Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 20 Jan 2026Thickened vegetable and meat stew with suet dumplings with parsley
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1901The food served in Victorian workhouses could vary widely depending on the time, place, and management of a particular establishment. Operating under the notion that if the food served to the inmates (yes, that’s what they were called) of a workhouse was worse than the average, it would encourage them to choose to not be poor (yes, those in power believed that being poor was a choice), workhouse food tended to be … not great.
The recipes for this stew and dumplings come from actual workhouse cookbooks, and they’re actually quite tasty, though the Victorian reality was often far from what you might make today with fresh ingredients. Meat could be too tough to eat, bugs and rat droppings were not uncommon, vegetables could be rotten, and the stew watered down.
As written, it makes a simple, hearty, thick meat and vegetable stew with dumplings that are rather dense, though they have a bit of fluffiness. It’s quite good, though I’m under no impression that it’s close to what the poor were actually being served.
Meat Stew (or Scouse)
Ingredients.
5 ozs. Raw Beef free from bone (Stickings or similar quality).
1 oz. Flour.
½ oz. Dripping or Fat.
4 ozs. Potatoes.
4 ozs. Carrots and Turnips.
½ oz. Onions
Pepper and Salt to taste.
Water to make 1 pint.
Method. — Cut up the meat and vegetables. Fry the flour in the fat till brown, stir in the water, add pepper and salt; then put in the meat and vegetables. Simmer gently for two hours. To make 1 pint of stew.
— Manual of Workhouse Cookery (1901)Suet Dumplings. 6 oz. flour, 2 oz. chopped suet, 1/16 oz. baking powder, ¾ oz. chopped parsley, salt and pepper. Mix all the dry things, rubbing the suet through the flour; make into a firm paste with the cold water; divide into ten or twelve small pieces, which roll up into balls, having the outsides well floured. Drop the balls into the stew, and cook for half an hour longer; then serve.
— Miss F. A. Merchant in Management and Construction of Poorhouses and Almshouses by George A. Mackay
July 17, 2026
Eating Like a Victorian Workhouse Inmate – Scouse & Suet Dumplings
July 10, 2026
The Pastry War – When France invaded Mexico over pastry
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 13 Jan 2026Puff pastry rings filled with raspberry and apricot preserves and topped with a cherry
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1840The Pastry War between Mexico and France was kicked off when, during a time of political upheaval, Mexican soldiers ransacked Monsieur Remontel’s pastry shop in the 1830s. Seeking reparations for M. Remontel as well as the repayment of other debts, the French invaded.
While we don’t know what was sold in Monsieur Remontel’s pastry shop in Mexico, these puits d’amour could certainly have been on the menu. By all means, you can make your own puff pastry, but I gave myself permission to use store bought, and you should, too. You can even use store-bought preserves to simplify things even further, but this preserves recipe is very delicious and very sweet. I used both store-bought apricot preserves and homemade raspberry preserves, and both were delicious. You can also fill them with half jam and half chantilly cream or pastry cream if the fancy strikes you.
PUITS D’AMOUR.
When the puff pastry has received all its turns, roll it out to a thickness of two lines; cut it with a fluted cutter, that is to say with a pastry cutter, and place the first piece on a baking sheet; then, with a cutter of the same type but smaller, cut another piece and place it on top; moisten the round with a little water, press it in slightly, brush these puits with egg, and put them into a hot oven. When they are three-quarters baked, sprinkle them with sugar in order to glaze them — that is, until the sugar melts; then remove them, hollow them out, and fill them with whatever preserves you judge appropriate.
— Le Cuisinier Royal by André Viart, 1840
July 4, 2026
Flag image candy for the 4th of July
Lofty Pursuits
Published 13 Jun 2018At Lofty Pursuits we make hard candy using techniques and equipment from the 1800’s. Here we are making Blue Berry and Strawberry shortcake candy in a pattern inspired by the American flag for flag day and the 4th of July. This is one of our most complex designs as it does not have an outer wrap. The video covers some fun bits about the history of the American Flag.
Get our candy here: http://www.pd.net
July 3, 2026
The latest trend in tourism: “grocery tourism”
At The Freeman, Nicole James discusses being so far ahead of a trend that it’s only just catching up with her now:
“Piggly Wiggly” by afiler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Grocery tourism is the hot trend of 2026 according to Condé Nast Traveler. This is all well and good, but also a bit late to the trolley because I have been practicing this trend since my twenties, although without the benefit of a name or a hashtag.
My two worlds met in the supermarket aisle. Before I was a travel writer and sent to places with hotel beds that appeared to have been prepared for minor royalty or a very clean corpse, I was a checkout chick at supermarket chain Coles. This was when prices were typed in by hand, making me feel like I was conducting a low-level NASA launch procedure.
A tin of pineapple rings would trundle towards me, and I would punch in its code. Behind it would come shampoo, fish fingers, instant pudding, 24 cans of Diet Coke, and a packet of aspirin. From these items, I could deduce entire family systems. Marriage trouble. School excursions. Flu. A birthday party. A woman about to murder everyone in her house unless she got a Mint Slice into herself immediately.
I loved the products. Not necessarily the customers who could turn feral over a five-cent discrepancy in canned tomatoes. The conveyor belt was a pageant of human need. It was anthropology in a polyester apron.
When people now declare that they have discovered grocery store tourism, I feel like saying, “We know. We’ve had those for years.”
My first trip to America should have been my grand supermarket awakening. I was a PR manager for Malaysia Airlines in the late ’90s, and we were launching a very long flight to New York from Sydney via KL and Dubai. I arrived bristling with ambition. I wanted to see the cereal aisle. Long had we heard rumors of American supermarkets. They were great glittering cathedrals of corn syrup with aisles devoted just to cereal and marshmallows in the shapes of everything from the moon and stars to presidents. I wanted to stand before them all in awe, like Moses, if Moses had come down from the mountain carrying Pop-Tarts.
[…]
I once stood in a Japanese aisle looking at 15 varieties of bottled tea and felt the kind of reverence other people reserve for stained glass. This is the point of grocery tourism. It’s anthropology with a basket.
Every country gives itself away eventually. This is usually somewhere between the biscuits and the cleaning products. Finland offers Moomins in places no Australian supermarket would dare put a cartoon hippo. Singapore understands the spiritual importance of salted fish skin. Sweden puts things in tubes that should never be in tubes and then offers fermented herring.
And then the Netherlands has licorice. The Dutch have built an entire moral philosophy out of licorice. Sweet, salty, double-salty, hard, soft, shaped like coins, cars, and warnings from your dentist. I’ve always admired the Dutch, but this commitment to black chewy punishment is heroic. Sweden is not to be outdone and has thus flirted with licorice-flavored chips.
Then there are the products that cause the traveler to stop dead and reconsider the whole Enlightenment. In Vietnam, I couldn’t walk past snake wine without dancing an involuntary flamenco of horror. There was a snake in a bottle suspended in alcohol. Sometimes there were scorpions.
South Korea has canned silkworm pupae. Peru has coca tea. Colombia has arequipe. America has cheese in a spray can, which I respect as both a product and a cry for help.
And now, social media has turned all of this into content. Travelers narrate the experience into their phones. A German soccer fan can wander into an American Waffle House at one in the morning and emerge as a folk hero. Erewhon in Los Angeles has become a celebrity shrine where a smoothie can cost more than a small household appliance and one strawberry comes packaged like an engagement ring and with a similar price.
Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. They’re too full of nappies and mince.
Beef Bourguignon for the French Peasants from 1885
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 6 Jan 2026Stewed beef in red wine sauce with onions
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1885Originally a peasant dish, early beef bourguignon was a sauce for leftover stewed beef. Elevated and popularized by the father of French haute cuisine, Auguste Escoffier, it shortly thereafter made the transition from a sauce to stew, and beef bourguignon was further popularized by cooking icon Julia Child.
This recipe from 1885 is for the sauce version, and it is just as delicious as the modern stew. It’s a little more wine-forward and a little less sweet, the meat is fall-apart tender, and the onions are my favorite part. If you have some leftover cooked beef like a roast or short ribs, this sauce is a great way to jazz it up. Otherwise, make the stewed beef as instructed in the recipe below because the sauce is absolutely worth it.
Boeuf Bourguignonne
Brown a piece of pork belly, diced, in butter; add a little flour, salt, and pepper, and add a mixture of half broth and half red wine; add a few small white onions, well peeled; let cook for 20 minutes, then add to this sauce your stewed beef, cut into slices. When the meat is well heated through, serve with the sauce.
— La Bonne Cuisine Pour Tous ou l’Art de Bien Vivre a Bon Marché by Marcel Butler, 1885
July 2, 2026
Canada has to stop defining itself as merely “Not-America”
Devon Eriksen responds to a cringey video that claims to explain Canada Day to Americans. The thumbnail image includes some of the usual suspects for this kind of embarrassing nonsense — “free healthcare!” … “poutine!”.
Once again, we see that Canada defines itself as Not-America.
So much so that in the very video where they try to explain their national identity, they require Straw-America as a prop.
But, having embraced multiculturalism and ethnic erasure of White people, they have painted themselves into a corner. Any positive Canadian identity, which identified Canada as what it is, rather than what it is not, would by definition distinguish it from other countries in the world, rather than just America. And this would exclude people of and from those cultures from being Canadian.
Which would be racist, or something.
So what this ends up meaning is that you may talk about what distinguishes Canada from America, and why Canadians are not American and Americans are not Canadian.
But you may NOT talk about what distinguishes Canada from India, and why Canadians are not Indian and Indians are not Canadian.
Or they’ll throw you in jail.
No culture, group, or organization can survive indefinitely by defining itself with a negative, which is why, for example, there are no atheist churches.
Canadians, accordingly, now share no common values, no common ethos, telos, or even logos, have nothing they can agree on, and nothing that binds them together other than physical geolocation and legal jurisdiction.
This is not patriotism, and patriotism, while it is regarded by liberals as a sort of embarrassing social disease, is actually required to get humans to act in concert for mutual good.
Canadians need something to celebrate on Canada Day other than their fear and resentment of Americans who barely think about them at all in any given month.
I honestly don’t know what the average Canadian would say, if he was asked to define a Canadian without referencing America. If he was asked to define a Canadian in a way that didn’t include Brits or Australians. If he was asked to define a Canadian in a way that didn’t include government programs and minor food idiosyncrasies.
You can’t just be the nation of gravy and cheese curds on fries.
You have to stand for something.
YourSmartAsianFriend also responds to the video:
Now from a real Canadian:
You better have a snack with you because wait times in Emergency often exceed 10 hours.
Most of us don’t eat poutine — or do so on rare occasion — but eating probably the most unhealthy dish ever conceived not something to boast about.
The entire system is fine but again, bragging about a your measurement standard is absurd, and moreover if you ask most Canadians what their height is, they’ll respond: 5’6, 6’2, etc. … if you say … he was 184 cm … you’ll get mostly blank looks.
Our plastic bag milk is wholly subsidized and controlled by our government dairy cartel — insuring higher prices for all.
What we also have is: emergencies act unlawfully used to crackdown on citizens including seizing their bank accounts, media funded by the government and thus beholden to them. New censorship laws on the way resulting in even more tech companies saying they’ll leave Canada. The highest cellphone rates because again we have regulated our own phone company cartel. We have severe housing shortages (while importing millions of undocumented and temporary visa foreigners) driving housing prices to astronomical levels. We have indigenous peoples now making legally endorsed claims to developed land calling into question much of Canada’s development — the same indigenous groups who have been funded with huge sums and have carved out their own independent country within Canada with the threat of going even farther.
There are many more issues, however, fear not — we have utterly vapid Liberal memes to distract us!
Full disclosure: on Tuesday I actually did order and eat a plate of poutine in a restaurant. In my defence, it was the first poutine I’d eaten in several months … while I enjoy the dish that has been described as “the culinary equivalent of having unprotected sex with a stripper in the parking lot of a truck stop in eastern Quebec”, it’s a very occasional item in my diet.
June 24, 2026
Feeding A Roman Centurion – Pork & Puls
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 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.
(more…)
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
Lies “in a good cause” are still frickin’ lies
This was posted in late May, but only came to my attention today, so apologies if you’ve already waded through the details here:
The problem with this meme is … well, just read the article.
This meme keeps entering my feed and it bugs me every time I see it. For search engines and the visually impaired: it shows, on the left, a large McDonald’s French fry priced at $1.99. On the right, it shows a delectable fruit cup, including mixed berries, cubed melon, and prominent slices of starfruit priced at $5.99. The caption above both declares, “The Problem With Our Food System”.
Invariably, this meme is met with earnest rejoinders, often in thread 🧵 form, explaining the complexities of food distribution. One particularly clever one that I just saw introduces the concept of “Malicious Design” as a sort of secular creationism where the limitations imposed by nature are imagined as human systems intentionally engineered to harm the masses. Threads like these usually go on to describe how potatoes are cheap, hardy, and practically preserve themselves, while berries are delicate, seasonal, and expensive to ship. They argue that the price difference is simply the natural consequence of supply chains, not the machinations of a capitalist oligarchy trying to keep the proletariat down.
All of that might be true.
But it doesn’t matter.
Because the entire discussion rests on a premise that is demonstrably false.
Not the stuff about potatoes or berries or supply chains. Not even the stuff about the oligarchs insofar as, if they are trying to poison us, they are doing a middling job at best. The problem is that everyone accepts the meme’s starting point as if it were genuine. They never check the most basic fact: the prices themselves!!!
Let’s start with the French fries, because they are on the left and because I have the McDonald’s app on my phone. I can tell you without looking that $1.99 is the wrong price for a large fry because I am a fast-food proletarian myself.
Behold: in my market — Omaha — the price is $4.39. According to the Interwebs, this is a pretty representative price nationwide outside of larger cities. The reason we are considering a large fry instead of a small, which still comes in at a whopping $3.99, is because the meme uses a picture of a large.
Already, the price of the fruit cup and the French fries are much more comparable. Ah, but those crafty capitalists know that the stupid masses will steer toward the cheaper option, regardless of the health risks, even if it is only to save a penny. That’s how the fast-food-to-pharma pipeline gets you! By tricking you into passing on the much healthier and obviously more delicious fruit cup. (Never mind last week’s newsletter about all the poisonous chemicals they’re spraying on the fruit.)
So, I will check on the fruit cup now. The first wrinkle is that the image of the fruit cup does not come from the McDonald’s app. That’s because McDonald’s doesn’t sell a fruit cup in most — if any — markets. If they did, it would arrive to the store frozen and the kid who was supposed to move it from the freezer to the refrigerator last night will have forgotten to do so, meaning that what you will receive is a cup of brightly colored ice cubes that you can pretend to enjoy in a couple of hours. (source: 5+ years personally serving in the McTrenches coinciding with the deployment of the Fruit ‘n Yogurt Parfait™.) In other word, you will not see these two items side-by-side on the menu.
And this is where it gets tricky. Because I can’t actually find that particular fruit cup. Reverse image search turns up a big fat nada. Not on any fast food site, online grocery store, stock photo outlet, food blog, or news page.
Read the whole thing, I believe is the term d’art for this. H/T to Kim du Toit for the link.
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
