The description seems to not appear for some people today, so I'm posting the recipe below. Help Support the Channel with Patreon: www.patreon.com/tastinghistory MODERN RECIPE INGREDIENTS - Chard - Spinach - Mint - Marjoram - 1 lb (450g) Ricotta - ¾ lb (340g) Parmesan - 3oz (85g) of High Fat Cheese - 6 Tablespoons (85g) Butter Softened - 1 Tablespoons Pepper - 4 ½ Teaspoons Cinnamon - 1 ½ Teaspoons Cloves - 3 Medium Eggs - ½ Cup Sugar - 2 Portions of Flaky Pastry Dough METHOD 1. Line a large pie tin or cake pan with pastry dough and blind bake it in a 450°F/230°C oven for 12-15 minutes, or until cooked. Remove from the oven and let cool. 2. Reduce oven temperature to 350°F/180°C. 3. Finely Chop all of your herbs/greens. 4. Mix the cheeses in a large bowl until somewhat smooth. Add the eggs and beat until incorporated. Then add the butter, sugar, and spices and mix until combined. Finally, add in the greens and mix them by hand so as not to bruise the greens. 5. Once the filling is well mixed, pour into the cooled pastry shell and smooth the top. Then top it with the other piece of pastry and press the edges into the bottom dough. Leave some ripples on the top crust to give room for the filling to expand during baking. Brush the top with an egg wash, then set on the bottom rack of the oven and bake for 1 hour. 6. Once baked remove from the oven and serve warm.
As for a YA series, why not combine this channel with a character? An ordinary human who happens to be immortal. Their major passion is cooking, so they go from age to age and city to city, working in kitchens around the world, observing the society around them. Each book is a different age. Include a couple of recipes in each book. 😁
I love how honest he is about how good a dish tastes. On some dishes he's said "nope", some he's fallen in love with, and dishes like this he says "it's weird, it's delicious, but it's weird..." Thank you for entertaining me with dishes I've never heard of or tried before!
I agree. If something is icky, I want to know before I go through the trouble of making it. I remember when he made Kykeon. He's like..."yeah...uh...NO." *snicker* I love history, and I love learning to make very old or ancient recipes. This is one of my absolute FAVORITE channels ever... I'm SO glad I found it.
Personally, I'm enjoying the Ancient Rome recipes the most. It's amazing to know we still have records of their food! That said, I'm just a novelty account so...
I enjoy it all! would love to learn about Japanese Food, and maybe how western influences may have changed aspects of it after opening themselves to trade. Either that or how a national dish became a “national dish.” Or all the weird gelatin foods that were all the hype in the 50’s.
Ancient recipes deffinitely, they're vague, exotic and often leave you guessing how the proper proportions should be, so that you can keep experimenting until you get it just right.
Speaking of eating like a king, have you ever considered making a video about dillegrout? It's a royal dish created for William the Conqueror, who apparently liked it so much that the cook who invented it was given a manor and his descendants were required to prepare it for all future coronations. Might make for an interesting episode.
Not gonna lie, when the pandemic is over you should totally open up a restaurant which only serves historic dishes, providing extra fun facts about the dishes on the menu
Definitely! I would love it if historians or teachers could sit down at the table and talk about the history of the meal, the ingredients, the methods and the origins of the recipes. My type of evening!
We have a surviving descendant to this recipe that survives to this day: the beautiful "Torta Pasqualina" or Easter PIe from Liguria - which is also popular in parts of South America. A recipe you definitely got to try. In Pasqualina the herbs, the cheeses and the eggs are all separate layers which makes a less brown pie, definitely more visiually appealing. The dough used are thin sheets of bread dough stacked on each other. And of course Pasqualina has done away with all excess sugar and spice even though old style seasonings such as lemon peel and nutmeg might show up in some recipes.
I used to make even more simple pie! You just need 2 puff pastries, a box of feta cheese, an egg, 2-3 spoons of cream and a bouquet of your favourite herbs (spring onion works the best to me).
Very similar to erbazzone too (something like herb/grass thing), typical of Emilia and southern Lombardy - it has chards, spinaches, parmesan and sometimes ricotta and/or rice, but there’s no sugar or spices, just salt and some onions (there’s really tons of recipes though). Top it off with prosciutto lard scraps and you’re in heaven
How about a collaboration between this channel and Baumgartner Restoration? While Baumgartner restores a painting and tells its history, Max tells history of the era and gives us a recipe.
”But your Holiness, a camel can’t be a fish.” “Wrong you heretic! It’s a ship of the desert that carries it’s water within it. It’s an inside out fish. So it’s a fish! Peter has spoken! Now, make me filets of camel-fish!” “Yes your Holiness.”
SOOO I totally made this and my friends and I were shocked at how complex and yummy it is. I couldn't even feel the greens/parmesan. "Pope pie" is now gonna be a staple in my recipe book. Really great vegetarian dish too. Also, springform pans will make your life a lot easier when it comes to popping this beast out.
I would love to go to a party where everyone baked a different dish (well, the successful ones!) and brought it. Then you get to taste all these ancient oddities while only having to go to the trouble of making one of them.
My friend makes Rosemary cookies every year for christmas. They're sweet but herby. So I imagine it's like this in general. They're really good but, to reiterate, weird
Are they from somewhere in europe by chance? Example, theres a Russian tarragon drink; Europe and Russia tend to make interesting use of herbs in their cooking.
@@Your-Least-Favorite-Stranger Russian savoury pies and juniper vodka were some of my favourites when I was in the Peace Corps in neighboring Kazakhstan. I had no idea there were "medicinal" vodkas before that. I thought I was being hood winked but the juniper vodka was really good.
@@sagapoetic8990 oh yeah, Gin was originally hella medicinal. Derived from Juniper and medicinal herbs;tonic water was used to treat malaria but tasted like absolute ass so they added sugar syrup and gin to make soldiers drink it. Gin and tonic, medicinal cocktail, really cool stuff tbh.
"I love that he calls this a 'common herb tort'; it makes it sound so _light_ and _healthy..._ and then you read what's actually _in_ it and put your cardiologist on standby." To be fair, I think the most strictly accurate understanding of the name given the Italian is "tort of common herbs", not "common tort composed of herbs". It's a distinct difference.
@@TastingHistory It just needs bacon, Italian pork sausages and mushrooms and you might want to call in a priest to give you a prayer before your heart gives out.
the iron thing doesn't surprise me much. my doctor recommended a lucky iron fish that is just a hunk of iron you boil with some water. with use it makes your iron levels better. its still weird but not unheard of
I believe if, memory serves, that it was a way to give privacy to the 'people of import' while they were eating while keeping 'the common folk' away from the conversations and rumors of power.
It is because during the selection of a new pope, the cardinals are completely secluded and cannot even have servants attend them. It was supposed to make them hurry up and decide, but that is not the case, they take their own sweet time. Having everything delivered in a similar manner, even today.
The horseshoe recipe actually makes a lot of sense: rusted iron is what you actually need to absorb iron in the body. That is why there are similar recipes all around europe that use acidic foods to corrode iron, like diping old gardening shovels in lemon juice, or putting iron nails into an apple for a week before removing them.
Man, this whole "Is this a dessert or not?!" dilemma appears to be a very common theme with recipes from this sort of time period. People really went wild with the sugar and cinnamon back then, didn't they?
Curiously, there are some places where this kind of flavor profile survived to the modern day. Northern German dishes famously have a "broken sööt" (broken sweetness) flavor profile, where savory/salty and sweet flavors are mixed. (bean stew with pears; candied potatoes as a side to kale and sausages; sweet puddings with bacon...to name a few examples) And scandinavia as a whole loves its salted liquorice candy...
@@olenickel6013 I actually had some of that salted licorice candy once. Once. Wouldn't try it again. I'm unfortunately not a fan of licorice as is, and covering it in salmiak salt doesn't do it any favors, at least in my opinion. I do love me some salted caramel, though.
@@olenickel6013 I've actually heard that licorice contains a compound that might taste completely different to different people, depending on various genetic factors that determine how your tastebuds develop, which would explain why people only ever seem to either love or hate licorice. Same goes for cilantro, actually. So yeah, it's possible that the reason why I and many other people hate licorice is because we've never tasted its "real" flavor and never will, thanks to our genes. Bummer, huh?
I would love to see a sign on Broadway that goes, "And now for the first time, SCAPPI'S OPERA" and the performance is basically the recipes being sung aloud.
@@cimmerianj8997 *Pantomimed cooked on stage And everyone has to pantomime eating and accurately reacting to how they actually taste (one rehearsal had to involve actual cooking and sampling)
Hey TastingHistory! You should do a Recipe on Nettle Pudding! It dates back to 6000BC and would be really cool for you to try to make the oldest recipe known to man.
That would need to be a spring dish as the fresh grown tips of the nettle are used. Nettles must be cooked completely to be edible. I have made a nettle risotto that was delicious. Good suggestion.
I'm a cardiac rehab specialist nurse and every time I see a recipe that appeals to me from the past I have this calculation going on in my head thinking 'what can I ditch to make this healthy and at the same time stay tue to the recipe'. I think it just blew a circuit! But thanks for the ideas here. If you cut down on the butter and full fat cheese (and go for a wholemeal pastry instead of puff), you have the makings of a very nice quiche. I like the idea of including the spices but I don't tend to add sugar to anything if I can help it. We'll have to see if I can find the time to experiment ;)
"Just like I have that YA fantasy novel kickin' around in my head and ONE DAY I'm going to put it down in paper and ship it off to a publisher..." I feel called out, I'm--
This is less rich than the modern Torta Salata but the idea is still the same in today’s Italy. There are many type of those “pies” yet my fave is this: spinach, eggs (beaten, they go in the filling), ricotta and ham. That’s it. It won’t make your cardiologist sweat and it is delish both hot and cold. I’m quite surprised on how this recipe is going strong even today, with a modified version. Thanks for the pleasant discovery of yet another ancient dish!
Well italy does have a strong primary sector with private shops and small markets still being very much used by everyone in italy to buy stuff(although even if slowly, supermarkets et similia are taking over), which means natural ingredients are still a favourite and in turn, greens too, which aided in the survival of this recipe, albeit wuth slight modifications and variations based on region and specific recipe.
My roommates and I make torta salata at least once a month, I used to make it once a week because it lasts a couple of days and I just had a couple of consecutive days I was out and about from dawn to dusk, I'd just grab a quarter of torta with me.
so, in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she mentions that in cooking spinach and chard etc.. a pinch of nutmeg is added, or similar spice (ie cinnamon, clove, allspice) because it offsets the bitter flavor compounds in spinach and chard. if you add too much spice, it does make it weird though. Like, oh this is tasty and also why is this unsweetened dish trying to taste sweet.
An old recipe for braised greens I had included exactly that. Braised because they're collards and quite... robust. Tasty anyway. It was maggie blacks medieval cookbook.
I grew up in the SCA and some of my fondest memories were meals that included cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, etc. in savory dishes - stuffing, chicken dishes, armored turnips.... It is something you'd have to get used to but it's one of my favorite flavor profiles.
This was an amazing recipe. The flavours! We made it last night. We waited 20 minutes after cooking to cut it but it hadn't set. I would recommend waiting at least 30 minutes.
Minus the sugar and the spices, we still make this kind of torta. Especially when we have guests over, as an appetizer. PS: your Italian pronunciation is great!
Just so you know: You're the only channel i could find who combines my passion for history and general nerdyness with my other passion of cooking, not a common combination ;)
indeed they are -- I can think of a couple traditional italian recipes off the top of my head which are basically the same recipe (greens -- beet greens, spinach, or nettle, what was in season), cheeses and eggs baked in a flaky pie crust) , minus the sugar and (most of the) spices: the genoese "Torta Pasqualina" and the emilian "Erbazzone" (which has no eggs in the filling) - both still made to this day - hearty and simple but delicious. Sugar and spices were indeed an addition for the rich (and the Pope was probably the richest of them all).
At times pepper was literally worth its weight in gold. Then remember that the spices you get today are waaayy fresher than what could be had even as recently as the 1800's - in Sacappi's time pepper would have spent 1-2 years traveling in the leaky hold of a sailing ship and/or on animal back before it even got to your local merchant.
I made this for Christmas dinner. It is really great. It does not really taste as rich as you might think - the gloves and other spices balance out the sugar and cheeses quite well.
An idea I've seen floated with par/pre baking a pie shell in older ovens is the over rack is a modern invention. Things would have been cooked with direct contact to the preheated stone floor of the oven, so cooking the pie on a preheated pizza stone might be fairly accurate and remove the necessity for par baking. I'm going to try this at some point. Reminds me a lot of a spinach pie I grew up eating. Just without cinnamon and sugar. Think my mom put mace in it too.
@@VannahSavage They called them peacocks (name dates back to the 13th century). Probably an early bait-and-switch tactic to sell them at a premium price. Maize btw was called Turkish Wheat in the British Isles until the 18th century.
I think it’s Indian as in South American. I think Columbus brought a Turkey home and they dubbed it Indian chicken, Indian Peacock, and a variety of other names relating to both India, Peru, Turkey, and other unrelated locations.
Is it that sort of flavour that goes like: "does it really taste like this, I better take another bite"? And before you know it you finished the whole thing and crave for more for some unspecified reason. I had this experience with dried kumquat.
@@luminalsaturn2 It's bitter with sweetness of sugar used in drying process. It's like candied orange peel on steroids :-D BTW I love candied orange, especially with chocolate.
4:50 If you do not have pie weights, use normal crystal sugar instead. After baking one dish you really cannot tell the difference, but after multiple bakes, the sugar goes nice and toasty and can be used in other recipes or just to sprinkle on top of some other pastry dishes.
Man, the visible confusion on your face, you have to wonder what kind of influence Scappi must have had to create something like this, or if there was no influence and he just brute-forced spices and sugar into every dish he made because the wealthy were obsessed with spices, i just did a little digging around and it seems like he did this mostly for shock value, as quoted in "The Paris Review" : It was never enough for Scappi to please diners: he set out to amuse, astonish, and confuse them with vast menus of pungent flavors and retina-searing colors, presented in displays more akin to a performance art piece than a dinner party
It's pretty much that. The spice mix itself, flavor-wise, is pretty sensible and uncontroversial; he just took it and dialled the amount up to 10 because, obviously, the Vatican was really rich and the food had to be ostentatious. If anything, it's less the spices and more the sugar that was the real luxury item. It was incredibly hard to find pure sugar in good quantity in that period, so much so that it took slavery in the colonies (which happened after this) to make it available and remotely affordable. Much of European cooking didn't even use sugar until the Renaissance (they used honey or defrutum-type syrups instead) so, when it first became commercially available (usually only to the rich), they put it in _everything_ . That's why even many savory, meaty dishes like the original mince pies are sickly sweet.
That reminds me of what Joseph Haydn would sometimes do with musical humor. I'm thinking of the "Surprise Symphony," when he suddenly startled the audience, just when they least expected it!
This video convinced me: We need an opera of "Scapi's Opera," letting those voices sing out all the recipes. Also, I really want to make this pie even though I'm a pretty bad baker.
I believe it was for sanitation even the kids mixed alcohol with their water to make it safer and I also heard drinking alcohol that wasn’t watered down was seen as barbaric
@@TastingHistory I have added your channel to my list of spirit lifting youtube videos to help me fight depression while dealing with chronic illness. Much love.
I prefer to get the “iron soup” I need by just making a tomato sauce or tomato soup in a cast iron pot. _Brunost,_ or caramelised whey cheese, is fortified with iron nowadays because it was traditionally made by boiling the whey in cast iron pots for hours, making it remarkably rich in iron for a dairy product.
I made a version of this for Christmas (but I changed the spices because I don't think my family would appreciate the ones in the original) and it was delicious! If anyone feels like tweaking it, you can safely taste your spice combinations if you add them to the cheese mix before adding the egg! So decadent, so delicious!
I really enjoyed the pictures included of Scappi's appendix! Even without them, the book would be a treasure just for how intact it is and the glimpse it provides into this renaissance life, but the pictures do make it invaluable!
I can't believe he reached 375k subscribers in just 7 months. When I subscribed to this channel it had around 18.7k subscribers I still remember about that. But he totally deserve it and deserve more than a million subscribers.
I got to say, his reactions at the end are just so authentic and you can tell that he's passionate about the stuff he talks about! Well done with this recipe again, and loving the history too!
I love *anything* you do- you add humour & interest to everything. I’d also love if you did an episode on the history of the stillroom, &/ or the changing ‘face’, as it were, of the kitchen. I find it one of the most fascinating places of pre-Modern era homes.... so much so that I started a novel called ‘The Stillroom Maid/ The Poor Relation’ (it’s a work in progress). I also wanted to mention, that I learnt a little while ago about a device called a kettlesaw hook... it made me realise I was definitely a naive idiot, in my lack of understanding for cooking in the past- *of course* people who took a whole year to cultivate their food, weren’t going to want to let it _burn_ & go to waste- they **could not** afford to do that; the kettlesaw hook was an ingenious device that allowed people to easily alter how close their pots got to the fire- that’s probably why they could have a pot on the fire all day; if the fire was low & the kettlesaw hook was closed- it was probably the equivalent of just keeping it warm. It’s amazing what assumptions you find yourself disabused of, when you really look into things..
@Lana Jig-maker - as Chef Walter Staib has discovered, no matter how great your PBS show is, no matter how many Emmys it wins, it can be a CONSTANT STRUGGLE to keep enough funds coming in so that filming can proceed unabated. "A Taste of History" was/is a wonderful show that won 15 Emmys and that I hope can continue into the future. www.atasteofhistory.org/
I'm gonna be honest in my answer to your query..anything I would never try on my own (cuz, ewww), but your willing to take one for the Tasting History Team. Beside that, I enjoy watching you make anything historical..your presentation and humour are why I am here! 😁🤗
By far, the hardest ingredient in this to actually get (for me) is fresh marjoram. My local grocery store carries all sorts of greens and herbs, but they do not have fresh marjoram (I wanted it for a chicken liver risotto I made about three weeks ago). Marjoram is one of those herbs, like parsley and cilantro, which takes on a completely different flavor profile when dried.
Special thanks for just the lovely way you embraced the Italian accent in this episode. It’s so nice to hear the ending vowels of those beautiful words from an American speaking them. Molto grazie!
Even today, if somebody suffers from anemia, it's not uncommon to recommend they start cooking with cast iron pans. It apparently infuses iron into the food and subsequently, into the person. And I just know, deep in my heart that Giada di Laurentis's ears perked up at the mention of mascarpone cheese.
Maybe that's why that stew I made from chicken, mushroom, carrot, onion, and cream, felt so extra hearty and giving. Washing that big and heavy cast iron pot is kind of tedious though.
Funny enough, I refused when my plumber offered to change some iron pipes here at my apartement so my water wouldn't be rusty anymore (it can be yellow sometimes, but it goes after a minute of water running and there's only a residue on it).
There kinda is something to the horseshoe thing. There is a thing called a lucky fish that they have gotten regions where iron deficiency to adopt. It's a steel fish that is boiled with the soup and imparts iron ions into the food.
Porcupine and bear are delicious depending on when harvested, if you harvest the bear when it’s eating all the berries on the mountain it’s better than pork, when it’s eating all the salmon in the river….not so much.
I'd love to hear you talk more about some of the reasons why so many historical recipes include what we might consider "too much" seasoning. For one, because of the incredible distance many spices used to travel, by the time they reached their destination they would have lost a good deal of their potency. EDIT: Turns out the line about spices covering up the taste of old meat is a tired urban legend
Another common reason was indulgence. The wealth of a mans house could easily be seen in the amount of spices he lavished his guests with. Access to imports like spices was a marker of wealth, and just like today the wealthy are often uhh... "opulent". 🤭
@@misscandle Yes, and when europe developed a middle class, the upper classes started abandoning spicy food as it was less and less a mark of prestige and thus developed haute cuisine which focused on maximising the flavour of the main part of the dish.
Re Iron....As a child I was very often anaemic. My aged Auntie would plunge the iron poker up in the coal fire til red hot....then plunge it into a small glass of stout...I then had to drink it. It added more iron to the stout and burned off most of the alcohol. I still use this trick when needed. Thanks. I love your vlogs. xx
I studied at the culinary school named after him, in Castel San Pietro Terme! Also in the Padania valley (north of Italy) we have this pie which is really similar to this one, but less thicker: Erbazzone, which is the "modern version"
An old worn horse shoe was the most likely piece of iron people could get their hands on. Doubt he was punking anyone. Cooking a rusty shoe in a bag inside a cauldron along with stew to add iron is something I grew up hearing about. It was considered magic by some.
The iron soup is interesting. A number of years back I read an article on the BBC about how small iron fish (lucky symbol) are handed out to impoverished families to be added to the cooking pot. Iron leaches into the food and helps prevent anaemia which can be a common health condition among certain demographics.
Re: the brown color: Did you use Swiss chard? If I use Swiss chard (which I love) in a mix of greens, the result is browner than you'd anticipate, because the chard has red pigment in it that's released when you cook it, same as beets. I remember an Italian restaurant / cafe in the Bay Area doing a dessert torta that was basically a greens pie with sugar, nutmeg, and maybe cinnamon in it. I can't find it on their menu now, but it sounds like it's in the flavor menu of this dish-- so maybe there are some regional survivals of a sweet herb torte?
![[#2024MAMA] BIGBANG (빅뱅) - 뱅뱅뱅 (BANG BANG BANG) + FANTASTIC BABY | Mnet 241123 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EQsYfiPR9uM/mqdefault.jpg)
The description seems to not appear for some people today, so I'm posting the recipe below.
Help Support the Channel with Patreon: www.patreon.com/tastinghistory
MODERN RECIPE
INGREDIENTS
- Chard
- Spinach
- Mint
- Marjoram
- 1 lb (450g) Ricotta
- ¾ lb (340g) Parmesan
- 3oz (85g) of High Fat Cheese
- 6 Tablespoons (85g) Butter Softened
- 1 Tablespoons Pepper
- 4 ½ Teaspoons Cinnamon
- 1 ½ Teaspoons Cloves
- 3 Medium Eggs
- ½ Cup Sugar
- 2 Portions of Flaky Pastry Dough
METHOD
1. Line a large pie tin or cake pan with pastry dough and blind bake it in a 450°F/230°C oven for 12-15 minutes, or until cooked. Remove from the oven and let cool.
2. Reduce oven temperature to 350°F/180°C.
3. Finely Chop all of your herbs/greens.
4. Mix the cheeses in a large bowl until somewhat smooth. Add the eggs and beat until incorporated. Then add the butter, sugar, and spices and mix until combined. Finally, add in the greens and mix them by hand so as not to bruise the greens.
5. Once the filling is well mixed, pour into the cooled pastry shell and smooth the top. Then top it with the other piece of pastry and press the edges into the bottom dough. Leave some ripples on the top crust to give room for the filling to expand during baking. Brush the top with an egg wash, then set on the bottom rack of the oven and bake for 1 hour.
6. Once baked remove from the oven and serve warm.
I can imagine how 'weird' the taste is, cinnamon and clove, then sweet, and with min and marjoram
Thank you! Sounds like a precursor to quiche. I'll be trying this my next Pie Day.
As for a YA series, why not combine this channel with a character? An ordinary human who happens to be immortal. Their major passion is cooking, so they go from age to age and city to city, working in kitchens around the world, observing the society around them. Each book is a different age. Include a couple of recipes in each book. 😁
Bonus: you'd be encouraging a love of food history in the next generation 😊
@@CynBH That's an amazing idea for a book series! Write it:D
"why procrastinate on that winter body" truly a word to live by. For it is either winter or winter is coming.
Truly profound words, I thank thee
“TREAT YO SELF!!!”
As a Canadian, this is unfortunately accurate
Preparing for winter on March 21st 👌
Now why did I read this while he said it lol
"Why procrastinate on that winter body."
This is now my new life motto, applicable to all seasons.
Call forth the Frost Skeleton.
I have seen you on every video of Rupauls drag race the pit stop and I must say ❤️ thank you
why are u verywhere ??????????????????????
Dude i see you on every cooking video calm down on the comments
Mincapball on point
Yo this dude's Italian pronunciation is beautiful, I'm actually going to cry.
☺️ awww shucks
Eyyy Warframe player!
@@TastingHistory Actually not that bad but there's definetely room for improvement
The truest Italian stereotype is that it is impossible to please one.
@@riccardomartignago3422 And evidently room for pedantry
I love how honest he is about how good a dish tastes. On some dishes he's said "nope", some he's fallen in love with, and dishes like this he says "it's weird, it's delicious, but it's weird..."
Thank you for entertaining me with dishes I've never heard of or tried before!
I agree. If something is icky, I want to know before I go through the trouble of making it. I remember when he made Kykeon. He's like..."yeah...uh...NO." *snicker*
I love history, and I love learning to make very old or ancient recipes. This is one of my absolute FAVORITE channels ever... I'm SO glad I found it.
Hard tack 🌕💥🌕
Max, you’re adorable. I’m an old lady, so I’m saying this in a big-sisterly way. Your show has become my favorite on TH-cam. Keep making it, please.
My favourite, as well. He is adorable. Combine the recipes and the history, he makes it so interesting!
“despite the cavalcade of coronary-clogging constituents,” that’s a hell of an alliteration!
I'm jealous that I didn't come up with it first.
That's a mouthful!
Very Moira - esque
A catch-all continuous collective!😁
He doesn't need to go that hard, but he does for us.
I'm curious, what eras/cultures being covered on Tasting History are you most enjoying? What should I make more of?
Personally, I'm enjoying the Ancient Rome recipes the most. It's amazing to know we still have records of their food! That said, I'm just a novelty account so...
I enjoy it all!
would love to learn about Japanese
Food, and maybe how western influences may have changed aspects of it after opening themselves to trade.
Either that or how a national dish became a “national dish.” Or all the weird gelatin foods that were all the hype in the 50’s.
More Anglo-Saxon/Early English recipes please! By far my favourite culture/period of history
Ancient recipes deffinitely, they're vague, exotic and often leave you guessing how the proper proportions should be, so that you can keep experimenting until you get it just right.
It’s have to be the *very* old stuff. It brings in unique ideas you don’t really see anywhere else in America
Speaking of eating like a king, have you ever considered making a video about dillegrout? It's a royal dish created for William the Conqueror, who apparently liked it so much that the cook who invented it was given a manor and his descendants were required to prepare it for all future coronations. Might make for an interesting episode.
Do you happen to know why it was not served for the six past coronations?
It’s on the schedule 😁
@@ragnkja No idea. I guess tastes changed?
@@ragnkja Probably because no one wants to eat a sweet stew of chicken with Christmas spices in almond milk anymore 😄
@@ragnkja I'm shocked the tradition lasted so long honestly. Feudalism can be weirdly stable when it matters least I guess
Not gonna lie, when the pandemic is over you should totally open up a restaurant which only serves historic dishes, providing extra fun facts about the dishes on the menu
you are so underrated
RIGHT ON!
Definitely! I would love it if historians or teachers could sit down at the table and talk about the history of the meal, the ingredients, the methods and the origins of the recipes. My type of evening!
While it would no doubt have a fervid audience i highly doubt how financially viable it would be.... Considering how spread out the audience is
restaurant would be just three times more work and three times less money
We have a surviving descendant to this recipe that survives to this day: the beautiful "Torta Pasqualina" or Easter PIe from Liguria - which is also popular in parts of South America. A recipe you definitely got to try. In Pasqualina the herbs, the cheeses and the eggs are all separate layers which makes a less brown pie, definitely more visiually appealing. The dough used are thin sheets of bread dough stacked on each other. And of course Pasqualina has done away with all excess sugar and spice even though old style seasonings such as lemon peel and nutmeg might show up in some recipes.
I used to make even more simple pie! You just need 2 puff pastries, a box of feta cheese, an egg, 2-3 spoons of cream and a bouquet of your favourite herbs (spring onion works the best to me).
That sounds wonderful.
Nutmeg, huh? Dont let townsends find out.
I was just thinking that it sounds like something my Yiayia in Cyprus used to make around Easter.
Very similar to erbazzone too (something like herb/grass thing), typical of Emilia and southern Lombardy - it has chards, spinaches, parmesan and sometimes ricotta and/or rice, but there’s no sugar or spices, just salt and some onions (there’s really tons of recipes though). Top it off with prosciutto lard scraps and you’re in heaven
"For this recipe, you will need..."
*Mrs. Crocombe enters the chat*
Yes!!
@JW McCabe THANK YOU!! ❤❤
I want a collab between these two so baddd
How about a collaboration between this channel and Baumgartner Restoration? While Baumgartner restores a painting and tells its history, Max tells history of the era and gives us a recipe.
"Mrs Crocombe enters the chat with a baseball bat"
This herb pie sounds so rich that it’ll probably try and commit tax evasion.
Topical 🤣
It actually sounds rich enough to also get away with it.
You're overlooking the fact this was made for the Pope. It's tax exempt.
That joke was so rich it made the Monopoly man blush.
#citizensunited
does black smoke or white smoke rise from the oven when it's done or still not?
That’s good. I should have used that 🤣
@@TastingHistory still, yorr script, jokes and facial play is top and adds a lot of flavor to the history and dish itself ;-)
If cooked correctly, only white steam should come out when you open the oven door. Black smoke means you must try again.
@@ragnkja It's linked to the pope election... white (new Pope) or black (try again) smoke
Andrew Ryan
Don’t explain the joke xD
”But your Holiness, a camel can’t be a fish.” “Wrong you heretic! It’s a ship of the desert that carries it’s water within it. It’s an inside out fish. So it’s a fish! Peter has spoken! Now, make me filets of camel-fish!” “Yes your Holiness.”
Nice
LAWL!!!
This is better than any harry potter book
@@funnyguy6110 LOL
@@funnyguy6110 Have you tried the Parthian chicken?
SOOO I totally made this and my friends and I were shocked at how complex and yummy it is. I couldn't even feel the greens/parmesan. "Pope pie" is now gonna be a staple in my recipe book. Really great vegetarian dish too. Also, springform pans will make your life a lot easier when it comes to popping this beast out.
I would love to go to a party where everyone baked a different dish (well, the successful ones!) and brought it. Then you get to taste all these ancient oddities while only having to go to the trouble of making one of them.
Did that recently at a Dnd Game.
Sounds like a good post COVID plan
Omgosh YEEEEES!!
I want this but I doubt I could find people in my area up for it
@@StonedtotheBones13 same
My friend makes Rosemary cookies every year for christmas. They're sweet but herby. So I imagine it's like this in general. They're really good but, to reiterate, weird
Recipe?
Are they from somewhere in europe by chance? Example, theres a Russian tarragon drink; Europe and Russia tend to make interesting use of herbs in their cooking.
@@Your-Least-Favorite-Stranger Russian savoury pies and juniper vodka were some of my favourites when I was in the Peace Corps in neighboring Kazakhstan. I had no idea there were "medicinal" vodkas before that. I thought I was being hood winked but the juniper vodka was really good.
@@sagapoetic8990 oh yeah, Gin was originally hella medicinal. Derived from Juniper and medicinal herbs;tonic water was used to treat malaria but tasted like absolute ass so they added sugar syrup and gin to make soldiers drink it.
Gin and tonic, medicinal cocktail, really cool stuff tbh.
@@Your-Least-Favorite-Stranger I had no idea about Gin's history
"I love that he calls this a 'common herb tort'; it makes it sound so _light_ and _healthy..._ and then you read what's actually _in_ it and put your cardiologist on standby."
To be fair, I think the most strictly accurate understanding of the name given the Italian is "tort of common herbs", not "common tort composed of herbs". It's a distinct difference.
Correct. It’s the herbs that are common.
Correct. It’s the herbs that are common.
Yes he said that in the video
@@TastingHistory It just needs bacon, Italian pork sausages and mushrooms and you might want to call in a priest to give you a prayer before your heart gives out.
Tomato, tomeato
the iron thing doesn't surprise me much. my doctor recommended a lucky iron fish that is just a hunk of iron you boil with some water. with use it makes your iron levels better. its still weird but not unheard of
I have one of these and use it all the time, any time I'm making soup or stew, in goes the little iron fish.
Gives you insight into health issues and concerns at that time.
In ancient Greece, it was a nail dissolved in wine for warriors that lost a lot of blood
it was a popular practice in my country to put a nail on the beans while cooking if you had an iron deficit
@@tashag7567 Interesting!
"there is no singing in this book..."
NOT WITH THAT ATTITUDE MAX!
The conclave wheel might seem silly, but sounds a bit Covid appropriate.
I believe if, memory serves, that it was a way to give privacy to the 'people of import' while they were eating while keeping 'the common folk' away from the conversations and rumors of power.
Gotta self-isolate from that heresy.
@@Jay-ln1co 🤣🤣🤣
sounds like a papal Lazy Susan
It is because during the selection of a new pope, the cardinals are completely secluded and cannot even have servants attend them. It was supposed to make them hurry up and decide, but that is not the case, they take their own sweet time. Having everything delivered in a similar manner, even today.
"Fat Cheese" is my street name.
🤣 very intimidating
The cackle that left my body was unholy 😂😂
I love that more than you'll ever know. 💜🥰
Sneaky Santa is mine
The horseshoe recipe actually makes a lot of sense: rusted iron is what you actually need to absorb iron in the body.
That is why there are similar recipes all around europe that use acidic foods to corrode iron, like diping old gardening shovels in lemon juice, or putting iron nails into an apple for a week before removing them.
Man, this whole "Is this a dessert or not?!" dilemma appears to be a very common theme with recipes from this sort of time period. People really went wild with the sugar and cinnamon back then, didn't they?
Curiously, there are some places where this kind of flavor profile survived to the modern day. Northern German dishes famously have a "broken sööt" (broken sweetness) flavor profile, where savory/salty and sweet flavors are mixed. (bean stew with pears; candied potatoes as a side to kale and sausages; sweet puddings with bacon...to name a few examples) And scandinavia as a whole loves its salted liquorice candy...
@@olenickel6013 I actually had some of that salted licorice candy once. Once. Wouldn't try it again. I'm unfortunately not a fan of licorice as is, and covering it in salmiak salt doesn't do it any favors, at least in my opinion. I do love me some salted caramel, though.
@@generalrubbish9513 It is very much an acquired taste. Personally, I couldn't live without.
@@olenickel6013 I've actually heard that licorice contains a compound that might taste completely different to different people, depending on various genetic factors that determine how your tastebuds develop, which would explain why people only ever seem to either love or hate licorice. Same goes for cilantro, actually.
So yeah, it's possible that the reason why I and many other people hate licorice is because we've never tasted its "real" flavor and never will, thanks to our genes. Bummer, huh?
Let's not forget nutmeg
I would love to see a sign on Broadway that goes, "And now for the first time, SCAPPI'S OPERA" and the performance is basically the recipes being sung aloud.
whilst being cooked on stage
@@cimmerianj8997 *Pantomimed cooked on stage
And everyone has to pantomime eating and accurately reacting to how they actually taste (one rehearsal had to involve actual cooking and sampling)
I need this now
🎶SERVE IT HOT🎶
cats the musical but its italian renaissance food singing about itself
Of course poets back then were so good at their job, if I had this dish to eat everyday, I would be an amazing poet too!
Hey, It's you
You know the channel is going big when Justin Y. Shows up.
And then along cake Zeus! I watch that video often.
And then along cake Zeus! I watch that video often.
@@TastingHistory Not often enough
Hey TastingHistory! You should do a Recipe on Nettle Pudding! It dates back to 6000BC and would be really cool for you to try to make the oldest recipe known to man.
That would need to be a spring dish as the fresh grown tips of the nettle are used. Nettles must be cooked completely to be edible. I have made a nettle risotto that was delicious. Good suggestion.
That sounds foul lol
@@surfband Yes, nettles are only good in spring, before they flower. Apparently they develop some crystals which irritate the kidneys afterwards.
@@Dr.ZoidbergPhD nettles were not an uncommon ingredient since you can gather it, and is still eaten today in places
I don’t know what is nettle pudding, but an now highly intrigued. Yes please, can we have a video on nettle pudding?
"Parmesan, the greatest of the cheeses". I see what you did there.
I'm a cardiac rehab specialist nurse and every time I see a recipe that appeals to me from the past I have this calculation going on in my head thinking 'what can I ditch to make this healthy and at the same time stay tue to the recipe'. I think it just blew a circuit!
But thanks for the ideas here. If you cut down on the butter and full fat cheese (and go for a wholemeal pastry instead of puff), you have the makings of a very nice quiche. I like the idea of including the spices but I don't tend to add sugar to anything if I can help it. We'll have to see if I can find the time to experiment ;)
"Just like I have that YA fantasy novel kickin' around in my head and ONE DAY I'm going to put it down in paper and ship it off to a publisher..." I feel called out, I'm--
I’m going to write a young adult fantasy novel about a dude that cheats on his wife and basically he dies and goes to hell for what he did
This is less rich than the modern Torta Salata but the idea is still the same in today’s Italy. There are many type of those “pies” yet my fave is this: spinach, eggs (beaten, they go in the filling), ricotta and ham. That’s it. It won’t make your cardiologist sweat and it is delish both hot and cold. I’m quite surprised on how this recipe is going strong even today, with a modified version. Thanks for the pleasant discovery of yet another ancient dish!
Seems kind of like a quiche!
Well italy does have a strong primary sector with private shops and small markets still being very much used by everyone in italy to buy stuff(although even if slowly, supermarkets et similia are taking over), which means natural ingredients are still a favourite and in turn, greens too, which aided in the survival of this recipe, albeit wuth slight modifications and variations based on region and specific recipe.
My roommates and I make torta salata at least once a month, I used to make it once a week because it lasts a couple of days and I just had a couple of consecutive days I was out and about from dawn to dusk, I'd just grab a quarter of torta with me.
wait, did you say **less** rich?
@@yungboy4216 Yeah. I *highly* doubt that.
so, in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she mentions that in cooking spinach and chard etc.. a pinch of nutmeg is added, or similar spice (ie cinnamon, clove, allspice) because it offsets the bitter flavor compounds in spinach and chard.
if you add too much spice, it does make it weird though. Like, oh this is tasty and also why is this unsweetened dish trying to taste sweet.
An old recipe for braised greens I had included exactly that. Braised because they're collards and quite... robust. Tasty anyway. It was maggie blacks medieval cookbook.
Dutch recipes put nutmeg and butter on ALL vegetables.
I just can't get enough of this channel. Fantastic.
☺️
I grew up in the SCA and some of my fondest memories were meals that included cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, etc. in savory dishes - stuffing, chicken dishes, armored turnips.... It is something you'd have to get used to but it's one of my favorite flavor profiles.
Wait, what is an armored turnip?!
@@slwrabbits turnips layered with cheese in a spiced (cinnamon, clove, nutmeg) cream. Can recommend.
@@slwrabbits I'm pretty sure Max has a video on armored turnips. Yes! found it.
th-cam.com/video/exTSP163sRg/w-d-xo.html
This was an amazing recipe. The flavours! We made it last night. We waited 20 minutes after cooking to cut it but it hadn't set. I would recommend waiting at least 30 minutes.
Scappi's paragraph of distrust sounds like a wordier version of "if you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself" :D
Make semla, the pastry that killed a Swedish King.
It’s on the schedule ☺️
That sounds cool!
TastingHistory killing a Swedish monarch is on your bucket list I see
Yes, semla 🤍 May I also recommend an examination of Eva Ekeblad and her work with potatoes. Groundbreaking science and history changing work.
Regarding the horseshoe, you can find videos on youtube of "iron fish" for treating anemia.
I believe they also recommend cooking things in a cast iron frying pan to help with anemia.
Oh wow! That part was fascinating - I’ll have to do some research. I wonder how much they knew about why it worked.
Another treatment is to take an apple and drive an iron nail into it and let it set for a while, remove the nail and give it to the patient
Minus the sugar and the spices, we still make this kind of torta. Especially when we have guests over, as an appetizer. PS: your Italian pronunciation is great!
Just so you know: You're the only channel i could find who combines my passion for history and general nerdyness with my other passion of cooking, not a common combination ;)
I wonder if the large amounts of spices and sugar are a way of showing off wealth and prestige.
That’s absolutely the reason. Next week’s episode on the history of sugar goes into exactly that.
indeed they are -- I can think of a couple traditional italian recipes off the top of my head which are basically the same recipe (greens -- beet greens, spinach, or nettle, what was in season), cheeses and eggs baked in a flaky pie crust) , minus the sugar and (most of the) spices: the genoese "Torta Pasqualina" and the emilian "Erbazzone" (which has no eggs in the filling) - both still made to this day - hearty and simple but delicious. Sugar and spices were indeed an addition for the rich (and the Pope was probably the richest of them all).
At times pepper was literally worth its weight in gold. Then remember that the spices you get today are waaayy fresher than what could be had even as recently as the 1800's - in Sacappi's time pepper would have spent 1-2 years traveling in the leaky hold of a sailing ship and/or on animal back before it even got to your local merchant.
Parmesan, the _grate-ist_ of the cheeses.
I'll see myself out now.
Jonathan Copperfall
Ba-DUM-bump 🌻
Yes, please do.
Italian is so extra I applaud your ability to pronounce this stuff
I try 😁
@@TastingHistory You very well succeed!
I think Italian words are fun to say. It's not THAT hard, for an english speaker or in general.
You want extra, go look at some georgian words.
@@vitriolicAmaranth Good point 😁🙃😆
"Cavalcade of coronary clogging constituents" is yet another of your truly remarkable choices of phraseology. Oh how I enjoy this!
I made this for Christmas dinner. It is really great. It does not really taste as rich as you might think - the gloves and other spices balance out the sugar and cheeses quite well.
An idea I've seen floated with par/pre baking a pie shell in older ovens is the over rack is a modern invention. Things would have been cooked with direct contact to the preheated stone floor of the oven, so cooking the pie on a preheated pizza stone might be fairly accurate and remove the necessity for par baking.
I'm going to try this at some point. Reminds me a lot of a spinach pie I grew up eating. Just without cinnamon and sugar. Think my mom put mace in it too.
"Indian Peacock" as an alternative name for turkey is pretty ironic, considering that peacocks are from india anyways.
I was just thinking this lol. What the heck did they call actual Indian peacocks then??
@@VannahSavage They called them peacocks (name dates back to the 13th century). Probably an early bait-and-switch tactic to sell them at a premium price. Maize btw was called Turkish Wheat in the British Isles until the 18th century.
weirdly, turkey in french and in hebrew translates to india also...
In spanish, pavo became the name for turkeys and peacocks tuned into pavos reales (Royal turkeys)
I think it’s Indian as in South American. I think Columbus brought a Turkey home and they dubbed it Indian chicken, Indian Peacock, and a variety of other names relating to both India, Peru, Turkey, and other unrelated locations.
Is it that sort of flavour that goes like: "does it really taste like this, I better take another bite"?
And before you know it you finished the whole thing and crave for more for some unspecified reason.
I had this experience with dried kumquat.
Lol now I’m wondering what dried kumquat tastes like!
Now I want to try dried kumquat. :D
@@luminalsaturn2 It's bitter with sweetness of sugar used in drying process. It's like candied orange peel on steroids :-D
BTW I love candied orange, especially with chocolate.
@@JustSpectre Dammit now I’m hungry!! XD *goes on Amazon searching for dried kumquat*
There's an Indian pickle dish that's like this, too. I think it's mango. It's awful and you can't stop eating it.
4:50 If you do not have pie weights, use normal crystal sugar instead. After baking one dish you really cannot tell the difference, but after multiple bakes, the sugar goes nice and toasty and can be used in other recipes or just to sprinkle on top of some other pastry dishes.
Scappi: 'He must be alert, patient and modest in evrything he does'.
Gordon Ramsey: 'Fuck that!'
"Fuck that, and fuck you!"
I prefer Scappi
Man, the visible confusion on your face, you have to wonder what kind of influence Scappi must have had to create something like this, or if there was no influence and he just brute-forced spices and sugar into every dish he made because the wealthy were obsessed with spices, i just did a little digging around and it seems like he did this mostly for shock value, as quoted in "The Paris Review" : It was never enough for Scappi to please diners: he set out to amuse, astonish, and confuse them with vast menus of pungent flavors and retina-searing colors, presented in displays more akin to a performance art piece than a dinner party
It's pretty much that. The spice mix itself, flavor-wise, is pretty sensible and uncontroversial; he just took it and dialled the amount up to 10 because, obviously, the Vatican was really rich and the food had to be ostentatious. If anything, it's less the spices and more the sugar that was the real luxury item. It was incredibly hard to find pure sugar in good quantity in that period, so much so that it took slavery in the colonies (which happened after this) to make it available and remotely affordable. Much of European cooking didn't even use sugar until the Renaissance (they used honey or defrutum-type syrups instead) so, when it first became commercially available (usually only to the rich), they put it in _everything_ . That's why even many savory, meaty dishes like the original mince pies are sickly sweet.
So he was shitposting? XD
@@Mephiles343 Not even close.
That reminds me of what Joseph Haydn would sometimes do with musical humor. I'm thinking of the "Surprise Symphony," when he suddenly startled the audience, just when they least expected it!
The indulgence comment sent my Lutheran soul to heaven! 🤣🤣🤣
🤣
This video convinced me: We need an opera of "Scapi's Opera," letting those voices sing out all the recipes.
Also, I really want to make this pie even though I'm a pretty bad baker.
Thanks to you for a whole term we watched your videos for a term in school in cooking for "history cooking" it was the best
I love that!
That smooth removal of the cork. Flawless......
I love the way recipes were written back in the day. It's almost fantastical.
I absolutely love this channel, your enthusiasm and humour is delightful
Thank you 😊
Thank you 😊
“Who’s that Pokémon!”
*Looks behind Max*
“It’s Maganium!”
Meganium
@@Nopointasking well he got the point across dumbass
he has evolved past the need for bayleaf
This channel is the best thing that happened to me all quarantine
Awww thank you
I made this for a dinner party last weekend - without the sugar, cloves and cinnamon. Sooooo good!
As a spice trader myself, I’m sure that the reason he put so much sugar and spices in his cooking was to make it ~fancy~ and ~expensive~
*cough* truffles *cough cough*
He missed the opportunity to say “feast like a priest”
Note that Scabbi says "as sober as possible", and not "don't drink while working"
Makes me think that people back then were tipsy all the time
Well if you lived somewhere where they drank beer instead of water...
Basically were. Watered down wine was drank for most of the day by the richer people and light beer by the peasants.
I believe it was for sanitation even the kids mixed alcohol with their water to make it safer and I also heard drinking alcohol that wasn’t watered down was seen as barbaric
not only back then haha
I mean kitchens now often have to tell their staff that.
13:11 I love this lil guy. I thought he was waving n I waved back at him just as you said "shielding his face"
If you ever say the words "pound" and "cheese" in the same sentence....you have my undivided attention
🤣
"Three grams of that cheese cost fifty pounds"
MrAranton
At £16 666.67/kg, that better be some very good cheese.
Charlie you really need to cut back on the cheese.
"to a pound of cauliflower add one tbsp of grated cheese"
Seriously this is now my favorite part of Tuesday.
Thank you! 😁
Also, perhaps a historical Welsh dish?
@@TastingHistory I have added your channel to my list of spirit lifting youtube videos to help me fight depression while dealing with chronic illness. Much love.
I think a modern iron soup recipe would just call for cooking it in a cast iron pot. Much more feasible than soaking ironwares in water.
Though I kind of want to try horseshoe soup.
I prefer to get the “iron soup” I need by just making a tomato sauce or tomato soup in a cast iron pot.
_Brunost,_ or caramelised whey cheese, is fortified with iron nowadays because it was traditionally made by boiling the whey in cast iron pots for hours, making it remarkably rich in iron for a dairy product.
@@TastingHistory Hopefully cleaned first.
I’m surprised Food Network hasn’t picked this show up yet. It’s really entertaining and well done.
They'd make Alton Brown the host.
I made a version of this for Christmas (but I changed the spices because I don't think my family would appreciate the ones in the original) and it was delicious! If anyone feels like tweaking it, you can safely taste your spice combinations if you add them to the cheese mix before adding the egg! So decadent, so delicious!
When you read the ingredients, I was like “Dang! No wonder the cardiologist needs to be on standby!” It looks delicious though!
So rich!
I really enjoyed the pictures included of Scappi's appendix! Even without them, the book would be a treasure just for how intact it is and the glimpse it provides into this renaissance life, but the pictures do make it invaluable!
as an Swiss Italian I approve your pronunciation, my friend actually tought you were of Italian origin
Thank you!
I can't believe he reached 375k subscribers in just 7 months. When I subscribed to this channel it had around 18.7k subscribers I still remember about that. But he totally deserve it and deserve more than a million subscribers.
I got to say, his reactions at the end are just so authentic and you can tell that he's passionate about the stuff he talks about! Well done with this recipe again, and loving the history too!
I love *anything* you do- you add humour & interest to everything.
I’d also love if you did an episode on the history of the stillroom, &/ or the changing ‘face’, as it were, of the kitchen.
I find it one of the most fascinating places of pre-Modern era homes.... so much so that I started a novel called ‘The Stillroom Maid/ The Poor Relation’ (it’s a work in progress).
I also wanted to mention, that I learnt a little while ago about a device called a kettlesaw hook... it made me realise I was definitely a naive idiot, in my lack of understanding for cooking in the past- *of course* people who took a whole year to cultivate their food, weren’t going to want to let it _burn_ & go to waste- they **could not** afford to do that; the kettlesaw hook was an ingenious device that allowed people to easily alter how close their pots got to the fire- that’s probably why they could have a pot on the fire all day; if the fire was low & the kettlesaw hook was closed- it was probably the equivalent of just keeping it warm.
It’s amazing what assumptions you find yourself disabused of, when you really look into things..
I'm so glad you linked this video to the Pumpion Pie video - I missed it, somehow. Thanks, Max!
Yay! This was one of my faves.
@@TastingHistory It does have vegetables - I mean, zucchini bread & carrot cake are vegetables, right? ;)
Max needs his own show, seems perfect for like PBS "Max Miller: History Moment"
@Lana Jig-maker - as Chef Walter Staib has discovered, no matter how great your PBS show is, no matter how many Emmys it wins, it can be a CONSTANT STRUGGLE to keep enough funds coming in so that filming can proceed unabated. "A Taste of History" was/is a wonderful show that won 15 Emmys and that I hope can continue into the future. www.atasteofhistory.org/
He'll get picked up.
These are so, so, so, so good. A wonderful breath of fresh air amidst the apocalypse.
I just want to reiterate how grateful I am that you have actual subtitles, not autogen ones.
*takes a bow
Oh my goodness, that’s my mother’s sausage-spinach pie! Minus the meat and with waaay too many spices, but it’s basically the same thing.
It reminds me of Greek feta pie Use feta cheese and garlic instead of 'fat cheese', spices and sugar.
It's vegetarian.
all the spice was just a rich flex of the "can afford to do this time and again" variety
Sausage spinach pie sounds so YUMMY! What type of sausage did she use?
@@polarbearsaysyummy5845 Recipe says Italian, but she typically used whatever ground/bulk sausage she has on hand.
I'm gonna be honest in my answer to your query..anything I would never try on my own (cuz, ewww), but your willing to take one for the Tasting History Team. Beside that, I enjoy watching you make anything historical..your presentation and humour are why I am here! 😁🤗
By far, the hardest ingredient in this to actually get (for me) is fresh marjoram. My local grocery store carries all sorts of greens and herbs, but they do not have fresh marjoram (I wanted it for a chicken liver risotto I made about three weeks ago). Marjoram is one of those herbs, like parsley and cilantro, which takes on a completely different flavor profile when dried.
I had to double check. I love that you change the pokemon plush in the background with every video.
Special thanks for just the lovely way you embraced the Italian accent in this episode. It’s so nice to hear the ending vowels of those beautiful words from an American speaking them.
Molto grazie!
Even today, if somebody suffers from anemia, it's not uncommon to recommend they start cooking with cast iron pans. It apparently infuses iron into the food and subsequently, into the person.
And I just know, deep in my heart that Giada di Laurentis's ears perked up at the mention of mascarpone cheese.
Caramelised whey cheese is fortified with iron because it was traditionally made by boiled the whey for many hours in a huge iron pot.
Maybe that's why that stew I made from chicken, mushroom, carrot, onion, and cream, felt so extra hearty and giving. Washing that big and heavy cast iron pot is kind of tedious though.
Funny enough, I refused when my plumber offered to change some iron pipes here at my apartement so my water wouldn't be rusty anymore (it can be yellow sometimes, but it goes after a minute of water running and there's only a residue on it).
There kinda is something to the horseshoe thing. There is a thing called a lucky fish that they have gotten regions where iron deficiency to adopt. It's a steel fish that is boiled with the soup and imparts iron ions into the food.
I had the exact same thought. Lucky iron fish. Definitely more sanitary than a used horseshoe.
Porcupine and bear are delicious depending on when harvested, if you harvest the bear when it’s eating all the berries on the mountain it’s better than pork, when it’s eating all the salmon in the river….not so much.
This is basically medieval spinach artichoke dip in a pie crust and I’m absolutely here for it
Would i totally read a YA fantasy novel written by Max? Hell yeah.
“Why procrastinate on that winter body?” needs to be on a shirt
Max needs to get a merch store ASAP
I'd love to hear you talk more about some of the reasons why so many historical recipes include what we might consider "too much" seasoning.
For one, because of the incredible distance many spices used to travel, by the time they reached their destination they would have lost a good deal of their potency.
EDIT: Turns out the line about spices covering up the taste of old meat is a tired urban legend
Another common reason was indulgence. The wealth of a mans house could easily be seen in the amount of spices he lavished his guests with. Access to imports like spices was a marker of wealth, and just like today the wealthy are often uhh... "opulent". 🤭
They would not have used their most expensive imports on spoiled meat. Everything else you say makes sense, though.
@@misscandle Yes, and when europe developed a middle class, the upper classes started abandoning spicy food as it was less and less a mark of prestige and thus developed haute cuisine which focused on maximising the flavour of the main part of the dish.
Due to quarantine, I've had a winter body all summer...
Re Iron....As a child I was very often anaemic. My aged Auntie would plunge the iron poker up in the coal fire til red hot....then plunge it into a small glass of stout...I then had to drink it. It added more iron to the stout and burned off most of the alcohol. I still use this trick when needed. Thanks. I love your vlogs. xx
I studied at the culinary school named after him, in Castel San Pietro Terme!
Also in the Padania valley (north of Italy) we have this pie which is really similar to this one, but less thicker: Erbazzone, which is the "modern version"
I am really hoping you put out a cookbook at some point. I would love to have one, historical blurbs and all
An old worn horse shoe was the most likely piece of iron people could get their hands on. Doubt he was punking anyone.
Cooking a rusty shoe in a bag inside a cauldron along with stew to add iron is something I grew up hearing about. It was considered magic by some.
The iron soup is interesting. A number of years back I read an article on the BBC about how small iron fish (lucky symbol) are handed out to impoverished families to be added to the cooking pot. Iron leaches into the food and helps prevent anaemia which can be a common health condition among certain demographics.
I LOVED Chikorita/Meganium growing up as a pokemon nerd, and it really feels fitting for this recipe haha
Re: the brown color: Did you use Swiss chard? If I use Swiss chard (which I love) in a mix of greens, the result is browner than you'd anticipate, because the chard has red pigment in it that's released when you cook it, same as beets.
I remember an Italian restaurant / cafe in the Bay Area doing a dessert torta that was basically a greens pie with sugar, nutmeg, and maybe cinnamon in it. I can't find it on their menu now, but it sounds like it's in the flavor menu of this dish-- so maybe there are some regional survivals of a sweet herb torte?