Eats History

Big day yesterday for Eats History! I had the honor of hopping on ABC 15's Sonoran Living this morning to talk about the channel, America's 250th coming up, and cook a little history live on TV.

From popular demand, the recipe is now posted on my blog!

For the Arizona dish, there was no better choice than a true chuckwagon recipe straight from the territorial era: beans, beef, and biscuits, just like the cooks (lovingly nicknamed "Cookie") would have made for cowboys on outfits like the Hashknife, one of the largest cattle operations in North American history, headquartered right here in Holbrook, Arizona.

This dish is humble, but it tells a powerful story. No refrigeration, no grocery store for a hundred miles, and meals built purely for survival on some of the harshest land in the country. Dried beans because they didn't spoil. Beef because it was the one thing these outfits had in abundance. Biscuits because flour, lard, and a hot skillet were reliable even when nothing else was.

I broke it all down on the blog, the history, the source, just how brutal cattle drive life really was, and of course, the rating. Spoiler: this one earned a solid 7.7/10.
Link to the full post and recipe in the comments.

eatshistory.com/a-recipe-from-the-chuckwagon.../

2 days ago | [YT] | 639

Eats History

Fun morning on ABC 15s Sonoran Living here in Phoenix!

Cooking up George Washington’s hoecakes for America’s 250th and a chuck wagon recipe from early 1880s Pre-Statehood Arizona (recipe coming soon)

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2 days ago | [YT] | 1,108

Eats History

Chicory was a medicine in ancient Egypt 3,500 years before anyone thought to brew it like coffee.

Wild chicory first appears in the Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical text dating to 1550 BCE and one of the oldest known medical documents in human history. The Greeks and Romans ate it as a salad vegetable. Galen, the famous Greek physician, called it the friend of the liver. For roughly three thousand years it was simply food and folk medicine. Nobody was roasting the root and brewing it as a drink.

That changed when coffee arrived in Europe in the 1600s and people discovered that roasted, ground chicory could imitate the colour and bitterness of the new, expensive import everyone suddenly wanted. Frederick the Great institutionalised it in Prussia.
Napoleon's British blockade forced all of France onto it, and decades later, exiled on Saint Helena, he bitterly blamed the coffee shortage for some of his own downfall. Confederate soldiers cut off from real coffee by the Union blockade turned to it by the ton, which is the exact reason it is still poured in every cup of coffee at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans 160 years later.

I made a chicory-dandelion blend this week after using it in a German WWII ration episode and genuinely did not expect to like it as much as I did. No caffeine at all, but smoother than regular coffee with a deep roasted sweetness that surprised me. 8.2 out of 10. Full history and the brewing method on the blog now, link is below.

eatshistory.com/what-is-chicory-coffee-the-wartime…

Had you heard of chicory coffee before today? And would you try a zero caffeine coffee alternative?

-Donnie

5 days ago | [YT] | 1,032

Eats History

Recently returned from Vienna, and one of their iconic desserts is Kaiserschmarrn. A soufflé-like pancake caramelized in a bit of sugar and butter, torn to pieces and served with a plum sauce.

I think I nailed this recipe from the 1850s, excited to give you the recipe and all of the history behind the dish, coming soon.

-Donnie

eatshistory.com

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,113

Eats History

What did American G.I.s eat in WW2?

To give a comparison of the logistics advantage of the Allies, while German and Japanese forces were struggling with basic supply lines toward the end of the war, the American military was running an industrial-scale dessert operation in the pacific. The Army's Quartermaster Corps manufactured 80 million gallons of ice cream every year and shipped 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream mix to the front lines in 1943 alone. Any soldier with access to refrigeration could whip up a frozen treat right where he was standing. Meanwhile, Nikita Khrushchev himself later credited Spam with keeping the entire Soviet Army fed, saying without it they could not have survived. America was not just feeding its own troops; it was propping up the whole Allied war effort.

The actual daily reality for most soldiers was Spam and eggs, chipped beef gravy poured over toast that earned the unprintable nickname SOS, canned peaches, instant coffee the Army was buying by the tens of thousands of pounds per day, and a small candy invented specifically because a businessman watched British soldiers in the Spanish Civil War carrying chocolate that would not melt in their pockets. That candy became M&Ms, sold exclusively to the US military for the first several years of its existence.

I made the full plate this week. Spam and eggs, SOS on toast, canned peaches, M&Ms, instant coffee. It is not balanced nutrition by any modern standard. It is salty, rich, comforting and built for a young man burning thousands of calories a day under extreme stress who needed calories more than he needed kale. I rated it 7.4 out of 10 and genuinely understand now why so many veterans look back on this food with real affection. Full history and the complete recipe on the blog now.

eatshistory.com/what-did-us-soldiers-eat-in-wwii-a…

-Donnie

1 week ago | [YT] | 497

Eats History

Huge moment for Eats History this month. A few of my recipes are featured in Kinfolk Magazine's June Edition, out now.

For anyone unfamiliar, Kinfolk is an iconic and beautifully designed quarterly lifestyle magazine that's been a staple in design and slow-living spaces since 2011, known for gorgeous photography and thoughtful writing. It's the kind of publication you actually keep on your coffee table. Being included in their history-themed issue, surrounded by writers, historians and photographers whose work I deeply respect, is not something I take lightly.

And the photography team did not miss. Every shot makes these ancient dishes feel like they belong exactly where they are: in a beautifully designed magazine, thousands of years later.

For my AZ based followers, I'll also be on ABC 15's Sonoran Living the morning of the 23rd, cooking up some presidential recipes to celebrate America's 250th!

Grateful for moments like these. More to come!

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1 week ago | [YT] | 1,418

Eats History

Uruguay hosted the first World Cup in 1930. This is the cake they were eating while they did it.

The first FIFA World Cup was held in Montevideo in July 1930, hosted by the nation that had just won back-to-back Olympic gold medals in football and wanted to celebrate their centenary constitution in style. Thirteen nations showed up. Most of Europe refused to make the Atlantic crossing and missed history entirely. Uruguay beat Argentina 4-2 in the final in front of 93,000 people. The Uruguayan government declared the following day a national holiday. Argentina threw stones at the Uruguayan consulate in Buenos Aires. The greatest rivalry in South American football was born that afternoon and has not cooled down since.

Torta Chajá was created in 1927 by Orlando Castellano at the Confitería Las Familias in Paysandú, Uruguay, three years before the first World Cup and in the same decade Uruguay was winning everything. Named after the chajá bird whose white plumage inspired the meringue-covered exterior. Layers of light sponge soaked in peach syrup, dulce de leche, whipped cream, canned peaches and broken meringue pieces, the whole thing finished with more meringue pressed all over the outside. It is simultaneously crisp and melting, rich and light, sweet and just acidic enough from the peaches to keep you going back for another slice.

I am watching this World Cup from North America and the scene has been genuinely one of the more joyful things I have witnessed in a while. Europeans encountering Buc-ee's for the first time. Scots taking over Boston. Texas Roadhouse becoming an international football pilgrim destination for reasons nobody fully understands. The World Cup in North America is a beautiful chaos and this cake felt like exactly the right thing to make in the middle of it.

I rated it 9.6 out of 10 and it might be the best cake I have made for this channel. Full history of the first World Cup and the complete recipe on the blog now.
Are you watching the World Cup this year? And which match has been your favourite so far?

Full Recipe: eatshistory.com/torta-chaja-recipe-uruguays.../

1 week ago | [YT] | 714

Eats History

Did Nostradamus predict Napoleon, World War 2 and 9/11? Historians are still arguing about that. What we know for certain is that in 1555 he also published a jam cookbook, and the poached pears are genuinely excellent.

In 1555, the same year Nostradamus published Les Prophéties and launched his career as history's most famous mystic, he also published a treatise on cosmetics and jam. Not metaphorical jam. Actual jam. The Traité des fardemens et confitures contains his plague remedies, his face powder recipes, his hair treatments, his love potion, and his preserved pears. All in the same book. Because in 16th century France, a trained apothecary did not separate medicine from food from magic. They were the same discipline.

Speaking of the love potion, the ingredients were the blood of seven male sparrows, mandrake apples, and the eyelets from the arms of an octopus. I did not make this. The sparrow situation alone was a logistical problem. What I did make is from the same book.

Sugar in 1555 was not a pantry staple. It was controlled by the apothecaries' guilds and classified as a pharmaceutical substance. The recipe Nostradamus wrote for preserved pears using fine white sugar, cinnamon, cloves and lemon was not a dessert recipe. It was a medicinal preparation. The cinnamon was warming. The cloves were antibacterial. The sugar was therapeutic. The pears were considered nourishing for delicate constitutions.

I made the pears, poached in spiced syrup, left to sit for a few days until the cinnamon and clove work their way completely through the fruit. Served cold with whipped cream, which Nostradamus absolutely did not document and which I added anyway because I am not a 16th century apothecary with professional obligations to medicinal integrity.

8.4 out of 10. Full history and the complete recipe on the blog now.

eatshistory.com/nostradamuss-poached-pears.../

1 week ago | [YT] | 969

Eats History

Before tomato ketchup existed, the ketchup on George Washington's table was made from mushrooms.

The word ketchup has nothing to do with tomatoes. It traces back to the Chinese ke-tsiap, a pickled fish sauce, and for most of culinary history the term referred to any number of fermented or concentrated condiments made from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters or anchovies. The tomato version did not become standard until the mid-19th century, and for a very good reason: most people in England and colonial America still believed tomatoes were poisonous well into the 1700s. The tomato is in the nightshade family and the suspicion was not entirely irrational. People simply were not eating them.

What they were eating instead was this. Mushrooms salted overnight until they give up an extraordinary dark, intensely flavoured liquid. Strained, spiced with nutmeg and warm spices, and reduced until thick and concentrated. The result is not ketchup in any sense you would recognise from a burger joint. It is a dark, almost black liquid that tastes like the most concentrated mushroom stock you have ever encountered. A teaspoon in a gravy. A splash in a braise. The same umami depth that Worcestershire sauce provides but with a cleaner, more directly mushroom-forward character. And not coincidentally, Worcestershire sauce developed in the 1830s is a direct descendant of exactly this tradition.

The recipe I used comes from Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747 and the most important cookbook in colonial American history. George Washington owned a copy. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy. Food historians confirm that mushroom ketchup was a documented pantry staple in Founding Father households, and Martha Washington's own recipe book documents related fermented condiment preparations.

This was the ketchup of the people who built the country. I rated it 7.4 out of 10 and the most accurate modern comparison is a homemade Worcestershire sauce with a cleaner finish. Full history and the complete Hannah Glasse recipe on the blog now:

eatshistory.com/mushroom-ketchup-recipe-the.../

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1,476

Eats History

Would you try an Ancient Roman Burger?

I got invited to a military history cooking festival in Olomouc, Czech Republic, and we ended up making an ancient Roman burger. Using real, documented Roman recipes from 4th-century sources.

The Olomouc Museum of Original History runs one of the most thoroughly researched historical food events in Central Europe, spanning Czech military cuisine from the ancient Celts and Romans all the way through to the Cold War and the modern Czech army. The Roman encampment was fully equipped with period-accurate cooking equipment, reenactors in authentic legionary kit, and food made directly from Apicius and Cato the Elder. A massive thank you to the museum and to every reenactor involved for the invitation and for the quality of research that goes into making this event what it is.

The Roman burger came together when we took the Isicia Omentata recipe from Apicius Book II, the oldest documented meat patty recipe in Western culinary history, minced pork seasoned with black pepper, wine-soaked bread, fish sauce, myrtle berries and pine nuts pressed inside the patty, grilled and basted with reduced wine. We pressed it flat, sandwiched it between two spelt flatbreads based on Cato the Elder's documented Roman grain preparations, and dressed it with green onions, dried cured pork, olives and a vivid pink beet and ricotta dressing built from Apicius 3.11.2, the documented Roman beet with mustard and vinegar recipe, blended with fresh ricotta until it turns an extraordinary deep pink. Every single ingredient is documented in Roman primary sources. The sandwich format is anachronistic. Everything inside it is historically accurate.

The Czech region is worth a brief mention here because this is not as geographically random as it might seem. Roman legions campaigned directly into what is now Moravia during the Marcomannic Wars of 166 to 180 AD, and Marcus Aurelius wrote parts of his Meditations from this landscape. The Romans never permanently conquered this territory but they traded with it, fought across it, and their food culture reached it. A Roman military cooking festival in Olomouc is historically grounded in a way that most people do not realise.

I rated the Roman burger a 9 out of 10 and I stand by that completely. The full history, all the primary sources, and the complete recipe built from Apicius and Cato are on the blog now.

eatshistory.com/the-ancient-roman-burger-recipe...…

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 2,168