For Max Miller, Tasting History Uses Food as the Gateway to the Past

For Max Miller, sometimes history tastes better than expected.

The creator and host of the popular YouTube series Tasting History with Max Miller has recreated dishes spanning centuries, often working from recipes written in an era when instructions could be considerably less helpful than their modern counterparts. But one upcoming creation caught even Miller by surprise.

Kvass, a lightly fermented drink with roots across Eastern Europe, doesn’t necessarily sound irresistible when described by its ingredients. The 16th-century version Miller prepared uses water, dark rye bread and honey, relying on naturally occurring yeast for fermentation.

Miller wasn’t expecting much.

“I thought it would be maybe, you know, drinkable,” Miller told Stream Punk Entertainment. “It’s literally just soggy rye bread that is slightly fermented.”

Then he tasted it.

“When I started drinking it, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, it tastes like a loaf of rye bread.’ And then I finished the entire bottle.”

It was refreshing, Miller said, and unexpectedly addictive.

That combination of curiosity, experimentation and historical discovery has helped turn Tasting History into something considerably larger than a cooking show.

Cooking Without a Rehearsal

Part of the appeal comes from the authenticity of Miller’s reactions. When viewers watch him taste a finished dish, they’re generally watching him experience it for the first time.

Miller doesn’t normally practice a recipe before filming.

“Usually what you see me eating at the end of the episode is the very first time I’ve ever made that dish,” he said.

There are exceptions. If he burns something or makes an obvious technical mistake, he’ll start again. More complicated are historical recipes where the original instructions leave significant information unsaid.

Miller explained that older cookbooks can require a bit of detective work. An author might explain a technique in recipe No. 15 and simply assume the reader remembers it when the same technique reappears in recipe No. 160.

That means Miller may search the rest of the cookbook, contemporary sources, later versions of the same dish and sometimes even its modern descendant to determine what the original author intended.

The goal isn’t to claim absolute certainty where none exists.

“The whole goal is just to follow the spirit of that original recipe,” Miller said.

Sometimes that detective work can consume an entire afternoon. Miller eventually has to impose a limit on himself when a single unanswered question begins swallowing hours.

And that’s only the recipe.

The 40-to-50-Hour Tasting History Episode

The polished episode viewers see each week hides a substantial workload behind it.

According to Miller, an average episode of Tasting History takes approximately 40 to 50 hours to produce, with research accounting for at least half of that workload. He estimated that an episode typically involves somewhere between 15 and 25 hours of research.

Some require less. Others demand translations, specialized sources or help from people with access to particular libraries.

That workload has also grown alongside the channel. Miller said the earliest episodes were originally intended to run roughly six to eight minutes because he was still working another job. Today, episodes commonly run more than 20 minutes.

And occasionally, the familiar formula changes entirely.

One example is Miller’s recent episode on Snow Eggs, which took him away from his usual kitchen and to Colonial Williamsburg.

The dish provided a doorway into the story of James Hemings, the enslaved chef of Thomas Jefferson. Miller discussed Hemings’ role in bringing French culinary techniques and dishes to America and how surviving records have contributed to Jefferson receiving credit for culinary history in which Hemings played a significant role.

Miller described Hemings’ life as “a really tragic story” but also a fascinating one.

Filming on location, however, presented a different challenge.

Miller normally scripts and shoots with remarkable precision. At Colonial Williamsburg, he was cooking alongside another chef in a working kitchen, dealing with different methods and a much more free-flowing production.

“It was a little bit different,” Miller said, “but it was a lot of fun to do.”

The experience also reinforced why he generally uses travel for research and inspiration rather than production. Shooting away from home adds complexity without necessarily making an episode perform better.

“The Cooking Is Kind of the Gateway”

For all the food that appears on Tasting History, Miller admits something that helps explain why the series has developed such a devoted audience:

The history is really the point.

Miller regularly hears from viewers who originally arrived because of the cooking but found themselves unexpectedly engrossed in the history surrounding it.

For him, that’s one of the greatest compliments the show can receive.

“The cooking is kind of the gateway,” Miller said. “It’s like, here, have a taste of this, and then I’m going to give you a lecture because this is what I actually find interesting.”

It’s more than a format developed for YouTube.

Miller said he would still be doing the research even without the channel.

“I like reading things and learning things,” he said.

That enthusiasm has carried beyond YouTube audiences. Miller said schools use his videos in their curriculum, as do some colleges.

For a creator whose work begins with old recipes, that’s an impact considerably harder to quantify than views or subscribers.

That philosophy is also beginning to move beyond YouTube. Miller is an avid tabletop gamer, and Tasting History is now being adapted into a board game developed with Salt Entertainment.

When a Million People Becomes One Person

Miller’s videos can attract audiences numbering in the millions, but those numbers can also become abstract.

“You can’t picture a million people,” he said. “The human brain can’t do that.”

Instead, the scale of Tasting History becomes real when Miller leaves his home studio and meets the people behind those numbers.

At a book-tour appearance, even an audience of 50, 150 or 300 people can feel more tangible than a seven-figure view counter. Those are people who navigated traffic, stood in line, bought a book and chose to spend part of their day meeting him.

Miller spends much of his working life at home — joking that he mostly sees his cats — so those encounters carry additional weight.

“Getting to actually meet people out in the world and hear about how the show affects them,” he said, “that’s really when it kind of hits.”

Dinner With Twain and Austen

Not everything needs quite so much historical detective work.

Asked whom he’d invite to dinner from history, Miller initially had too many choices. He eventually landed on two of his favorite authors: Mark Twain and Jane Austen.

Better yet, he’d invite them together.

Twain’s well-documented dislike of Austen’s writing, Miller reasoned, could make for some lively dinner conversation.

And after hundreds of recipes and culinary journeys through centuries of human history, what would Miller himself choose if he could eat only one Tasting History dish for the rest of his life?

Not an elaborate royal feast.

Not an obscure medieval delicacy.

Not even Snow Eggs.

A Sloppy Joe.

“Oh, this is going to sound so sad,” Miller laughed.

For Miller, the appeal goes beyond taste. The dish is hearty, sweet and savory, but most importantly, it carries something even centuries of culinary history can’t replicate: childhood nostalgia.

“It just reminds me of when I was a kid,” Miller said.

Perhaps that’s ultimately another reason Tasting History works.

Food isn’t simply something people eat. It carries stories. A loaf of rye bread can lead to 16th-century Eastern Europe. Snow Eggs can open a door into the complicated legacy of James Hemings. A recipe preserved for centuries can tell us something about the people who cooked it.

And sometimes, after all that history, a Sloppy Joe can take you home.

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