Pregnancy cravings book co-author shares best strange food combinations she tried while writing
Vicky Jacob-Ebbinghaus tells Fox News Digital that there were a few select and unique food combinations pregnant women craved that she enjoyed, including a burger complete with a chocolate bar. Jacob-Ebbinghaus co-wrote "Pickles and Ice Cream."
During pregnancy, women often find themselves digging through their cabinets, creating strange concoctions of foods that normally do not go together.
Sweet treats and spicy foods are among common pregnancy cravings, but there are others that are much stranger.
Vicky Jacob-Ebbinghaus of Hamburg, Germany, was curious about this — and set off on a mission to try some of the oddest pregnancy cravings she came across.
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The project turned into a cookbook called "Pickles and Ice Cream," which includes some of the oddest food combinations Jacob-Ebbinghaus and her co-author, Juarez Rodrigues, tried in their research.
"It happened because a mutual friend had a really, really crazy craving. She was craving toothpaste and Oreos," Jacob-Ebbinghaus told Fox News Digital in a Zoom interview about how the cookbook came to be. (See the video at the top of this article.)
Jacob-Ebbinghaus and her co-author, Juarez Rodrigues, styled each food in the book as a gourmet-style meal, no matter how disgusting the combination. (Juarez Rodrigues & Vicky Jacob-Ebbinghaus)
"We started wondering: Is this genius or is this madness? We thought that some nonpregnant palates should give it a try and see what they thought," Jacob-Ebbinghaus said.
"It started off as a photography project. We wanted to kind of set up these meals, like gourmet, and then taste them and review them."
Experts cite a few different reasons for why pregnancy cravings occur. One is shifts in the nutritional needs of the body, such as a deficiency of some kind, according to the Mother Baby Center's website.
"We looked at 50,000 pregnancy cravings for this book."
Hormonal changes can also be the cause of strange, strong cravings, per the source.
Jacob-Ebbinghaus and Rodrigues did extensive research to determine some of the strangest combinations to include in the cookbook, they said.
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They scoured the internet for strange pregnancy cravings, did a deep dive on social media and also spoke to individuals about weird foods they craved during their pregnancies.
"We looked at 50,000 pregnancy cravings for this book," Jacob-Ebbinghaus said.
Sixty-five recipes made the final cut, and Jacob-Ebbinghaus and her co-author tried all of them, they told Fox News Digital.
A handful of the pregnancy cravings included items that were not food, which Jacob-Ebbinghaus found particularly challenging to try.
"We tried all of them. We felt like it was our duty to try all of them. There were some nonfood ones in there which are a bit dangerous," Jacob-Ebbinghaus said.
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"It's a syndrome called pica, when you crave nonfood things, but we felt that we needed to at least taste what these things tasted like, so we would chew them and then spit them out if they were nonfood," she said.
"That included some things like [a] seat belt, toilet paper, sponge, nail polish [and] gasoline and rice. There were some rough ones. There were some really rough ones," Jacob-Ebbinghaus added.
Soap — which was grated over toast — was another odd nonfood pregnancy craving that Jacob-Ebbinghaus tried in the research process.
The humorous pregnancy craving book was named after the dish pictured above; pickles and ice cream. (Juarez Rodrigues & Vicky Jacob-Ebbinghaus)
Over a period of three to four months, Jacob-Ebbinghaus and Rodrigues went to work trying different recipes for their book.
A select few of the foods they tried were surprisingly enjoyable, including the book's title combo "pickles and ice cream."
Other recipes Jacob-Ebbinghaus enjoyed were spring rolls and chocolate sauce, a burger topped with bacon and Mars bars, beef jerky and Skittles — as well as salami and condensed milk.
Not all the food combinations tested were in good taste.
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"One of them was pickled pig's feet with cornflakes and milk. That was really, really bad, really bad, and also very difficult to make, because we were both based in Germany at the time, and so we couldn't buy pickled pig's foot there," she said.
"We had to actually buy a foot and pickle it ourselves."
"So, we had to actually buy a foot and pickle it ourselves — [meaning] go through the whole process just to make that really, really awful dish."
Jacob-Ebbinghaus added, "Lamb's eyes was really bad as well. That one was from a woman who's a vegetarian, and she was going through a market in Morocco and then suddenly had this insane craving when she saw roasted lamb's heads on display and apparently lunged for the eyes and got pulled back by her horrified husband. That one was very, very bad."
A hot dog coffee smoothie was another tried by Jacob-Ebbinghaus, and one she found to be extremely unfavorable.
There were many commonalities among the women spoken to during the research of this book, such as weird combinations including chocolate, like chocolate and shrimp, as well as different pickled foods, the co-author said.
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Even though many of the recipes presented in "Pickles and Ice Cream" are less than ideal for most palates, Jacob-Ebbinghaus wished that more people gave some strange but surprising delicious foods a try.
Pickled pig's feet with cornflakes and milk was a dish that Jacob-Ebbinghaus recalled as particularly disgusting. (Juarez Rodrigues & Vicky Jacob-Ebbinghaus)
"The main feedback we get is kind of fascination, and a lot of people say, ‘Oh, gross,’ when they look at the stuff. I was hoping more people would try things like the pickles and ice cream, but people weren't really as eager to do that as we were," Jacob-Ebbinghaus said.
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"People seem to be very curious about these recipes that pregnant women come up with, and I really like that," she told Fox News Digital.
"I feel like there's a lot of stigma around that … A lot of the women that we spoke to felt very embarrassed to say what they'd been obsessed with during their pregnancy, and I think it's nice for other pregnant women to know that they're definitely not alone when they crave strange things."
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