Woman Makes 'Horrifying' Discovery About Mom's Homemade Apple Pie

A woman made a "truly terrifying" discovery after noticing something was a little off about the taste of her mom's homemade apple pie.

New York City resident Sarah McGonagall told Newsweek she's famous in her family for having "incredibly heightened senses." She said: "I'm always the one who picks up on the smallest smells or sounds, so it made sense that I was the only one to pick up on the strange taste."

Apple pie is something of a Christmas tradition with her parents over in Boston. "We have the same pie every year around the holidays," she said. Only this time, there was something a little different about the pie her mom made.

Food plays an important role in keeping families together and can be a source of comfort and nostalgia for millions of Americans. In 2023, a poll of 2,000 U.S. adults commissioned by Bob Evans and conducted by OnePoll found two in three Americans have family recipes so good they believe they're worthy of best-selling cookbooks.

McGonagall usually looks forward to the Christmas apple pie, but from the moment she took a bite, she sensed there was something a little off about it.

"It wasn't necessarily bad, but I did ask my mom on Christmas if she had changed up the spice mix she used, because it seemed very chalky and slightly foul—like it hit the back of your throat before it reached your taste buds," she said.

Her mom, however, "swore it was all the same" so McGonagall shrugged off the strange taste sensation and carried on with the rest of the holidays.

It wasn't until a few days after Christmas, when she went back for seconds that she began to notice there was an issue. "That's when the taste became really noticeable to me, it was clear that the spices weren't sitting right," she said.

The following day, she brought it up with her mom again who continued to insist she "hadn't deviated from the traditional recipe" albeit with one telling caveat. "That's when she mentioned that the nutmeg had been a bit clumpy, and she'd had to break it up with a spoon," McGonagall said.

"It's funny, because I had given my aunt a new set of spices for Christmas, and they had a big expiration date printed on the box. My aunt had said that she was worried she wouldn't be able to use them all up before the date, and I'd joked about how I was scared to check my parents' spices and see what ancient horrors they'd been holding onto," McGonagall said. "So when my mom handed me the jar of nutmeg, I remembered that conversation and checked the date out of curiosity. And that's when the pie that was still sitting in my stomach from the night before suddenly became a two-ton weight."

That was the moment McGonagall discovered her mother had been using nutmeg with an expiry date of November, 2000. As in, 24 years ago.

While she was stunned, her mom had an altogether different reaction. "She laughed for at least five straight minutes," McGonagall said. It may not be a recipe she wants to pass down to future generations but McGonagall was more than happy to share it to X with the resulting post, shared under the handle gothspiderbitch, garnering 11.6 million views.

Alarmed at this discovery, McGonagall decided to conduct further investigations. "The process of cleaning out the rest of the spice drawer was both horrifying, but also absolutely hysterical," she said.

"The oldest thing we can confirm was a packet of dill seasoning mix that expired in December of 1999. But we did find tins of fossilized hot cocoa mix that I remember having as a child, and I think that they pre-dated my birth and may have been a relic of the mid-90s. We also found a ton of loose leaf tea that had a label from 1992, but no expiration date to verify the exact age. All we know for certain is that they definitely were packed up and moved here with us in the mid-2000s."

A further inspection of her parents' pantry threw up more horrors including several rock-hard tubes of decorating icing from the "mid-to-late 1990s." McGonagall reckons the nutmeg likely went this long undetected because, in previous years, her grandma has made the apple pie at her house. Whatever the case, when she discovered her parents were still saving a slice of the pie in their fridge for her the following day, she had to "gently break the news" that she was not going to eat it.

Since then, the whole family has been taking extra care to check the labels on things.

"I've been nagging my parents to check the expiration dates on things ever since they accidentally made cookies with expired chocolate chips a few months ago, but this incident has definitely radicalized my mom," McGonagall said. "We've already purged most of the cabinets and pantries, and I noticed her dethawing and disposing of some Italian ices from the freezer that I hadn't seen since high school."

Though she still loves her mom dearly and will never pass up one of her home-cooked meals, McGonagall is definitely going to be keeping an eye out from now on. "I'll still eat her food, but I'll probably do an annual pantry check from now on, just in case I catch her slipping."

According to health information site Healthline, dried herbs and spices generally have a shelf life of between one and four years, depending on type, level of processing, and storage.

However, it said dried herbs and spices don't really expire or "go bad" in the traditional sense. "When a spice is said to have gone bad, it simply means that it has lost most of its flavor, potency, and color. Fortunately, consuming a spice that has gone bad is unlikely to make you sick," it added.