Tasting History: Explore the Past Through 4,000 Years of Recipes by Max Miller, with Ann Volkwein | 2023 | Simon Element | Hardcover $ 30
What began as a passion project when Max Miller was furloughed during the pandemic has become a viral YouTube sensation. The Tasting History with Max Miller channel has thrilled food enthusiasts and history buffs alike as Miller recreates a dish from the past, often using historical recipes from vintage texts, but updated for modern kitchens as he tells stories behind the cuisine and culture. From ancient Rome to Ming China to medieval Europe and beyond, Miller has collected the best-loved recipes from around the world and has shared them with his fans. Including the original recipe and Miller’s modern recreation, this cookbook is a must-have for any avid cook or history fan looking to experience delicious recipes from the past.
If you haven’t seen Tasting History on YouTube, this might seem like just any other foodie history book. But in video form, Max Miller’s culinary adventures are just fun to watch and have attracted a devoted audience of people who enjoy the magic combination of well-researched historical facts shared as entertaining stories, charming humor, professional editing, and occasionally all-too-relatable kitchen struggles. This book feels like a pretty good extension of all that, to me.
In terms of history, each recipe includes a short introductory section with info about the context in which the recipe was developed. These sections are interesting and in a couple of cases even a little funny, but they aren’t super extensive either; this really is a cooking book wrapped up with a healthy dose of history, not a history book with incidental recipes.
Let’s talk about the actual recipes. Fair warning! Some of them take quite a bit of time (e.g. brewing mead), while others include specialty ingredients (e.g. long pepper). And some of the videos on the author’s channel are absolutely wild stunts, like stitching together a chicken and a pig for cockentrice or fermenting fish for garum — neither of which are included in this cookbook, thankfully. What I’m trying to say is that this is not a cookbook for folks who are just looking for straightforward weekday dinners. But for the most part, any halfway experienced home cook should be able to make most of the selections in this book in their own kitchens within a few hours at most and with ingredients from a decently stocked grocery store.
Over the past year, I made twelve recipes from Tasting History. Most of them turned out fine, even when not particularly photogenic; the exceptions were the potage d’onions au lait (onion soup with milk), in which the milk curdled in both of two attempts, and the precedella (pretzel cookies), which came out just looking like a mess because folding dough ropes is hard but also tasting too bland to make them worth trying again.
Don’t let my failures deter you, though. I really enjoyed and would certainly recommend a few other recipes, including the pumpkin tourte (pumpkin cheesecake), everlasting syllabub (dairy pudding), nyumen (noodle soup), epityrum (olive tapenade), and even the farts of Portingale (meatballs; and yes, they’re really called farts). I think the most unusual recipe on my list was the patina de piris, which was kind of like a savory-ish yet sweet-ish custard made with pears and fish sauce… which was good, actually, but also made my tastebuds sort of short circuit like “?????”
I also want to mention that the book has some lovely visual elements, including both photographs of food and historical reference images like hieroglyphics. It also has a really good section on some of the more obscure ingredients and optional substitutions.
I can confidently recommend this book to anyone else who is fascinated by culinary history, and especially home cooks who’ve always wanted to taste the foods of our distant ancestors but who haven’t been able to translate cryptic old recipes into modern kitchen language for themselves.
If you would like to see a few photos from my adventure through this book and several others, check out my Cookbook Cook-Thru Project Page:
If you want to follow along in my continued culinary experiments, please feel free to visit my foodie Instagram:
Links:
- Official website for Tasting History
- Tasting History with Max Miller on YouTube
- Author interview with Eater
- Review at Publishers Weekly
Publication information: Miller, Max. Tasting history: Explore the past through 4,000 years of recipes. New York, NY: Simon Element, 2023. Print.
Source: Personal library.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
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