Eats History

There is a dessert from the 1990s that has absolutely no business being as good as it is. Chocolate pudding, crushed Oreos, Cool Whip and gummy worms in a clear plastic cup. And I think about it more than I would like to admit.

The Cup of Dirt has a more documented origin than most people expect for something that feels like it was invented by a parent who ran out of ideas on a Saturday afternoon. The earliest printed recipe appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 1988, submitted by a reader as Kansas Dirt Cake. It spread through the Midwest the way all great American potluck food spreads, through community cookbooks and church recipe cards and handwritten index cards passed between neighbours. Then in 1993 Jell-O ran a national print campaign officially naming it Dirt Cups with the tagline play in the dirt with your kids, and that was it. A generation of American children had a named dessert and a reason to order it at every TGI Fridays from that point forward.

I have a very specific memory of sitting in a TGI Fridays booth in the early 2000s, sticky laminated menu, Jack Daniels glazed chicken, and ordering the Cup of Dirt for dessert because it was always the right answer. It arrived in a clear plastic cup with the layers visible through the side and a gummy worm hanging over the edge like it was trying to escape. I made it this week for the first time in probably twenty years, and the first bite produced a memory so specific I could see the booth. That is what this dessert does.

Is it healthy? Genuinely no. Is it nostalgic and an awesome little treat that still makes people unreasonably happy? Completely yes.

I rated it 8.3 out of 10 and I stand by that.

Did you grow up eating Cup of Dirt? And does anyone else have a very specific restaurant memory attached to this dessert?

Full Recipe: eatshistory.com/cup-of-dirt-recipe-the-nostalgic..…

1 day ago | [YT] | 1,146

Eats History

The most recognised drink in modern history was invented by a wounded Civil War veteran trying to cure his own morphine addiction. Did you know he died broke, still addicted, having sold the formula for three hundred dollars?

In April 1865, Confederate Lieutenant Colonel John Stith Pemberton took a saber to the chest at the Battle of Columbus, the last major land battle of the Civil War, fought days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Doctors gave him morphine. He never stopped needing it. Morphine addiction among Civil War veterans was so widespread it was called the army disease. Pemberton was one of hundreds of thousands of men who came home from the war dependent on the drug that had kept them alive in field hospitals across the South.

He spent the next twenty years trying to fix himself. He was a trained pharmacist and chemist, not a con man, and he approached the problem seriously. He tried toxic plant extracts. He tried coca wines. He eventually landed on a preparation of coca leaves, caffeine-containing kola nuts and carbonated water, marketed as a nerve tonic, headache remedy and, with spectacular irony, a cure for morphine addiction. When Atlanta passed prohibition legislation in 1886 and his wine-based version became illegal, he stripped out the alcohol and reformulated it.
His bookkeeper Frank Robinson named it Coca Cola and designed the cursive logo still on every can today.

First year sales were fifty dollars against seventy dollars in costs. Pemberton thought it was a failure. Sick, broke and feeding an expensive addiction, he sold the formula to an Atlanta pharmacist named Asa Candler for three hundred dollars, telling anyone who would listen that he believed it would someday be a national drink. He sold it anyway. He died four months later from stomach cancer, poor and still addicted. His son Charles, who he had put in charge of production, died six years later, found in a coma with opium beside him.

Candler turned three hundred dollars into one of the most valuable brands in human history. Pemberton is buried in Columbus Georgia, the same city where the saber wound started everything.

I find this one of the most tragic and extraordinary stories in food history. The man who accidentally invented something worth eighty billion dollars a year died broke in a rented room, still chasing the cure he never found...

-Donnie

Sources: Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It (Basic Books, 2000)
Constance L. Hays, The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company (Random House, 2004)

eatshistory.com

6 days ago | [YT] | 1,842

Eats History

Frank Sinatra had his favourite restaurant fly food to whatever city he was performing in. One of his favorite desserts, which he wanted flown across the country, was a lemon ricotta torte.

Patsy's Italian Restaurant on West 56th Street in Manhattan was Frank Sinatra's home away from home for over fifty years. He had his own table upstairs. He ate there more than a thousand times. He begged the founder to open a second location in Miami Beach and was refused every single time. When his career was collapsing in the early 1950s and he found himself alone on Thanksgiving with nowhere to go, Patsy Scognamillo opened his closed restaurant on a holiday, gathered his entire family and staff on a day's notice, and made sure Frank did not sit alone. Sinatra never forgot it. He spent the next four decades sending everyone he knew through that door.

The meal almost always ended the same way. Veal Milanese pounded paper thin and fried extra crispy, arugula salad alongside, Jack Daniel's throughout, and for dessert, the lemon ricotta torte. Three pounds of whole-milk ricotta, sugar, eggs, butter, and enough lemon to make it sing, baked slowly on the bottom rack of the oven until set. Light enough to finish after a full Italian dinner. Good enough that Sinatra wanted it flown to him when he was on the road.

The recipe is published in the Patsy's Cookbook by Sal Scognamillo, the founder's grandson, with a foreword written by Nancy Sinatra confirming everything. It is still served every December 12th at Patsy's, Sinatra's birthday, alongside his other favourites, as a tribute to the man who made the restaurant famous.

I made it this week scaled down to a 7-inch pan. It tastes exactly like a lemon cheesecake made by someone who grew up in a Neapolitan kitchen and knew what they were doing. I rated it 8.6 out of 10 and I would make it again without hesitation.
Full history and full recipe on the blog now!

eatshistory.com/frank-sinatras-lemon-ricotta.../

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,353

Eats History

This 13th-Century meal helped conquer twelve million square miles.

The Mongol army had no supply line. No wagons of bread. No foraging parties. No cooks. Every single soldier carried his own food in a small leather pouch hanging from his saddle. That food was borts, strips of lean meat with every trace of fat removed, hung in the shade for a month in the cold dry Mongolian air until they were so desiccated they could be snapped like wood. Then ground into a rough powder. Then dissolved in boiling water in the field and drunk as a thin, intensely protein-rich broth in twenty minutes before the army was moving again.

Friar William of Rubruck, a Flemish monk who travelled to the Mongol court in 1253 and left one of the most detailed eyewitness accounts of Mongol life ever written, documented that the Mongols were most careful not to drink pure water. Instead they drank suutei tsai, salted milk tea brewed in an iron pot over a small fire, made from whole milk, strong green tea, salt and toasted millet. It is savoury, warming, slightly earthy, and completely unlike anything in the Western tea tradition. It is also genuinely good once you adjust your expectations away from sweetness.

Marco Polo documented that a Mongol cavalryman could go ten days without cooking food. The borts and the suutei tsai are the reason. While medieval European armies were hauling supply wagons across muddy roads and stopping to forage, the greatest military force in human history was dissolving powder in hot water and covering sixty miles a day.

I made both this week. The borts with no salt and no seasoning, exactly as documented, which produces something that makes complete sense as a survival ration and very little sense as a voluntary meal in the 21st century. The suutei tsai genuinely surprised me. Warming and savoury and I kept thinking it would be even better with a small amount of honey, which I am aware marks me clearly as a person of the wrong century. I rated the full spread 3.5 out of 10 as a meal for a city dweller and a solid 9 out of 10 as a meal for someone trying to conquer Eurasia.

Full history and full recipe on the blog:

eatshistory.com/feeding-a-mongolian-warrior.../

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,672

Eats History

We love to talk about the Ancient Roman feasts. The stuffed dormice and the roasted peacocks drizzled in the exotic sauces. But what about the other 98% of the population?

This is puls, essentially porridge. Farro grains cooked in water, seasoned with salt, eaten twice a day by the soldiers who marched the empire's borders, the slaves who built its infrastructure, and the urban poor who received their grain from the state dole and cooked it into the only thing they had the means to make. For the first three centuries of Roman civilisation, Pliny the Elder noted, Romans ate essentially nothing else. They even called themselves the "pultiphagonists", quite literally the porridge eaters.

Most Roman recipes we have comes from Apicius, a cookbook compiled for the Roman elite in the 4th or 5th century AD. The stuffed dormice and the elaborate fish sauces and the roasted peacock are real and documented and genuinely fascinating. They are also completely unrepresentative of how the vast majority of Romans actually ate. The Roman soldier marching twenty miles a day in full armour was not eating stuffed dormice. He was eating puls from a camp pot with a bit of olive oil, bread, and hard cheese if he was lucky.

Cato the Elder documented puls in the 2nd century BC in De Agri Cultura, the same agricultural manual that gave us the libum recipe. He treats it with the matter-of-factness of someone describing something so ordinary it barely needs explaining. Which is exactly what it was. The foundational food of one of the most consequential civilisations in human history was a grain porridge that any peasant could make from the contents of a field.

I made it this week with farro, the emmer wheat the Romans would have used, cooked in water and milk and served two ways. The sweet version with honey, dried dates, toasted walnuts and pomegranate. The savory version with olive oil, Pecorino Romano and black pepper. Both are historically grounded. Both are genuinely good. I rated it 7.5 out of 10 and I think the savory version would score higher if I made it again.

Side note, this will be in my Ancient Roman cookbook, releasing in early 2027 🙂

Full Recipe: eatshistory.com/ancient-roman-puls-recipe-the.../

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1,330

Eats History

Did you know your modern frozen dessert has its origins from Ancient Persia?

This is a Sharbat-e Sekanjabin recipe from 1025 AD. It's a simple syrup made from cooking down honey, vinegar, and mint and pouring over shaved or cubed ice (sort of like an ancient snowcone!!!)

What I find so fascinating about this dish is that logistically it required an entire supply chain network of servents and pack animals to carry down fresh snow from the Alborz mountains, and they would pack them into royal ice houses called Yakhchāl.

For the ancient world, this was a logistical marvel. What's even cooler is that this dish is the original root word for Persian sharbat, later Turkish sherbet, English sherbert, and French/Italian sorbet. So basically, this is the root dish of our love of frozen desserts!

It's sweet, tangy, floral, and healthy. In my opinion perfect for a hot day later this spring/summer.

Recipe: eatshistory.com/sharbat-e-sekanjabin-recipe-the...…

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 999

Eats History

I took one day off coffee this week to detox and spent most of it with a headache, wondering why I do this to myself. Then I went down a rabbit hole. It turns out governments have been trying to take coffee away from people for over 500 years, and every single one of them failed.

In 1511 the Governor of Mecca, Khair Beg, banned coffee on the grounds that it was causing people to gather in coffeehouses, talk too freely, and think too critically about those in power. He was not wrong about what was happening in the coffeehouses. He was just wrong about being able to stop it. The ban was overturned within the year when the Sultan of Cairo heard about it, promptly declared coffee acceptable under Islamic law, and had Khair Beg removed from his position. Coffee won that round.

Next we go back to 1675, when King Charles II of England issued a proclamation banning coffeehouses for exactly the same reason. They were places where men of all classes sat together, read pamphlets, argued about politics, and said things about the government that the government did not appreciate. The ban was supposed to take effect on January 10th. By January 8th the public backlash was so severe that Charles reversed it entirely before it could be enforced. Coffee won that round too.

In 1777 Frederick the Great of Prussia banned coffee for a different reason entirely. It was not radical thinking he was worried about, it was beer sales. Prussians were spending money on coffee instead of beer and Frederick considered this an economic and cultural problem. He published a manifesto arguing that beer was the backbone of Prussian society and that soldiers and working people had been raised on beer and had no business switching to coffee. His solution was to require a government licence to roast coffee beans and to employ coffee smellers, actual official government employees whose job was to walk the streets and report anyone illegally roasting coffee by the smell. Coffee won that round decisively and the coffee smellers became one of history's more undignified government positions.

The pattern is consistent across 500 years and multiple continents. Every government that tried to take coffee away from its people discovered the same thing.

People really, really, really do not want to give up their coffee. A lesson I am personally relearning this week via headache. I mean, what would your reaction be if the president outright banned your morning joe?

-Donnie

eatshistory.com

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1,455

Eats History

Would you try a banquet platter from Cleopatra's Egypt?

While we don't have direct written recipes or accounts of what Cleopatra enjoyed directly in Ptolemaic Egypt, we can use pieces from historical writers like Atheneus, the Roman gastronome Apicius, and Egyptian archaeology to piece together an acceptable meal for the Queen of the Nile.

The plate features spiced lamb meatballs with pomegranate seeds, emmer wheat flatbread, goat cheese with honey, olives, dolma, stuffed dates (dulcia domestica), and fresh herbs.

Until we finally get the time machine, we don't know firsthand what Cleopatra ate in her Alexandrian palace, but I'd like to think this banquet platter comes as close as possible...

Full Recipe: eatshistory.com/feasting-like-cleopatra-an.../

-Donnie

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1,100

Eats History

I’ll be filming A TON of Ancient Roman Recipes this next month, so I decided to build out a little studio for it!

Got some marble, terracotta pottery, a few statues, and a handful of other props that will hopefully set the period properly on these recipe videos!

(Also, if you're new here, welcome! Every week, I cook and rate a handful of dishes from history out of 10, giving you both the backstory and origins of the recipe, plus if you want to try it out yourself, every recipe is posted on my blog)

eatshistory.com/

I have a hardcover cookbook in the works in Ancient Roman cuisine, set to release in early 2027. Stay tuned for future updates as we get closer to the presale date :)

-Donnie

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 944

Eats History

I made WWII American Chocolate earlier today, and it's safe to say I can't remake the German version. Why?

Well, there was a secret ingredient in specific German rations that fueled the all-day and all-night campaigns of the Blitz. And well, it's not legal...

You probably saw that earlier today, I posted about the American D-Ration bar, the Hershey's chocolate deliberately engineered to taste terrible so soldiers would not eat it recreationally. Several of you immediately asked the same question in the comments: what were the Germans eating? The answer is considerably more interesting and considerably more alarming than a bad chocolate bar.

In 1938 the Berlin pharmaceutical company Temmler patented a stimulant tablet under the brand name Pervitin and began marketing it to the German public as an energy booster and mood enhancer. It was sold in pharmacies without a prescription. It was advertised on billboards across Berlin. You could buy boxed chocolates containing it as a gift. It was, in the words of the TIME magazine investigation of the military archives, enormously popular within months of its release. Temmler's factory was eventually pressing 833,000 tablets per day.

The German military took notice. A military doctor named Otto Ranke ran experiments on 90 university students and concluded that the stimulant could help Germany win the war. In April 1940, ahead of the invasion of France, a stimulant decree was issued distributing more than 35 million tablets to approximately 3 million Wehrmacht soldiers, sailors and pilots within ten to twelve weeks. According to British War Office records cited by the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, those soldiers then marched and fought for ten consecutive days straight, covering an average of 22 miles per day through the Ardennes, trapping the entire British army on the beaches of Dunkirk in one of the most decisive military operations of the war.
The tablets were given nicknames by the troops: Stuka-Tabletten after the dive bomber, Hermann-Göring-Pillen as a reference to the Luftwaffe commander's widely known personal habits, and Panzerschokolade, tanker's chocolate, because the stimulant was also distributed to tank crews in actual chocolate bar form. Pilots received theirs under the name Fliegerschokolade, flyer's chocolate.

The side effects were severe. Withdrawal was brutal. Soldiers reported being terrified after extended use that they would never be able to sleep again. By 1941, the German military had restricted distribution due to addiction concerns and the stimulants required a prescription. The restrictions were widely ignored. The food and pharmaceutical historian Norman Ohler documented the full story in his 2015 book Blitzed, drawing on German military archives that had not been thoroughly examined before. It is one of the more extraordinary pieces of WWII history that most people have never encountered.

To bring this back to food history: while both sides were eating chocolate on the Western Front, only one side had engineered theirs to be unpleasant to prevent overconsumption. The other had engineered theirs to be a delivery vehicle for something considerably more motivating than calories. Hard drugs!

-Donnie

eatshistory.com

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 1,181