Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 30 Dec 2025Farro cooked in wine sauce topped with stewed pork, leeks, and dill
City/Region: Rome
Time Period: 1st CenturyWhile the common Roman foot soldier didn’t often have access to fresh meat, a Roman centurion did. A centurion was in charge of 80 fighting men and 20 servants, and holding such a rank meant that their meals were prepared for them and might include ingredients like garum, defrutum (reduced grape must), and fresh herbs and meat.
The dill and defrutum come through in the pork, and the wine isn’t overpowering. The puls, or wheat porridge, is wonderfully flavorful, and the whole dish is made up of lots of different textures (don’t skip the chopped leek garnish; it adds a wonderful crunch). If you like your puls to be thicker and more porridge-like in consistency, go ahead and crush the farro before cooking it.
… small pieces of meat and fine wheat flour or cooked groats you also season with [oenococti], and serve with small morsels of pork prepared with the same sauce.
Frontinian Piglet [oenococti sauce]:
You bone it, brown, and truss. Put into a pot garum and wine, and tie together a bundle of leek and dill. Halfway through the cooking, add defrutum. When it is cooked, wash it and dry. Sprinkle with pepper and serve.
— Apicius de re coquinaria, 1st century
June 24, 2026
Feeding A Roman Centurion – Pork & Puls
June 17, 2026
Brewing 3,000 Year-Old Ancient Mesopotamian Beer
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 23 Dec 2025Cloudy pomegranate beer made with honey and dates
City/Region: Assyria
Time Period: 9th Century BCEAshurnasirpal II was an Assyrian king who built an empire in a rather ruthless manner. While he’s remembered for razing cities and killing and/or maiming their inhabitants, he’s also remembered for throwing one heck of a party. When he unveiled his new palace, he invited nearly 70,000 guests to a 10 day feast, and they even wrote down the menu. He provided 10,000 jars of beer for the feast, and while some were basic beer, there were also specialty brews like this much fancier version made with pomegranates, dates, and honey.
While flat, this cloudy beer is surprisingly tasty. The flavor of the honey and pomegranate come through, but with none of the sweetness, and they combine for an oddly modern taste.
Because there are no hops to preserve the beer, it’ll only keep for up to 1 week. As with any vague ancient recipe, feel free to change the amounts of the ingredients to suit your taste.
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June 10, 2026
World War 2 Mincemeat Pie for the Battle of the Bulge
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 16 Dec 2025Raisin-forward army mincemeat pie made in a quarter sheet pan
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1945During World War II, and really any war, soldiers far from home longed for a taste of home, especially during the holidays. Field kitchens would go to great lengths to break the monotonous menus and bring a little holiday cheer to the troops with things like turkey, stuffing, and pies.
This mincemeat pie is not bad, but it does lack the spices and citrus that really say “Christmas” to me. The corned beef and bouillon cubes add more of a savory note than a real meaty flavor, and raisins are the star of this pie.
No. 822. MINCEMEAT FORMULA NO. 1
Yield: 100 servings, 2 sheet pans, 16 1/2″ x 24″ x 1 1/2″.
Bouillon cubes……36 cubes
Water, boiling……9 quarts (9 No. 56 dippers)
Corned beef, canned……4 pounds
Fat……2 pounds (1 No. 56 dipper)
Apple nuggets, dehydrated……2 1/2 pounds (3 1/4 No. 56 dippers)
Sugar, granulated……3 pounds (1 1/2 No. 56 dippers)
Raisins……7 pounds (5 1/3 No. 56 dippers)
Cinnamon…… 3/4 ounce (3 mess kit spoons)
Pepper……(1/3 mess kit spoon)
Nutmeg……1/4 ounce (1 mess kit spoon)
Salt……(1/3 mess kit spoon)
Dissolve bouillon cubes in boiling water.
Add remaining ingredients. Simmer on a slow fire for approximately 45 minutes or until apples and raisins are tender. The addition of gravy coloring or caramelized sugar will improve the appearance. Remove from fire and cool. Pour into pastry-lined sheet pans.
Cover with a top crust and make in hot oven 40 to 45 minutes or until crust is golden brown.
Note. This mix should be prepared just prior to using.
— TM 10-412 US Army Technical Manual. Army Recipes by the U.S. War Department, 1945
June 6, 2026
June 3, 2026
Brits and Americans mispronounce foreign words differently, film at 11
ESR explains why American mispronunciations of Spanish or Italian words tend to be less offensive to those cultures than equivalent British linguistic manglings:
Ah, yet another round of the great pasta-pronunciation debate.
My credentials to speak on this: I am American. I have lived in Great Britain. I have lived in Italy. I pay attention to descriptive phonology. And I was at one time bilingual in English and Spanish.
These facts make me an expert witness on this issue.
Yes, Brits do in fact systematically mispronounce words like “pasta” and “taco” in a way Americans find amusing. But the interesting part of this story is the reason *why* Americans pronounce these words in a way much closer to the Italian and Spanish originals.
It isn’t superior virtue or worldly sophistication or anything like that. It’s the result of an important feature of the American linguistic environment that it doesn’t share with the British one, and which Americans themselves seldom even notice.
Many Americans have heavy exposure to the phonology of Spanish. Brits do not. The result is even that even those of us who are completely monolingual (which is most of us) tend to have models for two phonological systems in our heads rather than one; the second one being Spanish.
There’s a video about this somewhere on YouTube by a linguist, an English one as it happens, who explains that Americans attempting to reproduce the vowel sounds of a foreign language often bend it to try and fit it into the five-vowel system of Spanish. And this is true even when they don’t actually speak Spanish themselves.
One consequence is that even Americans who don’t know Spanish pronounce it tolerably well. Intelligibly, at least. Same goes for Italian, the phonology is slightly different but similar enough.
We crash-land on languages that have vowel systems quite unlike either English or Spanish. There are good reasons that when an American says “pasta” or “taco” his pronunciation is quite unlikely to make a native wince or laugh, but there is no such guarantee about French. Or German. Or Russian. Or just about anything else.
We’re just as lost as the Brits are trying to pronounce those languages. The difference is that, unlike a Brit, we may not mispronounce the local language in a way that makes it sound like a mangled version of English. Americans are likely to make it sound like a mangled version of Spanish instead.
What is Turkish Delight? How to make real Ottoman Turkish Delight
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 9 Dec 2025Beautiful red Turkish delight dusted with powdered sugar and starch and flavored with rose water and musk
City/Region: Ottoman Empire
Time Period: 1844I don’t know about you, but I first learned about Turkish delight from The Chronicles of Narnia, where Edmund sells out his family for a box of the confection. True Turkish delight, made in Turkey or Greece, is made of sugar and starch, but when other countries tried to copy it, they often added gelatin, which gives it a completely different texture.
While we can’t be absolutely certain which kind Edmund liked, I hope it was the true Turkish kind that melts in your mouth beautifully. If you’ve never tried musk, it’s a unique flavor that reminds me of clean laundry and perfume, and mixes with the rose water to make a flavor profile unlike anything else I’ve had. All in all, I wouldn’t sell my family out for it, but it is very good.
Rose water or musk aren’t your thing? Feel free to change the flavorings to whatever you like. Almond, orange blossom water, and pistachio were popular at the time.
Rahatu’l-hulkum
Method: Take one kiyye of the finest sugar and prepare a syrup with three kiyyes of water in a tinned pan … take 75 dirhems of the finest pounded starch and slowly stir into the syrup. It must be stirred constantly so that it does not form lumps or stick to the bottom of the pan … Then blend 35 dirhems of rose water with a grain of musk and after adding to the mixture stir a few more times before removing from the heat. Oil a tray with almond oil and pour in the cooked mixture. When cool cut into pieces of the desired size and toss into a mixture consisting half of sieved starch and half of powdered sugar, and stir until they do not stick together. It will be delicious.— Melceü’t-tabbahîn by Mehmet Kamil, 1844
May 26, 2026
Gingerbread for Washington’s Army
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 2 Dec 2025Beautifully spiced gingerbread cookies formed in a sea goat mold
City/Region: England | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Time Period: 1773Christopher Ludwick was a true hero of the American Revolution. A German immigrant, he made his fortune in part by baking gingerbread in Philadelphia, and then used his baking knowledge, patriotic spirit, and all of his fortune to aid the American cause.
These gingerbread cookies are not as gingery as many modern ones, but the addition of mace, coriander seeds, and caraway seeds makes for a complex spiciness that is delicious. If you have gingerbread molds, these are a great time to use them, and if you don’t, they’re still delicious as cut-out cookies.
To Make Ginger-bread
Take a pound and a half of treacle, two eggs beaten, half a pound of brown sugar, an ounce of ginger beaten and sifted; of cloves, mace, and nutmegs all together half an ounce, beaten very fine, coriander-seeds and carraway-seeds of each half an ounce, two pounds of butter melted; mix all these together, with as much flour as will knead it into a pretty stiff paste; then roll it out, and cut it into what forms you please; bake it in a quick oven on tin plates; a little time will bake it.
— The Universal Cook or, the Lady’s Complete Assistant by John Townshend, 1773
May 24, 2026
The PRC would need a literal “short, victorious war” to defeat the US
On Substack, Tom Kratman looks at the economic and strategic weakness of the Peoples Republic of China should it get into a serious shooting war with the United States:
China’s strategic position is appalling, and at least the higher party cadres and senior military leadership have to know that it is. Why? China is utterly dependent on both imports and exports to keep their economy going and to feed themselves. By that latter, I don’t just mean they need to import food, though they do to the tune of one third. That’s bad enough, but they also need to import fertilizer to grow the inadequate amount of food they grow for themselves. No, nitrogen and phosphates aren’t a huge problem; they are net exporters. Potash is a problem. Loss of potash imports probably cut their grain production by about ten percent. This would be painful, but survivable with a touch of rationing and some weight loss.
Except for one thing, oil and natural gas. Cut those off and grain production drops by a third within two years and probably forty percent after that. On top of the loss of the third that they must import, that’s serious hunger.
And another thing, farm machinery and transportation. China only produces about a quarter of its oil needs domestically. Cut those off and mechanization of farming must be reduced.
Add in that this kind of food reduction also means they must stop feeding food animals.
Moreover, while a good deal of their transportation net runs off of electricity, which can be produced by the coal China does have, at what we might call the strategic level, getting the food from the farms to the railheads and from the railheads to markets to kitchens requires liquid fuel. China’s ability to produce liquid fuel from coal exists, but it is tiny.
Add in the increased need for liquid fuel for their military in this case.
A long series of interrogatories to Grok suggests that China’s total food production and importation collapses by seventy percent or more within two or three years if they go to war with us.
It won’t be sudden; they probably have about a year’s worth of food in storage against such a day. But within three years? We’re talking an entire civilization in kwashiorkor1 and marasmus2.
How do they keep that industrial civilization going in the absence of food and energy imports, or the exports that have kept their economy going? They likely don’t.
Although China’s population appears to be in accelerating collapse, they still have a lot more people than we do. Surely that represents … nothing. For a war fought largely at sea it represents nothing. Yes, they can, at least for the moment, build more ships faster than we can. However, we can build things to sink ships faster than they can build ships. Thus, we’ll keep our existing naval supremacy.
There’s a worse factor in there, though; in China sons are just a lot more important than daughters. No, I don’t care if this upsets western feminist sensibilities; we are not talking about the west but about China. Daughters, assuming they marry, go on to take care of their husband’s family. Sons take care of the parents. It is the rare Chinese family with an extra son to spare.
But can’t they build enough ships to overwhelm our blockade in the short term, at least? No, they can’t. China is surrounded by enemies on land, Vietnam, India, and Russia predominant among them, though none of the neighbors – barring, maybe, North Korea – really likes China or doesn’t fear it. No, however much public kissy face they may engage in for foreign consumption, China and Russia have long-standing, intractable issues between them. China is a threat to Russia and vice versa in ways we are not.
So all the manpower and money spent on a navy is largely wasted. They’re not going to get a navy large, powerful, and competent enough to take us on and, if they really try to, we will manufacture a war – the United States is good at this – to trim them down to size before they can. Worse, every increment of money and manpower they spend on the navy is money and manpower not spent on the much more important army and air force.3
- Caused by protein deficiency.
- Caused by deficiency in all macronutrients.
- The Navy is much more important to us because we have no serious land enemies in this hemisphere.
Update, 25 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
May 19, 2026
How to Eat Like a Medieval Peasant
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 25 Nov 2025Boiled carp fillets with a thick garlic-walnut sauce
City/Region: England
Time Period: c. 1450In addition to their regular schedule of backbreaking work, medieval European peasants often had to work extra days for their lord, called boon days. The upside to this was that the peasants were given better food on boon days, which could include cheese, good bread, ale, meat, and fish.
While the medieval cookbooks we have today were written for the wealthy, these seemed like good choices if a lord wanted to feed their serfs: good, but not too good, and fancier than their everyday fare, but not heavily spiced like the nobility’s dishes.
I’d never tried carp before and thought it was quite good, and the garlic is by far the dominant flavor in the sauce. All in all, it’s not amazing, but if I was a medieval peasant, I don’t think I would complain.
Barbell boyled.
Take a barbell, and kutte him, and draw him round; And pike in the nape of the hede and seth him in water and salt, Ale, and parcely. And whan hit bygynneth to boile, skeme hit clene, and caste the barbel there-to, And seth him. And his sauce is garlek or vergesauce, And then serve him forth.
— Harleian MS 4016 (c. 1450)Take kernels of walnuts, and cloves of garlic, and pepper, bread, and salt, and cast all in a mortar; and grind it small, & mix it up with the same broth that the fish was sodden in, and serve it forth.
— Ashmole MS 1439
May 12, 2026
Indian Pudding – America’s Forgotten Dessert
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 18 Nov 2025Rather unattractive, but delicious, molasses and cornmeal baked pudding with whipped cream
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1829Indian pudding, a perfect marriage of new world and old world cooking, resulted from British colonists making familiar foods with the ingredients that were available to them in America. Without access to wheat flour, they used cornmeal to make their beloved boiled puddings, and by the time this recipe came around in 1829, there were baked versions as well.
While an admittedly unattractive dish, it is absolutely delicious. The molasses really comes through, but it has none of the bitterness, leaving an almost caramelly flavor.
This dish has fallen out of favor and can usually only be found in New England, but I think it should make a comeback. If you’re planning on serving it for Thanksgiving (which I plan on doing), then I recommend presenting it dressed up with whipped cream to make it, if not pretty, then more palatable-looking.
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May 5, 2026
A 375 Year Old French Recipe for Pumpkin Soup
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 11 Nov 2025Creamy pumpkin soup served in a hollowed out pumpkin
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1651This is one of the first recipes for pumpkin soup where we can be sure that the pumpkin they’re referring to is a new world pumpkin. This cookbook was written by François Pierre de la Varenne, who’s credited with leading the shift away from highly spiced medieval and renaissance foods into what we would call French haute cuisine. He was into showcasing the flavor of the key ingredient in whatever he made, and this soup does it.
The cloves, onion, and pepper are there but subtle, and the pumpkin really shines through. You can use canned pumpkin to make this soup even easier, and serving it in a hollowed out pumpkin adds some festive flair. It’s simple, delicious, and would be a great addition to any holiday or autumnal table.
Pumpkin Soup with Milk
Cut up a pumpkin and cook it as above [in water and salt], then pass it through a strainer with some milk and boil it with butter, seasoned with salt, pepper, and onion stuck [with cloves], and serve with yolks of eggs thinned [with some broth].
— Le cuisinier françois by François Pierre de la Varenne, 1651
May 4, 2026
Gentleman’s Relish (Patum Peperium) – Weird Stuff In A (Sort Of A) Can #142
Atomic Shrimp
Published 16 Aug 2020Here’s something I have been meaning to feature on the channel for a little while — it’s a savoury anchovy paste that has been in continuous production in England since 1828 — the Georgian Era.
For more information about this product, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlem…
The music for the spoon segment is called “Forever Yours” by Wayne Jones – from the YouTube Audio Library
May 2, 2026
Making Real English Toffee from 1881
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Dec 2025Rich, sweet pieces of Victorian Era toffee
City/Region: Everton, England
Time Period: 1881Around Christmas, my house is full of candy and baked goods, and for me, toffee is one of the quintessential Christmas treats. Possibly invented by Molly Bushell in 1753 in Everton, just outside of Liverpool, toffee can be hard like the recipe we’re making here or of a softer, chewier variety.
While either option is delicious, this recipe is specifically for the hard style of Everton toffee. It’s a really simple recipe (the hardest part is waiting for it to come up to temperature), and is such a rich, decadent treat. The lemon extract adds a layer of acidic complexity to the toffee, but it doesn’t taste of lemon.
Feel free to dress yours up by adding some nuts to the dish before you pour the toffee over it, or sprinkle some chocolate chips over the toffee while it’s still hot so that they melt.
Everton Toffee.
Put one pound of brown sugar and one tea-cupful of cold water into a pan well rubbed with good fresh butter. Set it over a slow fire, and boil until the sugar has become a smooth, thick syrup, then stir into it half a pound of butter, and boil for half an hour. When sufficiently boiled, it may be tested by dropping some on a plate, and if it dries hard and can easily be removed, the toffee is ready for flavouring. For this purpose, add twenty or thirty drops of essence of lemon. Pour the toffee into a wide well-buttered dish. If liked, vinegar may be substituted for the water, then the lemon may be omitted.
— Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery, England, 1881
April 30, 2026
China’s weaker-than-it-seems strategic position
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR expands on a post by Tom Kratman about the strategic weakness of the current Chinese government:
Tom didn’t explain his second assertion, but it’s important so I’m going to do it.
China is in the worst strategic position of any great power in history because it is critically dependent on resources it has to import, and it doesn’t have control of the sea lanes over which it imports them.
China is neither food nor energy self-sufficient. It needs to import pork from the United States, grain from Africa, coal from Australia, and oil from the Middle East to keep its population fed and its factories running.
Naval blockades at about three critical chokepoints (Hormuz, Malacca, Sunda) would cripple the Chinese economy within months, possibly within weeks. China does not have the blue-water navy required to contrast control of those chokepoints. The moment any first-rate naval power or even a second-rate like India decides China needs to be stopped, it’s pretty much game over.
As a completely separate issue thanks to the one-child policy, Chinese population probably peaked in 2006 and has been declining ever since. Every year in the foreseeable future they will have fewer military-age males than they do now. Most of those males are only sons; their deaths would wipe out entire family lines, giving the Chinese people an extremely low tolerance for war casualties.
Then there’s the glass jaw. The Three Gorges Dam. Which is already in some peril even without a war — you can compare photographs over time and see that it’s sagging. If anyone gets annoyed enough to pop that dam thing with a bunker-buster or a pony nuke, the resulting floods will kill millions and wipe out the strip of central China that is by far the country’s most industrially and agriculturally productive region.
The Chinese haven’t fought a war since 1971. They lost. Against Vietnam. The institutional knowledge that could potentially fit their army for doing anything more ambitious than suppressing regional warlordism does not exist.
I could go on. But I think I’ve made Tom’s statements sufficiently understandable already.

The position of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in Hubei Province, showing the major cities downstream of the dam.
Image by Rolfmueller via Wikimedia Commons.
And Tom Kratman responds:
Almost perfect; you missed four tricks.
1. People, when we talk about blockading China, imagine that we’re talking about a civilized stop and search. Uh, uh; we will designate a no go zone and sink without further warning anything that enters it.
2. Our blockade will be distant, well out of range of those Oh-they’re-just-too-terrible-for-words (but never tested) DF-21s. [Wiki] (You did sort of address this, but not in so many words.)
3. We can blow the levees on the Yellow River, too, to kill many millions more and destroy still more industry (it flows above ground).
4. China not only doesn’t have the navy to contest with us, it can never have that navy. Why not? Because there’s only so much wealth to go around; China is surrounded on all sides by enemies with anywhere from decent to quite good armies, any or all of which might take a stab (pun intended) at carving China up like a turkey. They must put a lot more money and effort and manpower into stymying those than they can ever put into meeting us and Japan.
The History of BROWN SAUCE: HP Sauce, A1 Sauce, OK Sauce and Chef Sauce
Tweedy Misc
Published 7 Nov 2025Have you ever wondered how British “brown sauce” came about? What is it made from? Who invented it? When was it invented? Which brown sauce is the oldest? When did we start calling it “brown sauce”?
In this video we look into what exactly brown sauce is (and isn’t), we look into ingredients of a number of iconic brands (and some supermarket own brands) and explore the history of the five brown sauces which defined the category: A1 Sauce, OK Sauce, HP Sauce, Daddies Favourite Sauce and Chef Sauce.
Some links to Wikipedia etc in case it helps figure out what this is all about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_s…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Sauce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.1._Sauce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daddies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_Sauce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef_Br…If you’re finding the wobbling bottles are a problem for you, here’s a version of the video without any wobbling: • History of Brown Sauce (No Wobbling!)
This video was made using Davinci Resolve 20, with a lot of the still images made using Canva.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:16 What is brown sauce?
2:33 Supermarket own brand brown sauces
4:02 History of brown sauce
4:48 A1 Sauce
10:49 OK Sauce
15:31 HP Sauce
17:06 Daddies Favourite Sauce
19:06 Chef Sauce
23:50 Conclusion








