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

51 minutes ago | [YT] | 87

Eats History

The United States Army once paid Hershey's to make the worst chocolate bar in history, and you can try it at home!

It was 1937 and Captain Paul Logan of the US Army Quartermaster General's office sat down with Hershey's chief chemist Sam Hinkle and gave him one of the strangest product briefs in the history of food manufacturing. He needed a chocolate bar that weighed four ounces, could withstand extreme heat without melting, delivered enough calories to keep a soldier alive in an emergency, and tasted, in Logan's exact words, only a little better than a boiled potato.

He did not want it to taste good. If it tasted good soldiers would eat it whenever they felt like it and have nothing left when they actually needed it. The solution was to engineer the palatability out of it deliberately. Make it just edible enough that a starving man would eat it. Make it just unpleasant enough that no one would eat it for fun.

Hinkle got to work. He cut the sugar dramatically. He increased the bitter chocolate liquor. He added oat flour, which created a dry, chalky, unpleasant texture. The resulting mixture was so thick and stiff that it could not be poured into molds at all. Every single bar had to be pressed in by hand. Before the war ended Hershey's had made more than three billion of them.

When American GIs discovered that European civilians, who had never encountered the D ration bar and had no established low expectations of it, would accept a piece of Hershey's military chocolate with genuine enthusiasm, some soldiers began trading their bars to unsuspecting locals in exchange for cigarettes, food and goodwill, then watching the civilian take their first bite with a mixture of guilt and private amusement.

I made my own version at home and pressed it into an ice cube tray. It was extremely hard to bite into. The taste was actually not absolutely atrocious. I rated it 3.9 out of 10. Check out the full blog and recipe below 🙂

eatshistory.com/wwii-d-ration-chocolate-bar.../

5 hours ago | [YT] | 336

Eats History

For 400 years, the most prestigious dish you could serve at a medieval feast was a bowl of white slop.

A pale, thick porridge of rice dissolved in almond milk with shredded chicken stirred through, garnished with blanched almonds. They called it blancmange, which means white food in Old French, and they were not being ironic. The whiteness was the entire point. At the court of King Richard II, in the kitchens of bishops and great lords, on the tables of the wealthiest people in medieval Europe, this was the dish that said you had made it.

The recipe I made this week comes directly from the Forme of Cury, the oldest cookbook written in English, compiled in 1390 by the master cooks of King Richard II. The original instruction is specific: boil the rice in almond milk until they completely burst apart. Not until they are tender. Not until they are soft. Until they dissolve entirely into the liquid and there is no rice left, only a thick, pale, starchy mass. Then shred the chicken into it. Add lard. Garnish with toasted almonds. Serve it at the feast.

Medieval blancmange was not originally an English or French dish at all. It came from the Islamic culinary tradition, where rice cooked in almond milk with chicken appeared in Arabic cookbooks centuries before any European version. It travelled into European cooking through Sicily and through the Crusades, was adopted wholesale by the French court, and the English adopted it from the French along with most of the rest of their aristocratic food culture.

It does not taste as good as it looks in historical context. I rated it a 4.2 out of 10 and I stand by that. But making it connected me to a royal kitchen in 1390 in a way that made the eating almost beside the point.

The full history including where this dish went over the next 600 years, how a savoury medieval chicken and rice porridge became the wobbly sweet dessert mold we still call blancmange today, and the complete recipe are on the blog now:

eatshistory.com/medieval-blancmange-recipe-the.../

1 day ago | [YT] | 736

Eats History

Fun morning talking all things food history and the channel on Fox 32 Chicago!

PS- I’ll be visiting for the first time next month, what are some of the must have traditional dishes/restaurants I need on my list? 🙂

-Donnie

eatshistory.com

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2 days ago | [YT] | 451

Eats History

Two thousand years ago, Roman families had a specific cake they baked to keep their household gods happy. It was made from cheese, flour, egg and honey. It was left at a small shrine in the home, often in the kitchen or the atrium, on a bed of bay leaves. The gods got their portion and the family ate the rest.

The cake is called Libum and the recipe comes directly from Marcus Porcius Cato, known as Cato the Elder, a Roman statesman and writer of the 2nd century BC who included it in his agricultural manual De Agri Cultura. The original Latin reads: "Libum hoc modo facito. Make libum by this method. Break up two pounds of cheese well in a mortar. Mix in a pound of wheat flour, or if you want it more delicate, half a pound of fine flour. Add one egg and mix together well. Make into a loaf, place bay leaves beneath it, and cook slowly on a hot hearth under an earthen pot." It is one of the oldest surviving recipes in Western culinary history and it is genuinely, surprisingly good.

The household gods Libum was made for were called the Lares and Penates. The Lares were guardians of the family and the home. The Penates were specifically the gods of the pantry and storeroom, the gods of food abundance. Roman families kept small shrines called lararia in their homes, usually in the kitchen or the entrance hall, where offerings were made regularly. The Kalends, Nones, and Ides of each month were particularly sacred to the Lares. On those days the shrine was decorated with garlands, and simple offerings including food, incense and wine were left for the gods. Libum, along with grain, grapes and wine, was among the most common food offerings. The paterfamilias, the head of the household, served as the family's priest for these domestic rites.

So what you had was essentially a family sitting down together to eat the same thing they had just offered to the divine, in a ritual of gratitude and communal participation that was deeply ordinary and deeply meaningful at the same time. You baked a cake. You thanked whatever you believed was watching over your home. You ate together. The gods of the pantry were happy because the pantry was full. You were happy because there was cake.

Two thousand years later, I am not sure we have improved on this as a concept. Maybe we should take some time to show gratitude before diving into our sweet treats 😉

Full Recipe: eatshistory.com/libum-ancient-roman-cheesecake/

-Donnie

2 days ago | [YT] | 1,044

Eats History

He kept six nations, three religions, and two alphabets together for 35 years. He defied Stalin to his face. He had Sophia Loren cook pasta for him on his private yacht. And his favourite dish was a Croatian cheese pastry from the village where he grew up.

Josip Broz Tito is one of the most interesting figures of the 20th century. Born in 1892 to a peasant family in the Zagorje region of northern Croatia, he fought in two World Wars, survived Stalin's purges when almost everyone around him was executed, led the most effective guerrilla resistance movement in occupied Europe, built a communist state that refused to take orders from Moscow, and then co-founded a third global bloc of nations that refused to take orders from anyone. When he died in 1980 representatives from 128 countries came to his funeral including four kings, six princes, 31 presidents and 22 prime ministers. It remains one of the most attended state funerals in history.

In 1948 Stalin attempted to bring Yugoslavia into line as a Soviet satellite. Tito refused. He expelled Soviet advisers, purged Soviet sympathisers from his own party, and reportedly sent Stalin a letter warning that if he did not stop sending assassins, Tito would send one of his own to Moscow and would not need to send a second. He then declined to align with the West either, which the Americans had assumed would be the obvious next step. He played both superpowers against each other for thirty years and used the leverage to give Yugoslavians a standard of living, freedom of movement, and access to Western goods that no other communist country in Europe could match.

His favourite dish, documented in his personal cookbook compiled by Anja Drulović and corroborated by his longtime butler Joze Oseli, was Zagorski Štrukli. A pulled dough filled with fresh cottage cheese and sour cream, rolled into a log, baked in cream until puffed and deeply golden. The dish of the Zagorje farmhouses where he grew up.

I made it. It is an 8.1 out of 10, and I think a sweet version with fruit would be even better. The full history of Tito and the full recipe are on the blog now.

eatshistory.com/zagorski-strukli-recipe-eating.../

3 days ago | [YT] | 1,126

Eats History

I received a message from a Cambodian follower asking me to cover Beef Lok Lak and the story of what happened to Cambodia in the 1970s. This is that post. It is not an easy one. I hope you will read it.

Beef Lok Lak is Cambodia's most beloved dish. A stir-fried beef salad over fresh lettuce, tomato and cucumber, with steamed jasmine rice and a lime and Kampot black pepper dipping sauce that is unlike anything else in Southeast Asian cooking. It is a dish that documents centuries of history in a single plate. Chinese stir-fry technique, ancient Khmer flavour tradition, French colonial ingredients, all of it layered into something that is completely and unmistakably Cambodian.
The Kampot pepper that makes the dipping sauce what it is comes from one of the world's most celebrated pepper-growing regions. The Khmer Rouge converted the Kampot pepper fields to rice paddies between 1975 and 1979. The fields were nearly wiped out entirely. So was almost everything else.

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and ordered two million people to leave the city immediately. What followed was four years in which somewhere between 1.5 and 3 million Cambodians were killed, roughly a quarter to a third of the entire population. Cities were emptied. Money was abolished. Religion was banned. The educated class was systematically executed. The daily food ration in the worst periods was two ladles of rice gruel. People died of starvation while working the rice fields. The restaurants of Phnom Penh closed. The kitchens went dark. The recipes survived only inside the people who remembered them.

Survivors describe thinking about food constantly during those four years. Specific dishes. Their mothers' cooking. Lok Lak. Fish amok. Nom banh chok. Holding onto the memory of a meal was a way of holding onto an identity that the Khmer Rouge was trying to erase. You cannot eat memory. But you can refuse to let it go.
Vietnam liberated Cambodia in January 1979. What came back first, as it almost always does, was food. Markets re-established within days. Women set up cooking fires in the streets and made the dishes they had been forbidden to cook for four years. The Kampot pepper farmers began the slow work of replanting. That recovery took decades and is still ongoing. Kampot pepper now holds Protected Geographical Indication status, the same international recognition given to Champagne and Parmigiano-Reggiano. It is sold in specialty food shops from London to New York. The recipe for Lok Lak, which was never written down in any official record, came back to the table carried by the people who had survived.

All ad revenue from this video is being donated to Hope for Cambodian Children at hopeforcambodianchildren.org, an organisation working to provide education and support to children and families in Cambodia still living with the intergenerational consequences of what happened.

The full history and the full Beef Lok Lak recipe are on the blog now.

eatshistory.com/beef-lok-lak-recipe-the-horrors...…

5 days ago | [YT] | 1,548

Eats History

The samosa is one of the most eaten street foods on the planet. This is a 500-year-old recipe for it, written in Persian in a manuscript sitting in the British Museum.
The manuscript is called the Ni'matnama, the Book of Delights, written between 1501 and 1510 for the Sultan of Mandu in central India.

It passed through the hands of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, Tipu Sultan of Mysore, and the British East India Company before ending up in what is now the British Museum, where it has sat ever since.

The samosa recipe inside calls for roasted aubergine (eggplant) pulp, dried ginger, and lamb cooked completely dry with onion and garlic, all fried in ghee. No potatoes, no chilli. Both arrived in India after this manuscript was written.

This is the samosa before it became street food. It is richer, more perfumed, and more obviously royal than anything you will find at a street stall today.

Rating: 8.8 out of 10. Full history and full recipe on the blog now.

eatshistory.com/samosa-recipe-the-original.../

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,353

Eats History

In 1361 a monk in England baked a spiced bun, gave it away free to the poor at the abbey door, and served it with free wine. That bun became the hot cross bun. I just made the original medieval version and it is genuinely different from anything you will find in a supermarket.

No refined sugar, only honey. No piped cross, the cross is cut into the dough with a knife before baking, opening up into four quarters in the oven. The spice is cardamom and grains of paradise, a medieval African spice that was the dominant warming spice in English cooking before black pepper became cheap and widely available. The result is darker, denser, more floral and more complex than a modern hot cross bun, and considerably better.

The original recipe is still a closely guarded secret held by St Albans Cathedral, who still bake these every Lent from the same abbey that Brother Thomas Rocliffe baked them in 663 years ago. My recreation from the known ingredients scores a 7.9 out of 10. The full history going back to 1361, the story of how Henry VIII nearly destroyed the tradition entirely, and the full recipe are on the blog now.

eatshistory.com/the-origin-of-hot-cross-buns-the..…

Happy Easter to everyone celebrating this weekend!

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,784

Eats History

This dish stopped me in my tracks in Florence. A Tuscan nonna made it in front of me in about ten minutes from four ingredients; it was the most impossibly light, pillowy thing I have ever eaten. No pasta. No fuss. Just a ravioli filling, cooked naked. Today you can make it yourself!

Gnudi, which literally means naked in Tuscan dialect, is one of the oldest and most honest dishes in Italian cooking. It is the filling of a ravioli, ricotta and spinach, boiled without its pasta shell. The concept sounds almost too simple to be worth writing about. Then you eat one and you understand immediately why this dish has been made in Florentine kitchens for centuries without anyone feeling the need to change it. I had mine on an Eating Europe Food Tour in Florence, watched it being made in front of me, and have been thinking about it ever since.

This Tuscan version is lighter, more delicate, and more difficult to get right, which is exactly why most English-language recipes struggle to capture the exact flavour and texture of the dish. I went back to the traditional method, used proper deli-counter ricotta, squeezed the spinach until my hands hurt, and the result was the best thing I have made for this channel in months.

Rating: 9.4 out of 10. Full history going back to a 1570 Renaissance cookbook, the full recipe, and everything I learned from Florence is on the blog now.

eatshistory.com/tuscan-gnudi-recipe-the-naked.../

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,300