Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 17 Oct 2023
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January 19, 2024
Vienna’s Iconic Chocolate Cake
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January 8, 2024
Crispy Hashbrowns – You Suck at Cooking (episode 161)
You Suck At Cooking
Published 7 Oct 2023Hashbrowns. Also known as fried potato shreds. Also known as 2D potatoes. Also known as even greasier potato chips. Also known as hashbrowns.
If you’ve never fried before or you want to brush up on the details, check this out
https://food52.com/blog/18669-the-do-…This deep fry safety page is also very good
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/gui…Basically hot oil can get out of control so you need to monitor your temperature and not let it get too hot. Electric stoves are deceptive in that they can get the oil very hot even at a lower settings, there’s just a longer delay.
RECIPE
Capture potatoes
Apologize to potatoes
Remove outer thermal membrane
Disintegrate potatoes
Rinse potato smithereens or soak them if you want them less starchy
Wrap them in some cheesecloth or a clean dish towel and squeeze the hell out of them (but mainly the water and leave some of the hell)
Cook them in a non stick pan with a tablespoon of oil for around ten minutes so they won’t be medium rare
Let them cool off a bit
Put them in a bowl
For each potato add
1 teaspoon corn starch
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
some pepper pepper pepper
Wangjangle
Form into patties or triangles but NO OTHER SHAPES
Heat your oil in a cast iron skillet but not so hot that you burn your house down
Most recipes recommend around 350 degrees Fahrenheit but as long as you get a sizzle going when you put them in it’s hot enough
Fry until the first size is golden brown. Somewhere between 4-8 minutes
Fry the other side until golden brown which is gonna happen faster, probably 5 minutes max
Lay them down on a paper towel and tell them they did a good job
Let them cool or spray a heat resistant gel inside your mouth and eat immediately
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December 29, 2023
Rubaboo – Pemmican Stew of Canadian Mounties
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 12 Sept 2023
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December 27, 2023
Eating like a Lighthouse Keeper from the 1800s
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 19 Sep 2023
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December 22, 2023
Roast Smoked Goose – A Christmas Goose Special
Food Wishes
Published 8 Dec 2011Learn how to make a Roast Smoked Goose Recipe!
Visit http://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2011/1… for the ingredients, more recipe information, and over 650 additional original video recipes! I hope you enjoy this Christmas Roast Smoked Goose Recipe!
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December 20, 2023
Eat Like a Medieval Nun – Hildegard of Bingen’s Cookies of Joy
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Sept 2023
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December 16, 2023
QotD: British meals – potatoes
It is necessary here to say something about the specifically British ways of cooking potatoes. Roast meat is always served with potatoes “cooked under the joint”, which is probably the best of all ways of cooking them. The potatoes are peeled and placed in the pan all round the roasting meat, so that they absorb its juices and then become delightfully browned and crisp all over. Another method is to bake them whole in their jackets, after which they are cut open and a dab of butter is placed in the middle. In the North of England delicious potato cakes are made of mashed potatoes and flour: these are rolled out into small round pancakes which are baked on a griddle and then spread with butter. New potatoes are generally boiled in water containing a few leaves of mint and served with melted butter poured over them.
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)
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December 8, 2023
The Real Betty Crocker’s Pineapple Upside Down Cake
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 22 Aug 2023
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December 5, 2023
QotD: British meals – the midday meal
The richer classes have their midday meal at one-thirty in the afternoon and call it “luncheon”. At about half-past four in the afternoon they have a cup of tea and perhaps a piece of bread-and-butter or a slice of cake, which they call “afternoon tea” and they have their evening meal at half-past seven or eight, and call it “dinner”. The others, perhaps ninety percent of the population, have their midday meal somewhat earlier – usually about half-past twelve – and call it “dinner”. They have their main evening meal at about half-past six and call it “tea” and before going to bed they have a light snack – for instance cocoa and bread-and-jam – which they call “supper”. The distinction is regional as well as social. In the North of England, Scotland and Ireland many well-to-do people prefer to follow the working-class time scheme, partly because it fits in better with the working day, and partly, perhaps, from motives of conservation: for our ancestors of a century ago also had their meals at approximately these hours.
But though the name and the hour may differ, every British person’s idea of midday meal is approximately the same. We are not here concerned with the quasi-French meals that are served in hotels, but solely with British cookery, and therefore we can leave both soups and hors d’oeuvres out of account. Most British people are inclined to despise both, and do not care for them in the middle of the day. British soups are seldom good, and there is hardly a single one that is peculiar to the British Isles, while even the word “hors d’oeuvre” has no equivalent in the British language. The British midday meal consists essentially of meat, preferably roast meat, a heavy pudding, and cheese. And here one comes upon the central institution of British life, the “joint”: that is, a large piece of meat – round of beef or leg of pork or mutton – roasted whole with its potatoes round it, and preserving a flavour and a juiciness which meat cooked in smaller quantities never seems to attain.
Most characteristic of all is roast beef, and of all the cuts of beef, the sirloin is the best. It is always roasted lightly enough to be red in the middle: pork and mutton are roasted more thoroughly. Beef is carved in wafer-thin slices, mutton in thick slices. With beef there nearly always goes Yorkshire pudding, which is a sort of crisp pancake made of milk, flour and eggs and which is delicious when sodden with gravy. In some parts of the country suet pudding is eaten with roast beef instead of Yorkshire pudding. Sometimes instead of roasted fresh beef there is boiled salt beef, which is always eaten with suet dumplings and carrots or turnips.
[…]
In the second half of the midday meal we come upon one of the greatest glories of British cookery – its puddings. The number of these is so enormous that it would be impossible to give an exhaustive list, but, putting aside stewed fruits, British puddings can be classified under three main heads: suet puddings, pies and tarts, and milk puddings.
[…]
If the midday meal ends with cheese, that cheese will probably be foreign. Some of the cheeses native to Britain are very good, but they are not produced in large quantities and are mostly consumed locally. The best of them is Stilton, a cheese rather the same kind as Roquefort or Gorgonzola, but stronger-tasting and closer in the grain. Wensleydale, a similar but milder cheese, is also very good.
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)
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October 31, 2023
Why Vampires Hate Garlic – A Transylvanian Recipe from 1580
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 19 Oct 2021
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October 1, 2023
QotD: Curry
Of course for me, that was sweaty forehead, and under my eyes beading with it, burning lips and the thought that I ought to put a roll of toilet paper in the freezer for later.
In no small part … it is what you are used to. The chili pepper was native to Mexico. It’s not something the Indians were used to … once. But they have made it their own, and added their regional variant to it, making the food they add this foreign spice to very much characteristic of their culture and their cuisine. To them it very much part of what they are. Oddly, it seems expat Indians end up eating even hotter curries than those eaten in the country — fascinating in itself.
This is something millions of non-Indian folk across the world appreciate too. Now-a-days you’ll find many families who are neither culturally nor genetically Indian who have grown up eating curries. Many of them will be very knowledgeable about what a good curry ought to be, and some of them will even prepare it with strict adherence to the methods that good cooks in the Indian subcontinent use, and go to great lengths to get the right ingredients.
Of course: if we’re going to get puerile and talk “cultural appropriation” – it’s worth reminding people that the key ingredient came from Mexico. And, if you bother to start researching many of the other much beloved ingredients – they, as often as not had their origins elsewhere. This is as much part of being human as following these silly fads is. Whenever you look at any so-called cultural appropriation, you’ll find the xyz people actually adopted chunks of that culture from … someone else, and changed it a little to suit themselves. That’s as natural to humans as farting. Some people may do it less than others, but we all do it.
Curry and the world-wide spread of curries, has mostly been a win for the species, outside of the ill-judged dodgy vindaloo eaten after sixteen pints of lager.
Dave Freer, “Curry”, Mad Genius Club, 2019-08-26.
August 26, 2023
QotD: The psychological value of “making”
This makes perfect sense, of course: I don’t have a deep and intimate knowledge of these things because I don’t need one. Still, though, it’s important to have a certain very basic familiarity with how the things around you work — enough, say, to know what to Google when something breaks and how to put the results into practice, or to turn fifteen feet of arching blackberry cane into an actual bush — because it gives you power over your world. The particular powers don’t really matter (it’s easy enough to pay someone else to fix your plumbing or grow your berries); the key is the patterns of thought they engender. There are, for example, apparently some enormous number of people who don’t change the batteries in their beeping smoke detectors. I have no idea whether it’s drug-induced apathy, ignorance of how things work (in the same way that drilling a hole in your wall to hang something seems scary if you don’t know that your wall is
a liejust painted drywall in front of empty space between the studs), or simply a pathological lack of personal agency, but it’s hard to believe you can change anything dissatisfactory about your life if you can’t change a 9V battery.Making and doing things, even when you don’t have to, is practice in believing that you can change your own world. It’s weightlifting for agency. You can outsource the making of your physical world, but social worlds — the arrangement of your family life, your personal relationships, the organizations and institutions you’re involved in — must be created by the participants themselves. A good society would be one where the default “builder-grade” scripts lead to human flourishing, but unfortunately that isn’t ours, so you have to be able to decide on your own changes. Start practicing now: find one little thing about your physical environment that annoys you and fix it. Put the new toilet paper roll actually on the holder. Replace the burned-out lightbulb. Hang the artwork that’s listing drunkenly against the wall. Pull some weeds. And then, once you’ve warmed up a little bit, go and make something new.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.
1. They’re oak dining chairs, probably (judging by the construction) about a hundred years old, and they looked a lot better on Facebook Marketplace than in real life. When I showed up to buy them, the sellers turned out to be an elderly couple moving to assisted living in six hours; they admired my baby and showed me pictures of their grandchildren and explained they had inherited the chairs from the wife’s mother, who in turn had gotten them from her friend’s mother, and by this point I couldn’t really say “yeah I can tell” and leave, so home they came. When I took apart the seats to recover them I discovered the original horsehair padding and some extremely questionable techniques applied over the years, but anyway now my chairs have eight-way hand-tied springs and I have some new calluses.
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July 24, 2023
Flattering our modern selves by throwing shade at our ancestors
David Friedman has encountered a lot of “just so stories” about the customs and practices of earlier cultures and points out that a lot of them are derived from ignorance and arrogance in roughly equal proportion:
My favorite example is the Columbus myth, the idea that the people who argued against Columbus were ignorant flat-earthers who thought his ships would sail off the edge. That is almost the precise opposite of the truth. By the time Columbus set off, a spherical Earth had been the accepted scientific view for well over a thousand years. Columbus’s contemporaries not only knew that the Earth was round, they knew how big around it was, that having been calculated by Eratosthenes in the third century B.C.
By the fifteenth century they also had a reasonably accurate estimate of the width of Asia. Subtracting the one number from the other they could calculate the distance from where Columbus was starting to where Columbus claimed to be going and correctly conclude that it was much farther than his ships could go before running out of food and water. The scientific ignorance was on the side of Columbus and those who believed him; he was claiming a much smaller circumference for the Earth and a much larger width of Asia, hence a much shorter distance from Spain to the far end of Asia. We will probably never know whether he believed his own numbers or was deliberately misrepresenting the geographical facts in order to get funding for his trip in the hope that he would find land somewhere between Spain and Japan, as in fact he did.1
Another example of the same pattern shows up in discussions of medieval cooking, one of my hobbies. Quite a lot of people believe that medieval cooks over spiced their food in order to hide the taste of spoiled meat. A few minutes of thought should be enough to see the consequences for a cook of routinely giving his employer and the employer’s guests food poisoning. Also that, with meat available on the hoof, there was no need to keep it until it spoiled and that it made little sense to save on meat, a local product, at the cost of spices that had to be transported over thousands of miles.
I like to ask people who claim the food was overspiced how they know, given that medieval European recipes almost never give quantities. One possible source for the belief — the overspicing, not the reason for it — is a passage in the introduction to Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books, a collection published by the Early English Text Society.
Our forefathers, possibly from having stronger stomachs, fortified by outdoor life, evidently liked their dishes strongly seasoned and piquant, as the Cinnamon Soup on p. 59 shews. Pepper, Ginger, Cloves, Garlic, Cinnamon, Galingale, Vinegar, Verjuice, and Wine, appear constantly in dishes where we should little expect them; and even Ale was frequently used in Cookery.
“The cinnamon soup on p. 59” is not a recipe but an entry in a menu, so what the editor is complaining about is not the amount of cinnamon but the fact that it is there at all, and similarly for the rest of his list. That tells us more about English cooking of the 19th century than that of the 15th.
As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that medieval food was overspiced, only that they used spices in different ways than modern European cuisine. I have twice come across evidence on the question. There is a recipe for Hippocras, a spiced wine, in Le Menagier de Paris, a household manual dated to 1490. It is one of the rare recipes with quantities, sugar and spices by the ounce, wine by “quarts of Paris measure”. When I first made it I found the result too sweet and too highly spiced, so cut sugar and spice in half to fit my taste.
Many years later, when I mentioned the recipe in an online discussion, someone asked me whether I had checked the units. I had not, just assumed that a quart was a quart and an ounce an ounce. I was wrong — the period ounce was about an ounce but the quart by Paris measure was about twice our quart. In adjusting the recipe to my taste, I had gotten back to about the original proportions.
1. There is disputed evidence that he visited Iceland and might have heard about the existence of North America there, also speculation that he might have gotten the information from European fishermen. There were European ships harvesting Cod off what is now Newfoundland not long after Columbus, but earlier dates are speculative.
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July 6, 2023
The Devilish History of Deviled Eggs
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 4 Apr 2023
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June 10, 2023
Feeding a Greek Hoplite – Ancient Rations
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 6 Jun 2023
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