I was given a POTATO! It was a large POTATO admittedly but it sat on its own on the plate.
No butter, no cheese, no beans, no salt!

I cried.
😳😢😉☺️

liver and bacon stew urg makes me feel a bit sick just thinking about it!

Not very exciting, but a toss up between steak pie and steak on its own. I can't imagine going to one of the many steak restaurants to have a variation of something that tastes so... meh.

Boil in the bag cod in white sauce, served with peeled, boiled, watery potatoes, and disintegrating broccoli. At least once a week throughout the whole of the 80s. Grim.

I might actually cook this one evening, so my kids can see how ridiculous they're being when they moan about the food they get these days!

Lavabread
Who in their right minds eats that cowpat?

Once went to a country pub in a quaint market town. Ordered pie and mash. The pie was tiny and dubious of being vegetarian... and the mash was Smash. Didn't even know it still existed in 2009....

Dog

in Vietnam, our friends thought it would be funny to get us to try this famous local dish without telling us what it was.

Then the big reveal - Dog meat.

Was furious, disgusted upset … ruined friendship.

Still sick thinking of it .. but you asked.

Indian beef curry. The rice was overcooked to the point of being inedible and the curry was a slop of too much oil, little flavour and a couple of tough beef pieces,

Dp is french and I just asked him what andouilette is and he said "I dunno, disgusting stuff"

I was once served pig's ear on a bed of lentils at a bbq in Germany. I don't know if I could describe it as the worst meal I've eaten because I didn't eat it.

I respect the nose-to-tail philosophy, but you need to add some cooking skill into the mix!

Other than this, cold chips are always a very sad offering when they rear their head.

I once went to a wedding where dinner was a hog roast.

I was vegetarian at the time, as were a few other guests, and we were assured there was a veggie option.

What that veggie 'option' was was two falafels in a dry morning roll (Scottish people will know what I mean by that) - not a brioche bun or even a sesame burger bun, but a morning roll - a smear of hummus that both resembled and tasted like wallpaper paste and a handful of salad leaves. No sauce, no dressing, no nothing.

Fortunately the venue was in a city centre, so we went round the corner to a noodle shop.

Cracking wedding otherwise, but the catering was dreadful (although I think the omnis enjoyed it!). In fairness, the bride and groom were very embarrassed and had a fairly full and frank discussion with the catering company after the event.

A pancake filled with snot on a KLM flight to the Philippines in the 90s
I don't know how I didn't puke

I stayed once at a school friend after school for dinner. And got served fried sheep brain. It was horrendous. I was encouraged to eat as it's delicious and I put it in my mouth and chewed. I went to the loo a few times during the meal to spit it out. I was a shy teen and didn't have the bravery to say no thank you .

Tinned salmon. At my grandmas as a child. Full of mashed bones.

Sheep testicles, I was on a business trip in Turkey and being hosted in a hotel, the chef was showcasing his fantastic dishes. No menu, just food brought out.

Fish soup in France. It had what appeared to be an inch of sand in the bottom.

I'm just imagining a brown, salt flavoured mountain of mush!

Recovering after surgery in hospital, the sandwich I ordered for evening meal was:
One slice of cheapest white bread, unbuttered
One slice of sweaty , slimy processed cheese.

If anyone had come to tell me how important nutrition was for post-op recovery, I would have slapped them with it.

I didn't know what Andouillette was, and simultaneously the fact that the word sounded French reminded me if the most vile 'sausages' I encountered as a child on holiday in France that were literally nothing but a long parcel of gristle, slime and mini-tubes stuffed into a bigger tube. So I googled and it turns out that yes this is indeed Andouillette.