Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Apr 2026Roasted lobster tails with creamy beurre blanc served with smoked salmon roses with caviar
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1970sThe luxury dining experience that came with the exorbitant price tag of a ticket aboard the supersonic airliner Concorde (about $9,000 in 2026 money for a one-way ticket from New York to London) included an exclusive lounge experience at the airport and continued with a multi-course meal in the air.
Here I’m recreating a dish from a photo aboard Concorde of smoked salmon shaped into roses, garnished with crème fraîche and caviar. The caviar served aboard Concorde would have been beluga, of course, but feel free to opt for a more reasonably priced alternative. I used white sturgeon caviar, which was still a bit of a splurge.
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October 8, 2026
Dining on the Supersonic Concorde
QotD: Headlines for modern audiences
I considered some eye-catching modern headlines for this one.
Popcorn: you’re making it wrong. This is a classic formulation that produces both anger and curiosity. It’s confrontational and contemptuous, but you think hey, once I learn the secret, I can smirk at other people who don’t know the true way.
We talked to popcorn experts. Here’s why they say you should smear butter on your chest. This style has become the norm, and appeals to people who regard themselves as the sort of people who respect the experts. They trust the popcorn science.
The FDA has banned this poison from popcorn: here’s what we know. Then you discover there’s some 1964 rule that forbids using DDT on corn.
Gut doctor begs: stop doing this with popcorn (Picture of a doctor pointing at a cadaver with its chest blown out from the inside)
Sorry. The closest I can come is this:
If you stop eating popcorn on a regular basis, an unexpected thing happens: it becomes unappetizing. It ceases to be something you consider as “food”. It’s stuff you’d put in a box of plates to keep them from chipping.
But, you say, I make absolutely delightful popcorn with butter and salt! I don’t doubt it. Everything is better with butter and salt. You could say that popcorn is just a delivery mechanism for butter and salt. Golden, rich butter, seeping into the tiny caverns of the detonated kernel, salt falling like snow on Christmas Eve –
Hold on, be right back; I really want some popcorn now.
James Lileks, “Experts say these are the most overrated headlines; number 4 is scary”, LILEKS (James), 2026-07-06.
October 2, 2026
QotD: Ketchup, US vs British
American tomato ketchup is unapologetically sweet – basically a tomato-flavored sugar delivery system that goes perfectly with everything from french fries to scrambled eggs (yes, we do that). It’s thick, rich, and designed to be squeezed with abandon.
British tomato ketchup, I discovered, has more of an edge. Less sweet, more vinegar-forward, with a thinner consistency that actually enhances rather than masks the food it touches.
Heinz may have started in America, but the British version tastes like its more sophisticated cousin who studied abroad and came back with refined tastes.
The real revelation? Many Brits find American tomato ketchup cloyingly sweet, while I initially found British tomato ketchup disappointingly tart. It took a few months of adjustment before I appreciated the more nuanced British approach – though I still secretly prefer the American version on certain foods.
Turns out it’s not just my imagination. American Heinz uses high fructose corn syrup while the British version uses regular sugar, which explains why my taste buds were a bit confused.
Marianne Jennings, “Beyond Ketchup & Ranch Dressing”, An American’s Guide to British Life, 2025-05-25.
October 1, 2026
How to Eat Like Benjamin Franklin
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 7 Apr 2026Deep golden fried toast topped with anchovy filets and melted parmesan
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1759While spending time in London, Benjamin Franklin wrote about lodging with an elderly widow whose food was meager, but whose conversation was excellent. He wrote of one meal consisting of a bit of anchovy on a strip of bread and butter and a little ale. He was also a big fan of Parmesan cheese and fervently longed for a recipe for it, which he did eventually receive.
It almost goes without saying, but if you like anchovies and Parmesan, you’ll like this dish. It’s also quite salty, and unfortunately, I’m not the biggest fan of very salty foods or anchovies, but the toast is wonderfully crunchy and rich.
Des anchoise au Parmesan.
Anchovies, with Parmesan cheese.
Fry some bits of bread about the length of an anchovy in good oil or butter, lay the half of anchovy, with the bone upon each bit, and strew over them some Parmesan cheese grated fine, and colour them nicely in an oven, or with a salamander, squeeze the juice of an orange or lemon, and pile them up in your dish and send them to table. This seems to be but a trifling thing, but I never saw it come whole from table.
— A Complete System of Cookery by William Verral, 1759
September 29, 2026
The “meta-crisis” that isn’t
Anthony Watts refutes the media claims of climate change driving a large group of unrelated issues into a “meta-crisis” that — as these things always seem to do — requires co-ordinated central control of all human activity (the answer always, always seems to be an all-powerful world government, doesn’t it?).
Image from Watts Up With That
Euronews claims climate change has evolved into a “meta-crisis” threatening food security, energy supplies, economies, water resources, and international security. This is misleading because the article largely substitutes predictions and assertions for measurements of what is actually happening. The data show global crop production and yields reaching record levels, deaths from extreme weather collapsing over the long term, and many of today’s energy and economic problems arising from political choices and geopolitical conflicts rather than changes in climate.
Euronews builds its case primarily around an interview with Emmanuella Doussis, UNESCO Chair on Climate Diplomacy at the University of Athens. Doussis declares climate change an economic, social, political, and geopolitical problem, linking it to competition for resources, migration, water shortages, food insecurity, and the energy transition.
Those are sweeping claims. Curiously, Euronews provides remarkably little observational evidence demonstrating that climate change is actually causing the worldwide “meta-crisis” its headline announces.
Perhaps the most obvious contradiction concerns food.
Doussis predicts, “We will face a very large, serious problem with food security.” But predictions about what might happen cannot erase what is happening.
Climate at a Glance: Crop Production summarizes data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showing that global crop production and yields have risen dramatically during the period of modern warming. Its latest summary reports that the 2023 and 2024 global crop years produced the two highest global crop yields per acre on record.
Climate Realism has documented the same trend repeatedly. Global production of staple crops has increased substantially, and yields have repeatedly set records during recent decades. Even where individual crops suffer poor regional seasons because of drought, floods, pests, or other causes, that is not evidence of a deteriorating global food supply.
There are good reasons for this improvement. Agricultural technology, irrigation, fertilizers, improved crop varieties, mechanization, and better pest control have transformed farming. Modest warming can also lengthen growing seasons and reduce damaging frost events in some regions, while additional atmospheric carbon dioxide generally stimulates plant growth and improves water-use efficiency.
None of this means weather cannot damage crops. It always has. It means that portraying climate change as presently creating a global food-security crisis conflicts with the direction of observed agricultural production.
September 26, 2026
Social media seems to be antithetical to the ability to concentrate
I took over doing the cooking in our household a couple of years ago, so I’ve been paying more attention to cooking channels on YouTube and recipe-oriented blogs than I did before. Substack‘s algorithm suggested that I might enjoy reading this post by Romilla Arber, making the case that “Mirepoix is the antithesis of Instagram, as it values what cannot be seen in the final result over what is superficial and false”:
Photo from Stirring Thoughts
This article is about mirepoix, soffritto, social media, and the secret to a happy life. A lot to cover, but as I often say, everything is interconnected.
I dislike social media, in particular Instagram. I left X many months ago, as did my business. We use Facebook for local connection and, obviously, Substack, which currently I view differently. Instagram is ridiculous. It is a waste of time to be on it, and it is populated with so many lies and misrepresentations that it is difficult to work out what is fact and what is not.
I recently read a Substack article called “Meet All The Middle Aged Women Who Don’t Exist” by Robin Levine Shobin. It exposes the accounts on Instagram supposedly belonging to women in their fifties and sixties who look fabulous but who actually do not exist: an army of AI wellness women, manufactured to make women like me feel we need what they have.
The other tranche of accounts I have noticed multiplying on Instagram, like a terrifying science-fiction virus, are those owned by “successful” entrepreneurs. Most of these are fake, and are being used to sell overpriced masterclasses and mentorships to people who lack confidence and need money. The more our brains see of the same thing, the more likely we are to believe it. This used to be called brainwashing. There is probably another techie term for it now.
These accounts don’t surprise me. But they represent one of the reasons why Instagram is a monumental waste of time.
This feeling was further compounded today when I spent a few minutes watching a video made by someone, the central thesis of which was to make the most of the precious time we have on this planet, and to value those simple experiences that we take for granted at the time. The whole premise of Instagram is to make us envious of others, the way they look and the lives they have, and by consequence not to value the lives we live. It involves endlessly scrolling through videos and images, wasting precious time.
I have also noticed that if I spend time scrolling through short-form content, I find it harder to concentrate on something that requires longer attention, like reading a book. Sad, but true. I am now retraining my brain to concentrate on reading uninterrupted for longer periods. I was surprised at how tough this would be.
This sorry state of affairs brings me to soffritto and mirepoix: the same thing really, the former being Italian and the latter French. Both are the art of chopping aromatic vegetables finely and frying them slowly, in olive oil if you are Italian and butter if you are French. These aromatic vegetables are usually onion, celery and carrot, and the ratio varies country to country. The magic is in the simplicity. They are the flavour foundation for many stocks, sauces, soups and stews all over the world. Other countries may substitute white onion for spring onion, or carrot for peppers, but the point of the process remains the same: to create beauty through time and effort.
Mirepoix is the antithesis of Instagram, as it values what cannot be seen in the final result over what is superficial and false. The preparation of the vegetables takes care and time, and it is the investment in this preparation, the foundational substance, that creates the beauty and taste of the final dish. Instagram is about superficiality. What is not obvious is worthless.
Given how late I started doing serious cooking, I doubt that I even knew what mirepoix was two years ago … but I’ve pretty much always thought of Instagram as a total waste of time among all the various social media sites people use.
September 24, 2026
Making 200-Year-Old Mayonnaise – How has it changed?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 31 Mar 2026Thick, creamy mayonnaise made with tarragon vinegar and gelatin
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1828Mayonnaise (or magnonnaise, as Carême calls it in this recipe from 1828), didn’t really become popular until the early 19th century. First popular in France, by the 1850s, cookbooks in other countries were including recipes for it, sometimes with several variations. Earlier recipes commonly used gelatin, but by the end of the 19th century, the recipe looked very much like what we make today.
Homemade mayonnaise is vastly better than anything you can buy. There’s a nice zing from the vinegar in this one, and even if you don’t like store bought mayonnaise, I think you should give this a try; it’s really delicious. If you’re not worried about historical accuracy, you could make this without the gelatin.
White Magnonnaise Sauce
Place into a medium bowl two egg yolks (as pale as possible), a large pinch of white salt, the same of white pepper, and a quarter of a tablespoon of tarragon vinegar. You briskly stir this mixture with a wooden spoon; and as soon as it begins to thicken, you add half a tablespoon of oil from Aix. As soon as the sauce thickens, you add a few drops of vinegar, then oil, and so on, taking care to work it constantly … As it thickens, you add a little oil at a time, as well as vinegar and a small amount of aspic jelly … by adding the oil and vinegar little by little…you see it gradually come together, becoming firm and velvety like a well-set cream. Finally, after having incorporated two glass of oil, half a glass of aspic jelly, and the necessary vinegar to make it pleasantly tangy, you use it immediately.
— Le cuisinier parisien by Marie-Antoine Carême, 1828
September 17, 2026
The Brutal Life of a Medieval Butcher
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 24 Mar 2026Tender stewed spiced meat and onions with bright yellow saffron sauce
City/Region: England
Time Period: c. 1430It’s a well-circulated myth that medieval cooks spiced meat heavily in order to hide the fact that the meat had gone bad. And it is, indeed, a myth. Amongst the many reasons why this doesn’t hold up is the fact that in medieval Europe, spices were expensive, and if you could afford to use a lot of them on your meat, you could afford not-spoiled meat. Dishes like this one, which uses five different spices and saffron, which has always been expensive, would be only for the wealthy.
This dish has the classic medieval flavors of warm spices and vinegar, and I really enjoyed it. The meat and onions are tender, the sauce is a beautiful bright yellow, and it’s quite unlike anything we typically eat today.
Brawn en peuerade
Take might broth of Beef or Capon, and then take clean fresh meat, and seeth it, but not too much; And if it be fresh meat, roast it, but not too much, and then cut it in pieces, and cast it into the broth; And then take whole onions, and peel them, and then take vinegar thereto, and cinnamon, … then take cloves, mace, and powdered pepper, and cast thereto, and a little saunders, and set it on the fire, and let boil till the onions and the meat be cooked enough, and not too much; then take liquor made with bread and vinegar and wine … and cast thereto saffron to make the color bright, and salt, and serve it forth.
— Harleian Ms. 279, c. 1430
September 10, 2026
Hardtack Hash from Steerage on a Victorian Ocean Liner
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 17 Mar 2026Hash made from pulverized hardtack, salt pork, and vegetables, served with mashed potatoes
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1894Third class, or steerage, on the Titanic was served breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, which was a major upgrade from other ships in decades past. Before this, third class passengers were given their rations, which they had to prepare and cook on their own. Sometimes they had to wait in line to use a stove, and not everyone would get a turn.
This meal hearkens back to that time. The recipe uses ingredients that were included in third class rations, and comes from a cookbook for sailors in 1894. I really can’t recommend making this. It’s … not great. There’s essentially no flavor, and the hash turns into a kind of paste in your mouth with the only texture coming from the onions. If I was really hungry and had no other options, I suppose it would be fine, but you shouldn’t feel the need to make this.
Biscuit Hash. (Cold Meat Cookery)
Ingredients
6lbs. Broken biscuits, steeped
2lbs. Cold salt beef or pork.
1/2lb. dripping.
2 onions.
1 cooked carrot.
1 cooked turnip.
1 teaspoonful pepper.
1 teaspoonful mixed spice.
Method — Chop the meat, onions, and vegetables finely; squeeze the water well out of the biscuits, and rub them through a coarse wire sieve; add all the other ingredients, and mix thoroughly. Put it into a baking tin, and brown in a moderate oven until firm. Cut into squares and serve.
— Cookery for Seamen by Alexander Quinlan and N.E. Mann, 1894
QotD: The Victorian Workhouse diet and the modern “wellness” diet
The principle behind the New Poor Law of 1834 was “less eligibility”. Life inside the workhouse had to be made worse than the life of the poorest labourer surviving outside, or people might actually choose it. Misery was the policy, and the food was central to it.
The diet was built around gruel, bread, and watery broth. Thin oatmeal porridge. Pease soup. A little cheese. Meat, where it appeared at all, appeared in quantities a working man would have laughed at, carefully weighed out on a handful of days a year. Strip a population of meat and feed it on cheap starch, and you get people who are weak, compliant, and grateful for very little. The men with the ledgers understood that completely. They wrote the smallness down, in ounces, and signed it.
Now read that menu back slowly.
Porridge to start the day. Wholegrain bread as the base of every plate. Beans and pulses for protein. Broth-based soups. Dairy in moderation. Red meat cut right back, if you have it at all.
That is the workhouse diet, almost line for line. The gruel that was once the punishment for being poor is now the breakfast of the health-conscious. The near-absence of meat, once an economy forced on people who had no say in it, is now sold to you as the enlightened, heart-healthy choice you are making of your own free will.
They worked out the cheapest way to keep a body upright and dependent, and wrote it down in ounces.
A century and a half later the same menu comes back with a wellness label on it, and this time people pay extra for the privilege.
Sama Hoole, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-06-04.
September 4, 2026
Making Shepherd’s Pie from an 1894 Recipe – Beef or Lamb?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 10 Mar 2026Minced beef filling covered in browned mashed potatoes
City/Region: North Ayrshire, Scotland
Time Period: 1894Cottage pie is made with beef, and shepherd’s pie is made with lamb. Or so they would have you believe. This division between mashed potato-topped meat pies is actually only about 50 years old. Before that, recipes for shepherd’s or cottage pie could call for beef or lamb, or didn’t specify a kind of meat at all.
The clove and the mushroom ketchup are both present but not overpowering, and the potatoes are creamy and delicious. Shepherd’s pie is my absolute favorite way to make meat and potatoes, and this 1894 version holds up.
Shepherd’s Pie
Minced beef or lamb; if beef, put in a pinch of pulverised cloves; if lamb, pinch of summer savoury to season it, very little pepper and some salt, and put in a baking-dish; mash potatoes and mix them with cream and butter and a little salt, and spread them over the meat; beat up an egg with cream or milk, a very little, spread it over the potatoes and bake it a short time, sufficient to warm it through and brown the potatoes.
— Irvine Herald and Kilwinning Chronicle, October 5, 1894
September 2, 2026
Jeremy Clarkson is “the worst tax dodger in British history”
As I mentioned recently, I’ve been watching episodes of Clarkson’s Farm and thoroughly enjoying them. I’m doing the opposite of binge-ing them, limiting myself to one episode at a time, and not every night. I’m part-way through Season 3 at the moment. The unrelenting hostility of the local government is a thing to behold … it really does seem as if they think that their role is to prevent any sort of economic activity from taking place in their jurisdiction.
Sama Hoole outlines the steps Jeremy Clarkson has taken over the time since he purchased one thousand acres of farmland:
A timeline of one man’s cunning inheritance tax scheme.
2008: Buy a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Tell The Times that dodging inheritance tax is the critical thing. Scheme live.
2009 to 2018: Do absolutely nothing. A villager farms it on contract. Flawless.
2019: The villager retires. Rather than hire another one, decide to farm a thousand acres yourself, having never grown anything.
Also 2019: Invite a film crew.
2020: Rain for nine weeks. Profit on a thousand acres: £144.
2021: Broadcast the £144 to the largest streaming platform on earth, thereby informing the entire planet that farmland makes nothing.
2021: Open a farm shop. Acquire a queue down a lane and the undivided attention of West Oxfordshire District Council.
2022: Restaurant refused. Enforcement notice. Six weeks to take a barn apart.
2023: Lose the appeal. Lose it again.
May 2024: Accidentally get English planning law rewritten. Lawyers name it Clarkson’s Clause.
August 2024: Open a pub selling only British food. Sell your own sausage at 74p against 18p imported, and eat the difference on every plate.
October 2024: The Chancellor caps agricultural property relief at a million. Scheme dead.
November 2024: Stand on a platform in Westminster in front of thirteen thousand farmers, drawing maximum national attention to the exact tax break you were supposedly hiding behind.
July 2025: Go down with TB. First calf ever born on the farm destroyed, pregnant with twins. Gate padlocked.
23 December 2025: Government retreats. The threshold goes from one million to two and a half. Five million for a couple.
March 2026: Farm declared clear.
July 2026: Drive four hundred miles to Scotland and buy more cows.
Eighteen years.
Planning law changed. Agricultural degree applications climbing. Cited in the Commons more times than most ministers manage. Half the estates that were going to be caught by the tax are no longer caught by it.
He was accused of buying a farm to dodge inheritance tax, and then spent eighteen months getting the relief raised for everybody else’s.
Worst tax dodger in British history.
Best thing to happen to British farming in fifty years.
QotD: The great natural experiment in plant-based eating
It is the most vegetarian large country on earth, hundreds of millions of people, many vegetarian from birth. Grain at the base, pulses, vegetables, all cooked in vegetable oil: the government Eat Well plate, run as a national experiment for thousands of years.
The result. Around a third of its children are stunted, the largest share of the world’s stunted children of any nation. The Indian Dietetic Association reports 84% of the country’s vegetarians are protein deficient, against 65% of its meat eaters. And the nation that eats the least meat is the diabetes capital of the world, with over 100 million diabetics.
Before anyone blames poverty, a Journal of Nutrition study found a vegetarian mother predicted stunting across every wealth bracket, rich families included. The diet was carrying its own weight.
Bioavailable iron, zinc, B12 and complete protein build a child’s skeleton. Strip them out and it comes out smaller. The animal fat, meanwhile, got swapped for refined grain, sugar and seed oil. India is now the world’s biggest vegetable oil importer, per-person intake tripled since 2001.
The diet sold to the West as optimal human nutrition has been run here, at the scale of a billion people, for longer than the West has existed. It did not produce optimal humans. It produced the largest population of stunted, diabetic, protein-starved people on earth.
Sama Hoole, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-31.
August 28, 2026
Hatshepsut – The Pharaoh they tried to Erase from History
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 3 Mar 2026Fritters as they are depicted in ancient Egyptian tombs
City/Region: Egypt
Time Period: 15th Century B.C.E.Hatshepsut ruled as regent for, and then co-pharaoh with, her stepson, Thutmose III for twenty one years in the 15th century BCE. While she ruled, Egypt enjoyed a golden age as she opened trade routes, built monuments, and ensured that the economy thrived.
The inspiration for this recipe comes from the many paintings of food on temple walls in Egypt. One of these shows ball-shaped items piled up on a serving platter, which could be an ancient form of the modern dessert zalabiya.
Using ingredients available to ancient Egyptians around the time of Hatshepsut’s reign, I’ve made my interpretation of the food painted on the temple walls. They are delicious and full of wonderful cardamom flavor with a light crunch. I think they’re best served with a little honey for dipping.
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August 25, 2026
Rome’s annona civilis
In the late Roman Republic, the rapid increase among the urban poor in Rome itself eventually led to the Senate introducing food relief for the very poorest Roman citizens, the Annona civilis. It should be no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention that giving away free stuff attracts people happy to accept free stuff:
Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.
No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.
This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.
Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.
What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.
The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn’t weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.
The simple-but-not-easy-fix is to only allow people not accepting the free stuff to vote. You can imagine just how well that would go down in an election campaign at any level, can’t you?
