Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 2 Sept 2025Large, gingery loaf of bread
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1857In order to make expensive wheat flour go further, Victorian bakers added things to it of varying edibility. While potato, corn, and pea flour were used, so was ground up plaster of paris, chalk dust, and a powder called alum. Alum made the flour very white, but is also toxic in large quantities.
This loaf, made only with wholesome, edible ingredients, would have been on the fancier side of a bakery’s offerings with the addition of lots and lots of powdered ginger. This bread really surprised me, as it tastes like a normal loaf of bread at first, but then the heat and the flavor of the ginger comes through afterwards.
Ginger Loaf, or Rolls.
Mix intimately two ounces of good powdered ginger, — called in the shops prepared ginger, — and a little salt, with two pounds of flour, and make it into a firm but perfectly light dough with German or brewer’s yeast, [and 1 pint milk] in the usual manner; [to rise one hour or until quite light: to be kneaded down and left again to rise until light]. Bake it either in one loaf, or divide it into six or eight small ones.
The proportion of ginger can be much increased if desired; but the bread should not then be habitually eaten for a long continuance, as the excess of any stimulating condiment is often in many ways injurious.
— The English Bread-Book by Eliza Acton, 1857
March 3, 2026
The Deadly Job of a Victorian Baker
March 2, 2026
Remember this when they tell you grocery prices are high because of greedy corporations
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison explains why the headline profits of grocery stores bear almost no relation to the far smaller actual profits in the grocery retail market:

“Leader IGA” by daryl_mitchell is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .
The 32% Illusion: A Grocer’s View from Behind the Till
I used to own the IGA in Hamiota. Small town. Thin margins. Real bills. So when I hear that Loblaw Companies Limited is raking in “31–32% profit”, I don’t get angry. I get tired.
Here’s the move. Take a gross margin number. Call it profit. Add a dash of politics. Serve hot.
Gross margin is revenue minus cost of goods sold. That’s it. It doesn’t include payroll, hydro, insurance, property tax, refrigeration repairs at 2 a.m., shrink, theft, advertising, transport, interest, or the banker breathing down your neck. Net profit is what’s left after all of that. In grocery, that number floats around 2 to 3 percent in a good year. Some years less. Some years negative.
When I ran my store, payroll alone could swallow most of the gross margin. Then add freight. Then add utilities. Manitoba winters are not kind to freezers. Then add spoilage. Bananas do not care about your ideology. They rot on schedule.
People think grocers “set prices”. That’s half true at best. Suppliers raise costs. Fuel goes up. Wages rise. Carbon costs ripple through trucking and farming. You pass it on or you close. It’s arithmetic, not greed.
Now here’s the uncomfortable part. Food inflation hurts. It hurts seniors. It hurts young families. It hurts the clerk stocking shelves. But blaming a 30% “profit margin” is a shortcut. It feels good. It’s wrong.
Big chains make money on scale, pharmacy, cosmetics, financial services. Those categories carry higher margins than milk and bread. That lifts the consolidated gross margin number. It does not mean grocery aisles are printing cash.
We should argue about competition. We should argue about supply management. We should argue about taxes embedded at every step of the chain. Good. Let’s do that. But at least use the right numbers.
I spent years watching pennies. Grocers survive on volume and efficiency. A few cents per dollar is the game. Always has been.
If you want lower food prices, focus on input costs, transport, energy, regulation, and competition. Start there.
And before sharing the next viral graphic, ask one question: gross or net?
That single distinction separates outrage from reality.
February 24, 2026
What did Prisoners eat at Folsom in 1925? – Lamb Curry & Beans
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 26 Aug 2025Lamb curry with onions and carrots served with white bread and plain pinto beans
City/Region: Folsom, California
Time Period: 1916-1933Folsom Prison is infamous, but the food doesn’t sound like it was all that bad, though there was plenty of watery gruel made from the water salt pork had been soaked in, and if you were in solitary confinement, you got a diet of bread and water with beans every third day. Meals weren’t all terrible, though. A 1925 menu show foods like Hamburger Steak with Brown Gravy, Split Pea Soup, and Lamb Curry & Rice, which is what we’re making here.
In the 1920s, a lot of the cooks were using military manuals, so that is where the base of this recipe comes from, along with a list of ingredients from a commissary report from 1933.
It’s actually quite good, though I would add as much as double the amount of curry powder as was specified in the historical recipe. The beans are a little plain, but that’s to be expected.
382. Beef, curry (for 60 men).
Ingredients used:
20 pounds beef.
1 1/2 ounces curry powder.
Cut the beef into 1-inch cubes and place in a bake pan; cover with beef stock or water; season with salt, pepper, and curry powder. When nearly done, thicken slightly with a flour batter. Serve hot.— Manual for Army Cooks, 1916
LAMB CURRIE and RICE
1160 pounds Mutton
830 ” Rice
300 ” Onions
400 ” Carrots
1 bottle Curry
— Commissary report from Folsom Prison, February 1, 1933
February 17, 2026
Eating in Japan During World War 2
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 19 Aug 2025Fried sweet potato paste on top of roasted seaweed with a soy glaze and brown rice
City/Region: Japan
Time Period: December 1942Contrary to the government’s promises, the availability of food declined in Japan as World War 2 went on. Journal entries from 1945 highlight just how bad things had gotten. People were unable to get ahold of staples like rice, soy sauce, miso, and fuel for cooking fires, and many were scavenging for anything to eat.
This recipe comes from a few years earlier when things were tight, but not quite so dire. While it doesn’t exactly taste like grilled eel, it is quite good. There’s a nice crispiness to it (more so before the glazing and grilling), and the glaze is delicious. It kind of reminds me of the breading that you might get on some katsu.
Kabayaki of Sweet Potato
Ingredients for 5 servings
100 monme sweet potatoes
2 tablespoons wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
15 sheets of roasted seaweed
Grate the sweet potatoes with a grater and grind. Mix in the flour and salt. Spread the mixture onto the roasted nori to a thickness of about 1/2 cm. Fry them in oil until golden brown. Separately, make a soy sauce glaze in the ratio of 3 parts soy sauce to 2 parts sugar. Dip in the glaze and grill them. Repeat this twice, brushing with sauce each time. On the third, use only the sauce without grilling.— Fujin no Tomo (The Woman’s Friend), December 1942
February 15, 2026
QotD: The love of long-distance train travel
Why is it that I love, or used to love, trains so much? I thought about this often when I was effectively banned, by the virus, from my normal daily journey between Oxford and London, 63 miles each way. Even now, in bare modern trains systematically stripped of character and romance, there can be a glorious seclusion in a long-distance train that does not stop too much. The soft and distant landscape rolls by, and at any time I can look up and see a familiar hill, church, or stretch of woodland. I can name much of what I see, and have walked over a great deal of it, purposely seeking to know the land better. If I am traveling from the North of England to London, I always try to change at York, to the hourly nonstop train to the capital. The feeling of peace and irresponsibility that spreads through me as the train heaves itself out of the station is a special joy. For two hours nobody can bother me. For two hours I will not be disturbed. For two hours I will be enclosed in a warm and comfortable space, again passing through familiar towns and fields along the route so wonderfully described by Philip Larkin in “The Whitsun Weddings“, until the brakes tighten and I am in prosaic London. And it seems to me that everyone else on that train will be similarly calmed and soothed.
Of course, the accursed cell phone and the even more accursed smartphone have penetrated the seclusion. And alas, there are no more dining cars, a delight now almost completely abolished by spiteful managements, and available mainly on ridiculous super-luxury trains such as the pastiche Orient Express. Yet no restaurant meal I have ever had, including the pressed duck at the old Tour D’Argent in Paris (before it became a museum where you could eat the exhibits), has surpassed the breakfasts, lunches, teas, and dinners I have eaten in trains.
I think of the wonderful bacon and eggs, accompanied by soda bread, on the cross-border Belfast-to-Dublin flyer in Ireland; the vast plates of pork and dumplings accompanied by Pilsener beer on the somnolent Zapadny Express from Nuremberg to Prague; the fresh pancakes and maple syrup at breakfast on the California Limited, with antelopes fleeing from the train somewhere between Dodge City and Albuquerque; the first sip of tea from the samovar, served in a glass in an ornate silver holder, on the Red Star night sleeper from Moscow to Leningrad; the first glass of wine on a sunny September evening as the Rome Express, an hour out of Paris, clattered southward past the faintly minatory cathedral tower at Sens. Then there were the toasted teacakes near Grantham on the southbound Flying Scotsman, and the superb galley-cooked steak on the upper deck of the Chicago-bound Capitol Limited, as it climbed westward through the evening into the forests beyond Harper’s Ferry and up the Potomac valley.
Peter Hitchens, “Why I Love Trains”, First Things, 2020-07-16.
February 11, 2026
The “True” History of Key Lime Pie: Florida or New York?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 12 Aug 2025Key lime pie in a graham cracker crust with meringue, garnished with lime zest and lime peel
City/Region: Key West, Florida
Time Period: April 14, 1933Yet another example of a dish with multiple origin stories, the key lime pie was perhaps invented in Key West in 1875 by Aunt Sally, the possible cook or family member of William Joseph Curry, Florida’s first millionaire, when she observed Cuban sponge collectors making a cream of lime juice, condensed milk, and egg yolk. Or maybe it was a spin on Borden’s (the makers of Eagle brand condensed milk) Magic Lemon Pie, created in New York City in 1931.
Either way, this recipe from 1933, one of the first using a graham cracker crust, is delicious. The filling is smooth, but firms up well, and the lime flavor really stands out without being too tart.
Tropical Lime Pie
Mix thoroughly:
1 can condensed milk,
1/4 cup evaporated milk,
3 egg yellows,
1-3 lime juice, strained.
Butter 9-inch pie tin heavily. Sprinkle graham cracker crumbs about one-fourth inch thick for crust, pressing crumbs well up on sides of pan. Pour in uncooked custard and cover with meringue, using three egg whites and three scant tablespoons of sugar. Brown in moderate oven and allow to set for one hour before serving. Serves six.— Mrs. Mabel McClanahan, Key West Florida, in The Miami Herald, April 14, 1933
February 7, 2026
February 3, 2026
The Killer Pigs of the Middle Ages
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Aug 2025Sliced roasted pork loin with jus
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1390Pigs were an important source of food in the Middle Ages. They didn’t take up a lot of space, had lots of babies, and ate pretty much anything, so despite their smell and bouts of violence (sometimes ending in murder), they were commonly found throughout Europe.
This English recipe, which uses black pepper, coriander seed, caraway seed, and wine, all expensive ingredients that had to come from far away, wouldn’t have been for the common folk. Today, these ingredients are readily found at the grocery store, and this is a delicious roast that is perfect for those just getting into medieval cooking. As with a lot of historical recipes, there are no quantities given, so feel free to adjust the amounts of any of the spices to suit your taste.
Cormarye.
Take Coriander, Caraway small ground, Powder of Pepper and garlic ground in red wine, muddle all this together and salt it, take loins of Pork raw and flay off the skin, and prick it well with a knife and lay it in the sauce, roast thereof what thou wilt, & keep that that falleth therefrom in the roasting and seeth it in a little pot with fair broth, & serve it forth with the roast anon.
— The Forme of Cury, 1390
January 27, 2026
Did People in the Middle Ages Drink Water?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 1 Aug 2025A brew of barley, licorice, figs, and sugar
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1393The myth persists that everyone was drunk in the Middle Ages because no one drank water, only alcohol. While many people preferred to drink ale, wine, or mead, people drank water all the time. Having a source of fresh, clean water was the basis of the location of many cities and towns.
Clean water isn’t just an issue of the past, either. Today, 1 in 10 people don’t have access to clean water. For the month of August, I’m joining thousands of creators across the internet to form Team Water with the goal of raising $40 million to supply 2 million people with clean water which will flow for decades. You can support Team Water by donating at teamwater.org, or by watching and sharing the episode for this recipe. I’ll be donating all of the ad revenue from this video to Team Water!
This sweet tisane is an herbal tea made with barley, licorice root, figs, and sugar. I really enjoyed it, even though the flavor of the licorice and figs didn’t come through. It kind of reminds me of the milk after you’ve eaten a bowl of Raisin Bran, which I like.
Sweet tisane.
Take some water and boil it, then for each septier of water add one generous bowl of barley — it does not matter if it is all hulled — and two parisis’ worth of licorice; item, also figs. Boil until the barley bursts, then strain through two or three pieces of linen, and put plenty of rock sugar in each goblet. The barley that remains can be fed to poultry to fatten them.
— Le Ménagier de Paris, 1393
January 20, 2026
Feeding the Great Mongol Khan
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 29 Jul 2025Mastic stew with black rice, spices, and lamb, garnished with cilantro
City/Region: Mongol Empire | China
Time Period: 1330The grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan doubled the size of the largest land empire the world had ever known by conquering China. We actually know quite a bit about the foods that fueled his empire-expanding efforts. Shortly after his death, Yinshàn zhèngyào, or The Proper and Necessary Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink, was written, and its recipes include ingredients from across Kublai Khan’s vast empire.
The mastic in this stew is a resin from the mastic tree in the Mediterranean, and it has a bitterness along with cedar or pine notes. I really like it in sweet things, but there is no sugar in this dish. The stew is aromatic and smells of cardamom and cinnamon, but they don’t come through in the flavor. The bitterness of the mastic and the lamb dominate the dish, but Kublai Khan was eating this dish to invigorate his chi, so maybe the flavor didn’t matter as much.
I used black rice, or forbidden rice, so named because supposedly it was only eaten by the emperor and his court for much of Chinese history, and it makes the stew a deep purple. You can use long grain white or brown rice, which will make for a lighter colored dish.
Nourishes, warms the middle and grants chi. Leg of mutton, five tsaoko cardamoms, 2 ch’ien cinnamon, one half sheng chickpeas, mash and remove the skins. Boil the ingredients together to make a soup, strain it. Cut up the meat and set aside. Add 2 ho of cooked chickpeas, 1 sheng of aromatic rice, 1 ch’ien of mastic. Mix well with a little salt. Add chopped meat and cilantro.
— Yinshàn zhèngyào by Hu Sihui, 1330
January 13, 2026
The History of SPAM
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 22 Jul 2025Sliced SPAM layered with cream cheese filling, sliced and served with potato salad and tomatoes
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1951SPAM. The iconic canned meat product. Beloved by some, reviled by others, SPAM was buoyed by a very successful marketing blitz by the Hormel company starting in the 1930s. There were radio and magazine ads, The Hormel Girls (a singing group), and recipes.
I’m not the biggest fan of SPAM, and this recipe turned out way too salty for me. If you want to make the historical recipe, go ahead and follow it, but I would personally opt for the reduced sodium SPAM and cut out the salt in the cream cheese mixture. If you like SPAM, definitely try this out! It’s super flavorful, but it’s just not to my taste.
Tender, pure-pork SPAM joins with a zesty cream cheese mixture for memorable eating. Serve for supper or lunch — or as a noteworthy appetizer.
SPAM ‘n’ Cheese Ribbon Loaf
Cut in 8 slices……1 whole SPAM
Mix together……1 (3-oz.) package cream cheese (softened with a little milk)
1 tsp. lemon juice
1 tsp. grated onion
1 tbsp. minced parsley
1/4 tsp. salt
Spread between……slices of SPAM
Chill……4 hours (or longer; overnight if desired). Slice and serve. Good with deviled eggs or potato salad.Economical all-meat buy! No bone, no waste. SPAM is all meat … juicy pork shoulder and mild, tender ham, with Hormel’s unequalled seasonings.
— Hormel advertisement, 1951
January 8, 2026
QotD: Canned food and the early days of the Raj
Consider the history of canned food. It has obvious military applications — Napoleon famously quipped that an army marches on its stomach, and as canning was largely invented in France, he made some effort to issue food to his troops (as opposed to local procurement and / or “living off the land”). He didn’t quite get there, but the resultant revolution in logistics was as important to the conduct of war, in its way, as just about anything else. If you don’t know how armies are provisioned, you’re likely to miss something when you talk about wars.
You might even miss something culturally. For instance, there’s an entire sub-subdiscipline called “Food and Foodways”, and it’s not as silly as it sounds. Canned food was an important part of British cultural life in the Raj, for instance. File it under “Women Ruin Everything” — once it got safe enough for ladies to have a reasonable chance of surviving East of Suez, the awesome freewheeling decadence of the “White Mughals” period was replaced by dour, dowdy Victorian bullshit. Every summer the “fishing fleet” pulled into Calcutta harbor, disembarking scads of ugly British girls with a Bible in one hand and a can of spotted dick in the other, determined to snag the highest-ranking ICS man they could and, in the process, turn India into another boring suburb of Edinburgh. Anglo-Indian cookbooks are full of recipes for horrid British glop straight out of cans, and if you routinely got really, really sick from eating spoiled stuff, well, hard cheese, old chap! Heaven forbid you eat the delicious, nutritious, climate-optimized cuisine that was literally right there …
If you want to argue that the Indian Army fought so many border wars just to get away from sour, hectoring memsahibs and their godawful tinned slop, I’m not going to stop you.
Anyway, the point is, IF you are conversant enough with the relevant technical stuff, it occurs to me that you can get a snapshot of embedded cultural assumptions by looking at a period’s characteristic or representative technology.
Severian, “Assumption Artifacts”, Founding Questions, 2024-04-30.
January 6, 2026
Typhoid Mary’s Deadly Ice Cream
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 15 Jul 2025Fresh peach ice cream frozen in a mold garnished with sliced peaches and peach puree
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1877Mary Mallon, born in 1869, was a cook for wealthy families, but she’s better known for being the first person found to be an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever. While most food was cooked to a temperature that kills the typhoid-causing bacteria, the families that employed Mary loved her peach ice cream.
While ice cream that has eggs in it is cooked, and there’s no way to know what kind Mary made, I opted for a recipe from the time for American style ice cream that has no eggs and isn’t cooked. Whichever ice cream base Mary used, she put cut up fresh peaches into it, which certainly could have carried the bacteria.
Gruesome inspiration for this recipe aside, the ice cream is really good. There’s a ton of fresh peach flavor, and you can make it as sweet or not as you like. The slices of peach inside the ice cream were very cold and kind of froze my mouth, so you could try cutting them up into smaller pieces to avoid the brain freeze I got.
Peach Ice-Cream
Mix a quart of cream with a cupful of sugar and four tablespoons of sherry. Add four cupfuls of peaches mashed fine and sweetened to taste, and freeze.
— Everyday Desserts by Olive Green (Myrtle Reed), 1911
January 4, 2026
“You will eat the bugs, peasant!”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR reacts to yet another “bugs are yummy, peons, you are going to eat them” post:
Contemplating this picture, I had a realization about the people who want you to eat bugs.
The fact that the bugs are disgusting to you is the whole point. Enlisting you as the principal enforcer of your oppression is the program. Fucking with your head is the actual goal, not just a tactic.
It doesn’t matter whether or not Western prejudice against eating insects is irrational. In an alternate world where we routinely eat insects, the people who want you to eat the bugs would find some other kind of disgusting garbage and play to make you eat it.
Because this isn’t sustainability or any of that bullshit. The degradation is the point.
However, even the powers-that-be can’t magically create economic conditions in which insect factories earn profits:
In the renewable frenzy of the early 2020s Ÿnsect raised €600 million to “Reinvent the food chain” and pioneer alternative foods that “respect the planet’s boundaries”. Some $200 million of their funding came from hapless taxpayers somewhere. But in record time, seemingly before it began, it has already gone. Bankrupted. And not because people don’t want to eat mealworms (which they don’t) but because there wasn’t much market in making animal feed either. It turns out that farm owners didn’t want to spend 2 to 10 times as much on “sustainable” cattle fodder. So the company shifted focus to high end pet food, where besotted owners have money to spare, but that crashed too.
h/t Tom Nelson
How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming
By Anna Heim, TechCrunchThe company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as Ÿnsect had been embattled for months. Still, there is plenty to unpack about how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.
Ultimately, Ÿnsect failed to fulfill its ambition to “revolutionize the food chain” with insect-based protein. But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many Westerners feel about bugs. Human food was never its core focus.
It’s only money …
And revenue was the problem. According to publicly available data, Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. By 2023, the company had racked up a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).
The vainglorious heady days of climate communism meant some bureaucrats thought it made sense to spend $200 million dollars feeding bugs to cows to try to change rainfall in 2100 AD.
January 1, 2026
New Year’s Good Luck “Pasta Fazool” (Pasta e Fagioli) – Food Wishes
Food Wishes
Published 31 Dec 2019Scientists will tell you that there’s no way eating pork, beans, and/or greens at the beginning of a new year can bring you good luck and great fortune; but our lab-coated, left-brained friends are missing one very important fact: People who think they’re lucky, are lucky.
For a fully formatted, printable, written recipe, follow this link: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/277…
You can also find more of Chef John’s content on Allrecipes: http://allrecipes.com/recipes/16791/e…






