Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 17 Dec 2024Gelatinous Christmas pudding with chocolate, nuts, dried fruit, and whipped cream
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1931During the Great Depression, making Christmas festive was more important than ever. Homemade gifts, cards, and decorations defined the season when money was tight for everyone. Many people who lived through the Great Depression recalled that no matter what, Christmas dinner was special.
This recipe from 1931 comes from a radio program hosted by the fictional character Aunt Sammy, who was supposedly the wife of Uncle Sam. I’m not quite sure how this Christmas pudding was much less expensive than a traditional boiled pudding, but it’s an interesting change nonetheless. I like the flavors of the chocolate and fruit coming through, though I do wish the texture was a little smoother.
There are twelve ingredients. Quite a lot to write down but I’ll go slowly.
2 tablespoons of granulated gelatin
1 cup of cold water
1 pint of milk
1 cup of sugar
1 and 1/2 squares of chocolate
1 cup of seeded raisins
3/4 of a cup of dates
1/2 cup of nuts
1/2 cup of currants, and
3 egg whitesThat’s a long list. I’ll go over it again while you check. (Repeat)
To make this pudding, first soften the gelatin in the cold water for ten minutes. While the gelatin is soaking, melt the chocolate with part of the sugar. When it is melted, add a little of the milk, just enough to make a smooth paste. Put the rest of the milk in the upper part of the double boiler. When the milk is hot, add to it the melted chocolate. Then the sugar and salt. And, finally, the soaked gelatin. Stir the mixture. Then remove it from the fire. Set it away to grow cold. When it begins to thicken, add the vanilla, the fruit, and the chopped nut meats. Then fold in the beaten egg whites.
Now turn the mixture into a wet pudding mold decorated with whole nut meats and raisins. Set the mold in the refrigerator or other cold place, to chill. When the pudding is cold and firm, and it is time for serving at dinner, turn it out on a pudding plate or platter. Garnish it with sprigs of holly. A wreath of holly springs around the edge and one stuck in the top makes it look like a real Christmas pudding.
Serve the pudding with whipped cream, sweetened and flavored with vanilla, or with a currant jelly sauce.
— Aunt Sammy, December 1931
December 20, 2025
Christmas During the Great Depression
December 15, 2025
How to Eat Like an Ancient Stoic
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 8 Jul 2025Lentil soup with leeks, coriander seeds, and herbs
City/Region: Greece | Rome
Time Period: 3rd Century B.C.E. | 1st CenturyThe ancient stoics were all about being happy with what you’ve got. If one could learn to take pleasure in eating simple foods like lentil soup and barley bread (usually eaten by the poorest members of society), then they would have more happiness than if they constantly craved luxurious food. Granted, most of these philosophers were wealthy, so they didn’t actually have to live like the very poor.
The ancient Greek stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium was known for carrying around lentil soup in a clay pot, and that was probably just lentils boiled in water. This recipe, adapted from ancient Rome’s Apicius from a few centuries later, is a little fancier, but still rather simple and uses ingredients that would have been available to Zeno. Despite its simplicity, it’s surprisingly delicious with a hint of sweetness, oniony leek, and the cooling effect of the mint.
Boil the lentils; when skimmed, put in leeks and green cilantro. Pound coriander-seed, pennyroyal, silphium, mint, and rue, moisten with vinegar, add honey, blend with garum, vinegar, and defrutum. Pour over the lentils, add oil, serve.
— Apicius, de re coquinaria, 1st Century
December 10, 2025
Murmurs of dissent from within Canada’s supply management cartel
At Juno News, Sylvain Charlebois shares a sign of internal dissent inside the supply management system that prioritizes protecting producers at the cost of significantly higher prices and reduced choice for Canadian consumers — not to mention getting Trump’s attention (and anger) for shutting out American competitors:
Every once in a while, someone inside a tightly protected system decides to say the quiet part out loud. That is what Joel Fox, a dairy farmer from the Trenton, Ontario area, did recently in the Ontario Farmer newspaper. In a candid open letter, Fox questioned why established dairy farmers like himself continue to receive increasingly large government payouts — even though the sector is not shrinking, but expanding. His piece, titled “We continue to privatize gains, socialize losses“, did not come from an economist or a critic of supply management. It came from someone who benefits from it. And yet his message was unmistakable: the numbers no longer add up.
Fox’s letter marks something we have not seen in years — a rare moment of internal dissent from a system that usually speaks with one voice. It is the first meaningful crack since the viral milk-dumping video by Ontario dairy farmer Jerry Huigen, who filmed himself being forced to dump thousands of litres of perfectly good milk because of quota rules. Huigen’s video exposed contradictions inside supply management, but the system quickly closed ranks. Until now. Fox has reopened a conversation that has been dormant for far too long.
In his letter, Fox admitted he would cash his latest $14,000 Dairy Direct Payment Program (DDPP) cheque, despite believing the program wastes taxpayer money. The DDPP was created to offset supposed losses from trade agreements like CETA, CPTPP, and CUSMA. These deals were expected to reduce Canada’s dairy market. But those “losses” are theoretical — based on models and assumptions about future erosion in market share. Meanwhile, domestic dairy demand has strengthened.
Which raises the obvious question: why are we compensating dairy farmers for producing less when they are, in fact, producing more?
This month, dairy farmers received another 1% quota increase, on top of several increases totalling 4% to 5% in recent years. Quota — the right to produce milk — only increases when more supply is needed. If trade deals had truly devastated the sector, quota would be falling, not rising. Instead, Canada’s population has grown by nearly six million since 2015, processors have expanded, and consumption remains stable. The market is expanding.
Understanding what quota is makes the contradiction clearer. Quota is a government-created financial asset worth $24,000 to $27,000 per kilogram of butterfat. A mid-sized dairy farm may hold $2.5 million in quota. Over the past few years, cumulative quota increases of 5% or more have automatically added $120,000 to $135,000 to the value of a typical farm’s quota — entirely free. Larger farms see even greater windfalls. Across the entire dairy system, these increases represent hundreds of millions of dollars in newly created quota value, likely exceeding $500 million in added wealth — generated not through innovation or productivity, but by regulatory decision.
December 8, 2025
Eating aboard a US Submarine during World War 2
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 1 Jul 2025Slow-cooked steaks with tomatoes and onions with mashed potatoes and gravy
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1945Being a crew member aboard a submarine during World War II was one of the most dangerous jobs in the US military with a fatality rate of over 20%. This, and the extremely cramped and uncomfortable quarters, were why the food aboard a US sub was really good. If nothing else, at least you had delicious food to keep you going.
These steaks cook up to be fall-apart tender and delicious, and the mashed potatoes have wonderful flavor, even if the texture is a little different from regular mashed potatoes. They kind of remind me of the mashed potatoes I’d get as a kid in school, which were also probably made from dehydrated potatoes.
SWISS BEEF STEAKS
Portion: 1 (6-ounce) steak.
100 PORTIONS
Beef, bone-in……60 pounds
OR
Beef, boneless……42 pounds
Flour……2 pounds……1/2 gallon
Salt……6 ounces……3/4 cup
Pepper……1/2 ounce……1 3/4 tablespoons
Fat……2 pounds……1 quart
Tomatoes……12 pounds, 12 ounces……2 No. 10 cans (6 1/2 quarts).
Onions, sliced……6 pounds……4 1/2 quarts
Salt……1 ounce……2 tablespoons
Flour (for gravy)……1 pound……1 quart
Water, cold……
Cut meat into 6-ounce steaks 1 to 1 1/2 inches thick.
Sift together flour, salt and pepper. Pound into steaks.
Cook steaks in fat until browned on both sides. Place in roasting pans.
Add tomatoes. Cover with onion slices. Sprinkle with 1 ounce salt.
Cover pans. Cook in slow oven (300°F.) 3 hours or until steaks are tender.
Drain liquid from Swiss steaks. Make a paste of flour and water. Stir into steak liquid. Cook until thickened. Pour over steaks. Reheat.MASHED POTATOES (Using dehydrated, shredded potatoes)
Portion: Approx. 4 1/2 ounces (approx. 2/3 cup).
100 PORTIONS
Water……5 pounds, 8 ounces……2 gallons
Potato shreds, dehydrated, precooked……5 pounds……2 gallons
Salt……3 ounces……6 tablespoons
Milk, liquid, hot……3/4 gallon
Butter, melted……1 pound……1 pint
Heat water to vigorous boil. Pour over potatoes. Cover.
Let stand in warm place 15 minutes or over low heat 10 minutes.
Add salt. Stir vigorously 15 to 20 minutes or until smooth.
Add milk and butter. Whip until light. Serve immediately.
— The Cook Book of the United States Navy by the United States Department of the Navy Bureau of Supplies and Accounts, Washington, D.C., 1945
December 7, 2025
QotD: The Great Applesauce Blight of 1977/78
“An Army marches on its stomach.” — Napoleon
As we take our own little march down memory lane, let me state up front that I can’t stomach applesauce, just can’t. I liked it as a kid but now it has less appeal than the prospect of being duct taped to a chair, face down, in prison. Yeah, I hate it.
This may seem unreasonable, but anyone who was in at the time, at least in the Army or Marines, and some portion thereof that actually went to the field a lot, will probably remember the Great Applesauce Blight of 1977 and 1978, which was the reason I can’t stand the crap.
The “Great Applesauce Blight?” you ask. Oh, yeah.
The story I got, after some years and some digging, goes like this: It seems that sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, a fruit company – the Monterey Fruit Company, so it was said – was going out of business. So the Monterey Fruit Company, if that’s who it really was, called the Department of Defense and said, “Boys, have we got a deal for you. Hundreds upon hundreds of tons of Grade A applesauce, and you can have it. All of it. Cheap.”
McNamara and his Whiz Kids – neither of them ever sufficiently to be damned, of course – were gone, but their spirits remained. Department of Defense, ever conscious of the value of a well-squeezed penny, bought that inventory of applesauce, and began to put it into the old style, canned, MCI; Meal, Combat, Individual, which is to say, “C-rations”.
C Rations of the day were entirely canned and composed of a main meal, for one meal, plus either a cake (or very rarely, canned bread) or fruit of some kind, usually a small tin of peanut butter or cheese of some kind of jam or jelly, and one or another type of B Unit, which would have some variant of crackers plus either candy or cocoa. Sometimes, as with the B-2 unit, the cheese was in those.
Now, perusing a case of 1978 C-rats, which would have been newer than those of the Great Applesauce Blight, but still broadly similar, one notes that there were twelve menus, twelve different main meals, and 12 different kinds of dessert, a sundry pack, plus variable candies, spreads, etc. Of that latter twelve, eight were fruit and four were cake of some kind. I seem to recall that, possibly for reasons of economy, the amount of fruit during the Great Applesauce Blight had gone up to usually ten cans out of twelve, some extra cheese or peanut butter seemed to be included with some, and the cakes went down to two, one of which was going to be Chocolate Nut Roll, essentially inedible, from the Nashville Bread Company and the other would be the even more thoroughly disgusting fruit cake. I don’t recall who made that, and that lack of memory may have been an automatic defense against a future charge of capital murder. None of the cakes except pound cake could be relied on to be edible, and pound cake was always rare.
Now picture this, you’re a soldier in the Panama Canal Zone, training – training hard – to fight for the Canal, living in the jungle maybe twenty-five or more days and nights a month, eating C-rats to the tune of sixty or seventy a month, and virtually every meal contains applesauce or something more innately disgusting. “No, none of that nice fruit cocktail or those ever so delectable pear slices for you, young man; Department of Defense, to save a few bucks, has determined that applesauce is good enough, three meals a day, for weeks on end.”
*****
Now we were already kind of thin, because no military feeding system can ever completely keep up with the caloric requirements for a soldier either continuously fighting or realistically training to fight. Normally, this isn’t a problem because he can pack it on in the mess hall. These were unusual circumstances, though, with an unusually high chance of fighting – or riot control, which is worse – over the Canal. So we’re pretty much living out there, in pretty much trackless jungle, with nothing like enough helicopters for regular hot rations from the mess. Besides that, the old 193rd Infantry Brigade, in the Panama Canal Zone, was unusual in that it made a very serious effort to train even the cooks to fight, which takes time, too. C’s are pretty much it.
Even so, thin and hungry or not, after a month or two we could not eat the applesauce. That was probably seven or eight hundred calories a days that just got tossed.
We began going from thin to frigging emaciated.
*****
When I think upon the Great Applesauce Blight, though, I do not think about hardship or hunger. No, I think – as we old farts are wont to – about happier aspects of it.
Now this is no shit:
There we were, the heavy mortar platoon of 4th Battalion, 10th Infantry, stuck on top of a non-descript hill somewhere southwest of Gamboa, Canal Zone.
PFC McBrayer had a birthday out there in the jungle. I think it was his nineteenth birthday. None of us had been able to do any shopping, so we were all just stuck for getting him a birthday present. “I’m not giving up my pet scorpion,” said Big Al, who in fact, had a pet scorpion for the mega-ant versus scorpion gladiatorial combats we used to stage. “I’d offer to give him some of my crotch rot,” said Art, “but I think he already has some of his own.” “Howler monkey?” “Who’s going to catch it? And those suckers are mean, too.” “How about a sloth? They’re easy to catch.” “If the Lord God didn’t see fit to give B’rer Sloth an asshole, I don’t see why we should add to his troubles by catching him and wrapping him as a present.” Finally someone, I don’t think it was me, might have been Sergeant Sais, said, “Gentlemen, there can be only one proper gift under the circumstances,” and then he held up a – you guessed it – can of applesauce.
So we stuck nineteen or twenty Canal Zone Matches in a Nashville Bread Company Chocolate Butt Roll, invited McBrayer over, torched off the matches, sang Happy Birthday, then presented him his can of applesauce.
He was touched; you could see that. As he dashed tears from his eyes while making his, “Gee, you guys are just all so special … you shouldn’t have,” speech, you could see the emotion radiating from his face. And then, all choked up, he turned to go and tossed that can off applesauce off the hill with a casual contempt I have never seen before or since. It was the sheer, distilled essence of everything we all felt about applesauce.
Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-09-05.
December 5, 2025
Abolish the Temporary Foreign Worker program
The CBC presented a sob story about a restaurant owner in Lloydminster who had to reject over a hundred job applicants because they couldn’t cook Indian food to her satisfaction. I’m no great cook, but there are about a dozen Indian dishes I make regularly that are, in my opinion, nearly as good as I can get from any of our local Indian restaurants. I’ve never been trained in cooking and I don’t have access to all the ingredients, but I do well enough. I’m sure that with some training and access to a proper restaurant kitchen I could do much better … as could a lot of those rejected job applicants, I bet.
Ms. Garner added the next day:
The more I think about this story the more preposterous the assumption behind it becomes — that no one out of the 100 applicants the owner rejected could be taught to cook at this place.
Yet the article essentially accepts this preposterousness as fact.
Abolish the TFW program.
As Fortissax responded:
December 1, 2025
Feeding the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 24 Jun 2025
Two majestic tiers of grapes, mandarin oranges, and raspberries suspended in pink champagne gelatin topped with whipped cream
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1877The Gilded Age, a period of late 19th century United States history when a handful of people got mind-bogglingly wealthy off of industrialization, conjures up images of the social elite in New York. High society families had more money than most of us could imagine, and they spent it in the most ostentatious ways. One of those ways was by throwing parties that could cost up to the equivalent of millions of dollars in today’s money. These parties would host lavish feasts with dozens of dishes, like this gelée macédoine, which would have been served in a sweet course alongside plum puddings, mince pies, and fruit cakes.
I’m not normally a fan of gelatin, but this was really nice. It wasn’t rubbery at all and the champagne flavor really comes through. It takes a while to make, but feels fancy and is delicious. You could also use the recipe as a base and swap out other types of wine or use other flavorings like liqueurs or spices. If you do add spices (cinnamon was popular at the time), put them into the syrup, and be sure to use a cloth jelly bag or nut milk bag to strain the gelatin mixture. This will ensure a clear jelly.
If you don’t have a gelatin mold, you can use a bundt cake pan, or really any bowl of pan that you have.
Gelée Macédoine. This is made with any kind of jelly; however, jelly made with Champagne or sherry is preferable. Any of the delicate fruits of the season, such as grapes, cherries, peaches, strawberries, raspberries, mulberries, currants (on their stems), plums, and orange sections, or preserved fruits, such as brandied cherries, peaches, etc., are tastefully imbedded in the jelly, so as to show their forms and colors to best advantage.br/>
— Practical Cooking, and Dinner Giving by Mrs. Mary F. Henderson, New York City, 1877
November 24, 2025
What is Spotted Dick?
Boiled pudding with plenty of currants and a simple butter and brown sugar sauce
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1854While the name “spotted dick” makes us giggle today, its likely origins are just an amusing circumstance of language evolution. The Old English word for dough is dāg (sounds very similar to dog), which probably led to a version of the word that sounds like dick. Funnily enough, another name for spotted dick is spotted dog. So in all likelihood, the name is a holdover from Old English meaning spotted dough.
Whatever you call it, this boiled pudding is really good. It’s sweet, but not too sweet, with an almost crumbly texture and is very moist. The butter and brown sugar sauce isn’t necessary for it to be tasty, but it’s so easy and delicious that I highly recommend making it.
Spotted Dick.
Put three-quarters of a pound of flour into a basin, half a pound of beef suet, half ditto of currants, two ounces of sugar, a little cinnamon, mix with two eggs and two gills of milk; boil in either mould or cloth for one hour and a half; serve with melted butter, and a little sugar over.
— A Shilling Cookery for the People by Alexis Soyer, 1854
November 22, 2025
Ottawa is working hard … to keep beef prices high for consumers
It’s not your imagination, beef is still much more expensive than it used to be (we no longer buy any “good” cuts of meat, settling for ground beef and “stewing beef” when we do the shopping). But rest assured, the feds are working diligently … to prevent beef prices from falling:
We recently received information from a reliable industry source about how the federal government is administering beef import permits. If accurate, it raises serious concerns about whether Ottawa is knowingly sustaining an outdated and opaque system that keeps beef prices unnecessarily high. At a time when many families are struggling with food costs, this is more than a bureaucratic issue — it directly affects affordability.
Canada’s beef import rules operate under a tariff-rate quota system. A limited volume of beef can enter the country at a low tariff, but anything beyond that is slapped with a steep import charge. When supply tightens or when specialty products are required, supplemental import permits are meant to provide flexibility and help stabilize the market. For years, the system worked reasonably well.
But the structure behind the process has not kept pace with today’s realities. The committee originally created to provide guidance — the Beef and Veal Tariff Rate Quota Advisory Committee — has not met since 2015. For a decade, no formal mechanism has existed for importers, retailers, or independent distributors to participate in discussions with government about how permits are allocated. Instead, decisions have shifted informally toward a small group of influential players, including major domestic processors who have a vested interest in limiting imports. The transparency and balance once built into the system have eroded.
Adding to this complexity is the broader concentration of market power in the sector. Beef packing and processing in Canada is dominated by two foreign-owned private companies: Cargill, based in the United States, and JBS, headquartered in Brazil. Together, they control the overwhelming majority of beef slaughter and processing in this country. When a sector is this concentrated, and when a federal system restricts competition through import controls, the beneficiaries are obvious. Any policy that tightens import access — intentionally or not — further entrenches the dominance of these two multinational giants.
The consequences are no longer theoretical. Our source described a case where a long-established importer has beef sitting in bonded storage in Canada. The product is legally imported and properly documented. The importer applied for a supplemental permit to release it into the market at the regular tariff rate. The application was refused. The justification offered — that the beef had been purchased abroad at a price “too low” compared with U.S. prices — makes little economic sense. The product did not come from the U.S., and competitive pricing has never been grounds for rejecting a permit. With no permit, the importer must wait until the next quota year or pay the full over-quota tariff. Ironically, the only reason paying the tariff is even possible now is because beef prices have climbed so sharply. The federal government, of course, collects that tariff revenue.
Cases like this raise an uncomfortable question: does Ottawa actually want to keep beef prices high? If the goal were genuinely affordability, the government could issue supplemental permits when supply conditions justify them. It could restore a functioning advisory committee to ensure balanced input. It could provide clear and transparent criteria for permit decisions. Instead, legitimate requests are rejected, supply is restricted even when product is physically present in the country, and both processors and Ottawa benefit from elevated prices.
November 20, 2025
“Oh my God, the Conservatives support children starving at school”
In the National Post, Chris Selley profiles my local MP, Jamil Jivani:
A screengrab from MP Jamil Jivani’s video that is critical of the Liberals’ national school-lunches program. Photo by Jamil Jivani/X
A few eyebrows raised earlier this year when Toronto-area MP Jamil Jivani, long heralded as an essential younger voice in the Canadian conservative movement, wasn’t offered a critic role by party leader Pierre Poilievre. There are 74 official Opposition critics, which is more than half the Conservative caucus. And if Poilievre and Jivani don’t see eye to eye, one might still have thought Jivani’s relationship with U.S. Vice-President JD Vance would be a useful resource.
There’s also the fact that Jivani is rather good at defending conservative policy, especially on the social side — better, one might argue, than Poilievre. On Monday, Jivani posted a video of himself arguing that Canadian children should go hungry at school. Or at least, that’s how certain hysterics chose to interpret his opposition to the Liberals’ national school-lunches program.
“It should frighten us that there are parents who can’t buy their own kids lunch,” he tells a constituent in the video. “(But) the government shouldn’t be your daddy; the government shouldn’t be your mother. We have families, and families should be strong enough to provide for their children, and when they’re not that should break our hearts. … It should not be used as a justification for the government to have even more influence, even more input, even more control over our lives.”
The program is already underway, with $1 billion in funding over five years committed as transfers to the provinces in 2024 — three years after the Liberals first promised it. And the Liberals recently announced plans for more. “Permanent” funding of more than $200 million is set to kick in in 2029.
The response anywhere to Jivani’s intervention, anywhere to his left, in a nutshell: “Oh my God, the Conservatives support children starving at school”. Even among some conservatives we hear the traditional timid refrain: Is this a “winning issue”? Or is the party just making itself look callous? What will the media think? Jivani, unlike many more seasoned Conservatives, seems not to care so much about the potential blowback.
Lunches served at school — paid or subsidized — are hardly a brand-new statist invention. They’ve been around forever, although they’re more common in certain kinds of schools than others. A 2013 Queen’s University study looked at 436 Canadian schools and found only 53 per cent had a cafeteria. (When I was a kid, many of my friends walked home for lunch and back afterwards.) And Jivani concedes in the video that many Canadians will like the sound of a national school-lunch program. Who would argue against it? It’s obviously far more important that kids eat breakfast and lunch (and dinner) than it is who provides it.
But that assumes a national school-lunch program, or even a provincial or local school-lunch program, is the quickest and easiest way to make sure kids are fed. It obviously isn’t, but trust in government, somehow, is a tough nut to crack in this country. Mass pandemic-era supports like CERB weren’t unalloyed successes, but they proved governments at least know how to shovel money out the door when they feel it absolutely necessary.
Especially since so many Canadian schools don’t have cafeterias — 53 per cent of elementary schools in the Queen’s study, and 82 per cent of combined elementary-secondary schools — it would make much more sense just to mail every parent who needs one a subsidy and let them pack the lunch, or the lunch money, that their kids need.
I’ve mentioned many times that I’m not a Conservative, but I don’t mind Mr. Jivani as my Member of Parliament because he doesn’t seem to me to be a typical Canadian Conservative (I thought it was significant that the PPC chose not to run against him once he became the Conservative candidate). In my YouTube recommendations, this video appeared with some sensible views from the Deputy Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Melissa Lantsman:
The trouble, as always with parties in opposition, is that they can sound like they’ve got great ideas and will energetically address the problems they identify while not in government … but once they go into office, sound remarkably like the government they just defeated and little or nothing actually changes.
November 17, 2025
What did Cowboys Eat on the Open Range?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 10 Jun 2025Slow-cooked pinto beans and dense cast iron skillet cornbread
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1896The cook for a cattle drive, often called “cookie”, was usually a former cowboy himself, having aged out of the profession by 25. They’d wake up around 3:00 AM to get breakfast ready, then pack up and drive ahead about 15 miles to prepare supper.
These beans are very simple, and surprisingly delicious. Honestly, the garlic doesn’t do a whole lot (who only uses half a clove?), but they’re still very good. Feel free to use however hot a red pepper you like, and the beans are a perfect accompaniment to the Chuck Wagon Cornbread (below). Mighty fine, indeed.
FRIJOLES.
1 cup Mexican beans.
1/2 clove garlic.
1 long red pepper.
1 thin small slice bacon.
Soak beans over night; boil slowly until soft—from eight to ten hours. Add red pepper, garlic, and bacon, and bake.
— Manual for Army Cooks, 1896
November 14, 2025
QotD: A modest Utilitarian proposal
– An avg person eats ~3,500 animals/yr (including shrimp)
– A human body has ~125,000 calories of edible tissueSo you only have to eat six humans/yr to meet your calorie needs, assuming you’re a good cook and don’t waste too much. Maybe 5.5 with veggies and sauces. And this saves the lives of roughly 150,000 animals, assuming you can catch a 30-year-old. But even if you just prey on the old and infirm, you’re still at bodhisattva levels of reducing suffering.
Anyway, I’ve tallied up the units of suffering and the logic is unassailable. The single best thing you can do — for the climate, the environment and the end of suffering for all sentient beings — is to switch to an all homovore diet. I’m shopping for chest freezers right now and plan to phase out all animals by the end of the year. Who’s with me?
Vivid Void, Twitter, 2025-08-11.
November 10, 2025
Food in the Trenches of World War One
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 3 Jun 2025Mashed potatoes over a corned beef and onion filling with gravy
City/Region: United Kingdom
Time Period: 1914Many of the young men headed to fight in World War I didn’t already know how to cook, so the British government set up army schools of cookery to teach some of them how to make the most of the rations they were given. Even that ancient army standby, hardtack (clack clack), is better when you can cook it into a stew or pudding.
This potato pie, kind of a simplified preserved meat version of shepherd’s pie, isn’t half bad. If I were to make changes, I would leave out the additional salt (canned corned beef is plenty salty on its own) and add some more onions. While relatively tasty as-is, if you have any HP Sauce lying around, it makes this pie delicious, and many troops would have had access to it during World War I. Delicious and historically accurate: a win-win!
Potato Pie.
16 1/2 lbs. meat, 20 lbs. potatoes, 1 lb. onions, 3 ozs. salt, 1/2 oz. of pepper.
Cut up and stew the onions with jelly from the meat added; boil or steam the potatoes; when cooked mash them. Line the sides of the dish with one-third of the mashed potatoes; place the meat and cooked onions in the centre; season with pepper and salt; cover over the remainder of the mashed potatoes, and bake till the potato cover is brown. As the mashed potatoes absorb the moisture of the meat and render it dry, about 2 pints of gravy prepared from the liquor in which the onions were cooked, should be poured into the pie before serving.
— Manual of Military Cooking. Prepared at the Army School of Cookery, 1914
November 6, 2025
Reactions to Tuesday’s budget announcement
Mark Carney’s government finally got around to releasing their 2025 budget and lots of folks have thoughts and concerns about what is in it and what isn’t in it. After all, it could be the best possible budget, but it would still not satisfy all concerns … and nobody is pretending that this is anything close to “best possible” territory. Sylvain Charlebois says that the budget ignores the food insecurity issues and grocery prices for ordinary Canadians:
Graphic stolen from Small Dead Animals.
For a government that often talks about food affordability and insecurity, Budget 2025 offers surprisingly little that directly addresses either. There’s no bold food strategy, no affordability roadmap, and no new incentives for domestic food production. Yet, in between the lines, Ottawa has quietly set the stage for some indirect relief — not through grocery subsidies or consumer-facing policies, but through infrastructure, trade, and administrative reforms that could make the food system work a little more efficiently.
The largest signal comes from the government’s $115 billion infrastructure plan, one of its so-called “generational investments”. The new Trade Diversification Corridors Fund aims to modernize ports, railways, and airports — all chronic weak points in Canada’s food supply chain. When bottlenecks ease, goods move faster, and perishable products arrive fresher and cheaper. While no one in Ottawa framed this as a food-price measure, logistics efficiency has long been one of the most effective — and least visible — forms of price control.
[…]
Still, the absence of a broader vision for food affordability stands out. After years of grocery price volatility and public debate about “greedflation”, Canadians might have expected a more direct focus on food resilience — investments in innovation, local processing, or retail transparency. Instead, the government seems to have opted for a quieter, systemic approach: strengthen the arteries of trade and logistics, and trust that efficiency will trickle down to the dinner table.
The budget forecasts a $78.3 billion deficit for the 2025-26 fiscal year, which is significantly higher than notorious spendthrift Justin Trudeau’s last budget number. This adds to an already staggering $1.27 trillion debt load, which is nearly double what it was just before the pandemic. In the lead-up to the budget release Mark Carney had hinted at major sacrifices to be made, and while there wasn’t a lot in the document directly corresponding to sacrifice, the need to service that long-term debt will do the job quite adequately.
In the National Post, John Robson says that the budget is “elbows up, IQs down”:
Since I was last propelled years ago into the purgatory known as “the lockup”, where journalists spend budget day, have either process or contents improved? No. Instead they now insert a false stolen-land “acknowledgement” before even getting to the same old same old labeled bold and new. Which is especially troubling at this supposedly critical juncture.
The document is the familiar brick, 406 paper pages and 493 digitally with no explanation for the discrepancy and no excuse for the length. (Or for being called “Canada Strong” with an inexplicable picture of a ship.) Especially as the Finance Minister gabbled “This is a budget that talks to everyday Canadians,” and its purpose is to state plainly how much the government intends to spend, where it hopes to get the money and how far short it already knows it will fall, you shouldn’t have to wade through 248 pages of sludge to find out.
As P.J. O’Rourke said, “beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud”. Though we “privileged” insiders search “Summary Statement of Transactions” and voila, submerged on p. 249 (all references digital) is a $78.3 billion deficit next year if all goes well, and the national debt increasing $80.5 billion so it already didn’t.
Much commentary, and special-interest attention, focuses on trivial fiddles. But what matters is that Leviathan is in hock up to its horns, with interest payments projected at $55.6 billion next year, soaring to $76.1 billion by 2029-30. If the Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise, both forlorn hopes. NDP MP Leah Gazan, who would jail you for “downplaying” residential schools, snarled about not supporting an “austerity budget” but she won’t get the chance.
Some may bleat that times are tough. Indeed the finance minister’s campaign-speech “Foreword, Budget” gasses “The world is changing, profoundly and in real time; we are no longer living in an era of calm, but of significant change”.
The projected deficits are clearly hallucinatory, as the Liberals never seem to get deficit spending to go down, running deficits every year since 2015:
However, on the ludicrous side, the feds want to spend money to “investigate” Canada taking part in the freaking Eurovision contest:
On the slightly less ludicrous side, Noah considers the military aspects of the budget:
Budget 2025 outlines the government’s generational investment to quote, “defend Canada’s people and values, secure its sovereignty, and position the nation as a strong, reliable partner to its allies“. This starts by initiating a process of rebuilding, rearming, and reinvesting in the DND, CCG, and CAF to provide everyone with the necessary tools and equipment to protect sovereignty and bolster security.
Budget 2025 starts by outlining the government’s previous commitment to accelerate investments to meet NATO’s 2 per cent defence-spending target this year, which is five years ahead of schedule.
Budget 2025 goes a step further by setting Canada on a path to meet NATO’s 5 per cent Defence Investment Pledge by 2035. This will be broken down into two categories, 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035 in core military needs, including supporting the CAF, modernising equipment and technology, and building up defence industries, and 1.5 per cent on security-related infrastructure and investments.
This reinvestment in defence and security is the largest in decades, totaling $30 billion over a five-year horizon on an accrual basis. This funding is allocated across three main pillars: $20 billion for capabilities, $5 billion for infrastructure and equipment, and $5 billion for industrial support.
On a cash basis, Budget 2025 proposes to provide $81.8 billion over five years, starting in 2025-26, to rebuild, rearm, and reinvest in the CAF. This figure includes over $9 billion in 2025-26 that was previously announced in June 2025. This is the funding previously set out for Canada to reach the 2 per cent NATO target.
Key investments from this $81.8 billion fund include $20.4 billion over five years to recruit and retain a strong fighting force, which incorporates the previously announced updates to pay and support for CAF health care.
An additional $19.0 billion over five years is allocated to repair and sustain CAF capabilities and invest in defence infrastructure, including the expansion of ammunition and training infrastructure. Upgrades to digital infrastructure for the Department of National Defence, CAF, and the Communications Security Establishment, particularly for cyber defence, are funded with $10.5 billion over five years.
Finally, $17.9 billion over five years is designated to expand Canada’s military capabilities, with investments in logistics, utility, and armoured vehicles, as well as counter-drone, long-range precision strike capabilities, and domestic ammunition production.
This is a serious chunk of change, although sadly, and as you will see, we don’t get a major breakdown of what this looks like. What we are left with are general piles of money, which isn’t always a bad thing. It’s also expected. The budget is set for a timeline before many critical capabilities will be delivered, so they won’t be included. Almost everything comes after 2030.
November 2, 2025
Biryani from 16th Century India
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 27 May 2025Basmati rice cooked with spiced ghee, lamb, onions, and chickpeas
City/Region: Mughal Empire | India
Time Period: 16th CenturyIt’s likely that the word biryani comes from Persian, which would have made its way to India with the Mughal court of the emperor Babur in the 16th century. The actual dish of rice and meat cooked with ghee, however, had been around for hundreds of years before that, appearing sometime in the Vedic Period (1500 B.C.E. – 500 B.C.E.).
Whatever its true origins may be, biryani carries influences of Indian and Mughal (and thus Persian) cuisine and is delicious. The spices make the whole house smell amazing, and the rice is simultaneously fluffy and has the richness of fried rice thanks to the spiced ghee. It’s a bit of work, but it is so, so good.
10 seer meat, 3 1/2 seer rice; 2 seer ghi; 1 seer gram; 2 seer onions; 1/4 seer salt; 1/4 seer fresh ginger; 2 dam garlic, and round pepper, cinnamon, cardamoms, cloves, 1 dam of each: this gives six dishes.
OF BREAD
… Bread is made in the pantry. There is a large kind, baked in an oven, made of 10 s. flour; 5 s. milk; 1 1/2 s. g’hí; 1/4 s. salt. They make also smaller ones. The thin kind is baked on an iron plate. On sér will give fifteen, or even more. There are various ways of making it: one kind is called chapáti, which is sometimes made of khushkah; it tastes very well, when served hot …
— Ain-i akbari by Abu’l-Fazl ‘Allami, 16th century
