Tasting History's Max Miller on food & history

On tonight’s show, I do something a little different and bring on Tasting History’s Max Miller for a live conversation about food, history, and the weird ways the two overlap.We start with how he built the channel, how The Great British Bake Off helped pull him into baking, and how that eventually turned into a career recreating recipes from centuries or even millennia ago. From there we get into his trips with fans to Jordan and Egypt, the history he experiences through travel, and why food ends up being one of the best ways to understand how people actually lived.Then the conversation gets into the really fun part: the food itself. We talk about garum, the ancient fermented fish sauce that sat at the center of Roman cooking, along with some of the grosser things he’s made, including jellyfish and boiled leather. We get into historic pumpkin cheesecake, long pepper, why old recipes are maddeningly vague, and how so much of pre-modern cooking was written by and for people who already knew what they were doing. That leads into a broader discussion of forgotten dishes, early chili, Welsh rarebit, and the challenge of figuring out what people in places like ancient Babylon or even prehistoric Europe were actually eating.The last part of the interview turns into a really interesting conversation about how taste changes over time. We talk about pastry “coffins” used for preservation, misconceptions people have about ancient food, the infamous Japanese ration balls that clearly did not impress him, and why some cultures treated recipes almost like state secrets. Then we get into something I always love: the way ingredients, technique, flour, sugar, pizza, chocolate, and even measuring cups all evolve over time. It ends up being a smart, funny conversation about history, but also about how much of what we think of as timeless food is actually the product of constant change.This was a really fun interview. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. JOHN This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aravosis.substack.com/subscribe