It's not "Jaws," but this is still horror from the sea...

250 Fish and Sea Food Recipes (ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1940) emphasizes the new possibilities for homemakers because "modern refrigerated shipping facilities bring these briny morsels [of seafood] with their valuable nutritive iodine and other mineral salts to inlanders while the world sleeps." I imagine all the inlanders were mumbling, "Mmmm... Mineral salts" in their sleep.

In keeping with the wonders of modern refrigeration, there's a recipe for Frozen Tuna Cream.

I can just imagine little Billy pulling an unmarked container out of the freezer when mom wasn't looking, scooping out a big, creamy blob, and then gagging at the realization that the concoction is tuna and horseradish in whipped cream, rather than a dessert.

As is typical of these older books, there's a purportedly Mexican recipe that had me wondering about its connection to Mexico.

Anything with onion, green peppers, and tomatoes as ingredients tended to get a special label back then. A recipe was usually called Italian if the seasonings included garlic and/ or oregano, Cajun or Creole if the vegetables also included some celery, or Mexican if chili powder was involved. This has no chili powder, but the Tabasco and cloves might make it Mexican? It's kind of hard to tell... (The closest match I could find online was attributed to Spain, not Mexico, and it was flavored with garlic and parsley.)

I expected to see some sweet and sour, and I was not disappointed. However, I thought the sweet would be pineapple (since it's almost always pineapple in these older recipes). Not this time!

Yep-- this is a recipe for fish and gingersnaps! I know I must be in the minority wanting to keep cookies away from savory preparations (especially given the ubiquity of sauerbraten recipes), but I can't imagine too many people have ever longed for a fish/ gingersnap combination.

The book also offers the rather common seafood-avocado combination (that always makes me think of The Bell Jar's protagonist Esther Greenwood barfing in the backseat of a taxi). Most of the preparations for the pairing are cold, but 250 Fish and Sea Food Recipes goes a different direction.

The avocado halves are filled with a creamed shrimp mixture, topped with American cheese, and baked! Baking avocados just seems wrong to me. And even if that doesn't horrify you the way it does me, there are plenty of other things to horrify others who are similarly judgy about food but have different aversions. There's white sauce for the white sauce haters, American cheese for the cheese snobs to hate, and a seafood-and-cheese combo for the people who swear that the two do not belong together. There's a little something for everybody to hate!

The thing that disturbed me the most about this book, though, was not a recipe at all. It's the caption for one of the photos.

"A fish is its own excuse for being when baked to flaky perfection." In what world does anyone need an "excuse for being"? Nobody asked to be here. We all just show up (and I'll bet I'm not the only one who wonders "WTF?" about my own existence with alarming regularity). If one needs an excuse for being, that's bad enough, but if that "excuse" involves being served on a platter surrounded by sliced cucumbers and lemons, with a flourish of watercress obscuring the spot where one's head should be... Well, this cookbook is way scarier than the horror movies I love. The recipes might occasionally provide jump scares, but this book's heart is existential horror.