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 days ago | [YT] | 1,208

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...…

3 days ago | [YT] | 974

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

4 days ago | [YT] | 1,440

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

5 days ago | [YT] | 1,090

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

6 days ago | [YT] | 942

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

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,180

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.../

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,013

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 week ago | [YT] | 877

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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1 week ago | [YT] | 487

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

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,097