Tasting History with Max Miller

Max recreates parmesan cheese ice cream from Frederick Nutt's 1789 *Complete Confectioner*. The episode traces ice cream from Roman snow cones to Persian sharbat, Italian sorbetto, and frozen custards. He covers cream cheese molds ("fromage glacé"), key figures like Procopio and Nancy Johnson, and ice cream's rise in America via presidents and soda fountains.

Step back in time and discover the rich, smoky flavors of bochet, an ancient style of mead once crafted in medieval France. In this episode, we explore the fascinating process behind "black mead," where honey is slowly caramelized before fermentation, transforming its color, aroma, and taste into something deep, complex, and unlike traditional mead.

Explore Medieval Irish social hierarchy through food. Recreate corned beef with honey using a 1100s poem while revealing what peasants, nobles, and monks actually ate.

Max recreates ancient Sumerian beer using the 4,000-year-old *Hymn to Ninkasi*, detailing a week-long process with soaked barley, bappir bread, malting, crushing, and fermentation with aromatics and date syrup. He explores beer varieties, tavern laws, its role in commerce, and mythology like the drunken tale of Enki and Inanna. The nutty, effervescent brew lasts 2-3 days.

Max explores D-Day meals, from pre-invasion steak and lemon meringue pie to the pivotal breakfast of eggs and bacon, k rations, d bars, and British 24-hour assault packs. He covers seasickness, paratroopers trading chocolate for eggs, and 48-hour hunger gaps, featuring stories from uss lci 94 skipper "Popeye" and soldiers miming chicken for eggs.

Max explores Alcatraz's surprisingly good food program (1934-1963) via a Women's Club cookbook. He covers Warden Johnston's use of nutrition for order, the mess hall as a riot risk, coveted kitchen jobs, and the 1950 "Spaghetti Riot." He recreates stuffed pork chops, evaporated milk cucumber salad, and quickie apple pie-better than most U.S. prisons' meals.

Max explores lighthouse keeper life via an 1881 provisioning list and period recipes. He covers the isolated, demanding job-cleaning Fresnel lenses with mercury, trimming wicks, and cooking with limited supplies like flour, beans, and salt pork. Featuring keepers Henry Long, Mary Ryan, and Hannah Thomas, he recreates Fannie Farmer's 1896 Boston corn chowder with pilot bread.

Max reveals that sugar plums are sugar-coated confections, not fruit, tracing their history from 1600s England to the Victorian era, including use as medicine and cannonball names. He recreates an 1865 cherry sugar plum recipe, showing the 3-day process of drying cherries, coating with gum arabic and sugar syrup, and adding color for the final treat.