Max Miller: Why I Pay Attention

Food history is most useful when it changes how we understand an ingredient, technique, or meal. Max Miller’s Tasting History makes context entertaining without treating the past as costume.

Food history can go wrong in two directions: textbook with snacks, or costume party with footnotes.

Max Miller’s Tasting History avoids both, mostly because he actually cooks the old recipe. The history is there to explain what is in the bowl and why somebody would have bothered to make it in the first place—and what happens when that thing meets a modern kitchen.

The recipe is evidence, not a prop

That is the standard this site’s history and regional work gets held to. If a story about an ingredient, a migration pattern, or an old menu does not change how a reader understands the food, it is garnish.

Miller is also willing to cook recipes that turn out strange, difficult, or simply not very good by modern standards. This matters more than it sounds. Historical food gets dull the moment every surviving recipe is treated as a lost masterpiece. People in the past made questionable decisions too. We have paperwork.

His first Tasting History cookbook translated the video project into recipes and research. His May 2026 newsletter says the manuscript for a second book is complete, this time with a disaster-focused theme—almost unfairly well matched to the premise, since food history is full of meals that had to survive circumstances considerably worse than a missing shallot.

What transfers from his method is a discipline: separate what the record tells us from what we are inferring, and notice where an old instruction assumes knowledge we no longer share. That discipline belongs anywhere an article claims to explain why a food became important—regional food maps, ingredient histories, restaurant research, old community cookbooks.

History should change the answer, not just decorate it.