Tasting History with Max Miller
is a YouTube web cooking show made by Max Miller, a Los Angeles-based former Disney Cruise Line cast member turned marketing creative turned food historian. The show is about Max recreating historical dishes as close to the original recipe as possible (other than using modern cooking tools and appliances). In between cooking, the show has a segment where Max talks about the history related to the featured dish.
He has a second channel with his husband Jose called Ketchup with Max and Jose where they discuss the recipes and do livestreams. He also made a website for the show, with all the recipes additionally available in typical cookbook fashion.
His cookbook, Tasting History: Explore the Past Through 4,000 Years of Recipes, was released April 2023.
Compare B. Dylan Hollis, the other gay male food video blogger who primarily posts to TikTok.
A delicious trope list, this time on Tasting History.
- Author Appeal: Besides the kind of fascination with certain historical places/periods common to anyone specializing in [insert here] history (Max has several, chief among them being medieval and early modern England), Max also loves all things Disney; as one might expect from a former Disney Cruise Line cast member-turned-Disney Corporate marketing creative. His focus on Medieval Europe makes him a good resource for visuals and tasting notes on medieval European food.
- Birthday Episode: One of his earliest episodesnote has him bake a Roaring Twenties-style birthday cake while discussing the history of birthday cakes and candles. He also baked a World War II era carrot cake to celebrate his 40th birthday.
- The Cameo: Every video has at least one Pokémon plushie in the background. Max and Jose are huge fans of the franchise and have a ginormous collection of Pokémon plushies. The plushies often (though not always) fit the theme of the dish (ex: the videos on the Titanic's menu all have different ice types).
- Character Tic: When using a fork, Max has a habit of touching his eating hand to the corner of his mouth after taking a bite.
- Christmas Episode: Max Miller has done multiple Christmas recipes every December, including Victorian Christmas pudding, medieval gingerbread, Victorian mince pies, and even eggnog from the era of George Washington.
- Cordon Bleugh Chef: Not due to Max himself, but the large historical and/or cultural gap with the recipes means that the resulting dishes are sometimes incompatible with his modern American palate, and Max will not hesitate to tell the viewer when he doesn't like something. Sometimes the reverse happens as well, when Max likes a dish more than he expected, such as the recipe for gruel.
- Edutainment Show: In addition to cooking the dish in the video, there is a segment in between where Max relates some historical facts and stories relevant to the food in question.
- Food Pills: Max goes into the more real-world side of this trope in the "Tang Pie" video, when discussing astronaut food. He mentions that NASA's earliest attempts at space food were various foods hyper-compressed into small blocks and then coated with an almost gelatinous starch to keep them from losing crumbs—an astronaut could just pop one into their mouth and it would magically expand and rehydrate! ...Into a mushy mess that was apparently deeply unappetizing.
- Food Porn: A staple of foods meant for royalty, where the showmanship was often as important as taste. Saffron was frequently added to food in order to give it a more golden appearance, and herb pies were topped with elaborate decorative pastries.
- Fun with Subtitles: The subtitles often contain their own jokes, emojis, and comedic descriptions of Max's reactions to tasting dishes.
- Historical Villain Upgrade: Discussed in his "Bakewell Tart" video, sponsored by 20th Century Studios for the release of The King's Man which used the trope with Grigori Rasputin and Mata Hari. It's easier both in fiction and in real life to find a single person to blame for complicated problems, so while the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers in the Nivelle Offensive and subsequent mutinies were due to a lot of factors, the French army pinned it all on Mata Hari and she subsequently became the prototype for the Femme Fatale Spy in fiction despite no hard evidence that she was a Double Agent at all.
- Hitler Ate Sugar: Discussed in the video for absinthe and how the drink was blamed for a farmer getting drunk on itnote and killing his wife and children. The court of law wasn't swayed as the man was a known alcoholic, but the court of public opinion was a different story, as this led to absinthe's decline in popularity and getting banned in many countries (though the bans were eventually lifted).
- Halloween Episode:
- On the day before Halloween 2020, he baked some soul cakes using a recipe from c. 1600 and discussed the connection between soul cakes and modern-day trick-or-treating.
- For Halloween 2023, he celebrated with 18th century pumpkin pie and the history of pumpkins.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: In the Victoria Punch episode, Max uses the fact that he's about to discuss the role sugar had on the slave trade as an excuse for making the punch.
- Jabba Table Manners: In imitation of Rasputin messily devouring a Bakewell tart in The King's Man, Maxwell decides to give it a shot with his own tart. He only gets a few bites on-screen before cutting to him wiping it all off and laughing.Max: I can't believe I just did that. It was kinda fun though.
- Large Ham: Max isn't afraid to ham it up in his videos, especially when there's a scandalous story attached to the featured recipe, such his video for yuanxiao (Chinese rice balls).
- Masochist's Meal:
- Discussed in his Spartan black soup episode, as the dish had a reputation for being this, with other Greeks declaring that only Spartans could withstand it. Max tried it and decided it was actually fine, even a bit flavorless, with the caveat that this is a "best guess" approximation of it and that it might have had nastier ingredients that have been forgotten by history. On the other hand, similar pigs' blood and vinegar soups are eaten to this day in (at a minimum) northern Germany (as Schwarzsauer) and the Philippines (as dinuguan, a noted Pinoy Comfort Food). The key difference, if any, with Spartan black broth is that these modern recipes put more seasoning in (dinuguan in particular is noted for being heavily spiced), and of course the austere Laconians would not use spices. But historians think they might have put in some common herbs and onions, and the onions at least are understood to do a lot of the work in making modern black blood soups tasty favorites in their home regions.
- Played straight with kykeon, an Ancient Greek drink made of wine, cheese, barley meal, and honey, and the first food to make Max gag onscreen. This has the same caveat in the opposite direction, with him speculating that he might have prepared it wrong since there's no contemporary accounts of it being disgusting.
- Discussed in his Spartan black soup
- Perma-Stubble: While Max is babyfaced in his earlier videos, he has since maintained a tasteful bit of stubble.
- Poverty Food: Max cooks a recipe that a peasant would eat called makke which is basically refined beans with onions. Other foods considered to be for peasants were garlic, green cheese (the subject of his very first episode),note hedgehogs, pigs, salmon, and beaver.
- Running Gag: Every time hardtack (a hard, dry biscuit made for long-term storage) is mentioned, Max plays the clip from his original hardtack video, "How to Eat Like a Pirate: Hardtack & Grog", where he clacked two biscuits together to show just how hard hardtack is.
- Shown Their Work: It goes without saying that Max puts plenty of research into each video, but what qualifies for this trope are his efforts to pronounce foreign words as close to the original tongue as he can manage. In his videos for Asian recipes, for example, he's often praised in the comments by native speakers for his accuracy.
- So Was X: In "500 Year-Old Pizza VS Today", he admits that the episode's rosewater-and-sugar flavored flatbread isn't exactly what we would call "pizza" today... but then points out that even modern Chicago-style pizza is a pretty unusual example of "pizza". He also says in the comment section that the origin of pizza is difficult to nail down, since "bread baked with toppings" is almost as old as bread itself.
- Spinoff: Downplayed. The episodes about historic beverages are known as Drinking History with Max Miller and they have their own unique intro and backdrop, but they're integrated with the main series and follow the same format.
- Spoof Aesop: In "Semlor: The Dessert That Killed A King":So the moral of the story is no matter how good the semlor are, do not eat fourteen of them, or else your country might fall into ruin and you'll end up buried with nutmegs for eyes.
- Thanksgiving Episode:
- In the episode where he talks about the first Thanksgiving, Max makes an authentic Wampanoag recipe known as sobahegnote
- In November 2023, he did a video on Thanksgiving for World War II-era military, making three side dishes from 1940s recipes: cranberry sauce, candied sweet potatoes, and oyster dressing.
- That Came Out Wrong: In "The Ninja Diet of Feudal Japan", when discussing hyōrōgan, Max says "these balls turn out immensely crushable — well, that didn't sound right."
- The Unseen: Jose is a bit camera shy, and the few times he's been featured in the videos it's just his voice from offscreen. Even in their joint channel, it took until the 18th episode for Jose to actually appear on camera.
- Wedding Episode: Appropriately, Max filmed two wedding-themed episodes in the weeks leading up to his own wedding. One is about the history of wedding cakes, and he makes a historic English wedding cake, which was a type of fruitcake (he assured viewers that he and Jose would be having a modern white cake at their actual wedding). The other is about a wedding cocktail, and he describes a few historic wedding traditions.
- Written by the Winners: Or rather, Written By People Who Write Stuff Down. The first written recipe is not always the oldest but, as the first recorded version, it often takes over in the social mindset.
