Max Miller turned a pandemic furlough from Walt Disney Studios into Tasting History, a research-heavy video series and cookbook project that reconstructs historical recipes while explaining the people and events around them.
Max Miller came to food history by way of a furlough. He was working at Walt Disney Studios in marketing and film distribution when the COVID-19 stay-at-home period disrupted that work, and the gap got filled with something he already loved doing: find an old recipe, cook it, tell the history around it on camera.
Tasting History with Max Miller caught on because it solved two problems that usually travel together. Historical food tends to arrive as a lecture. Internet cooking tends to pretend context doesn’t matter. His format let neither happen.
The recipe as primary source
Miller works from historical cookbooks, manuscripts, translations, and published scholarship, then rebuilds the dish in a modern kitchen. The distance between the old instruction and the current stove becomes part of the story. Measurements may simply be absent. Ingredient names have drifted. A technique every cook once knew by feel can now need several paragraphs of explanation.
Under the costume of a cooking channel sits a stubborn habit of mind. Before deciding an old dish is ridiculous—or brilliant—Miller wants to know what problem it was solving in its own time. That order of operations is the whole point.
His first Tasting History cookbook ranged across thousands of years of recipes, pairing original historical material with modern adaptations. The research has not slowed down since: his second cookbook project centers on food during disasters, conflict, and catastrophe.
Tasting History · Max Miller’s publisher biography
More Max Miller on Salty & Clever: how he interrogates an old recipe · why food history earns its keep here
Part of Food People & Ideas.
