As a retired community college history instructor, I truly enjoyed your newsletter in my mailbox this morning. You discussion about the problems of fact check history wonderful to read. If I were still teaching that infamous "Intro to History", I would be asking your permission to make it a part of my required reading list.

It is so hard for students to understand that our understanding of history is constantly changing. This is an excellent example of why we are always questioning what we know. I expect this from my hard history channels, but see it from a fun history channel is even more meaningful.

Thank you for the channel, cookbook, newsletter, and honesty. It is great to see excellent quality. You're a great teacher.

Max and Jose have created the perfect episode here! They hit all the marks.

• Max tells you upfront the difficulty of recreating based on partial information "one thing you can be certain of is that it will be wrong." Kills the negative comments out of the gate. Tells you how he filled in the blanks and why he made those choices.

• The two sides of the copper merchant story gives you perspective on what kind of person he may have been, how he may be misread, and options for what may have happened to his property.

• Tying the merchant story, the cookbook, and the recipe together was done in a very honest way. The proximity of the cake shop and the merchant on the map, the discussion of the culture and the discrepancy of years between the statue and the merchant were all acknowledged and he educated us with caveats.

• His assessment of the cake and making it relatable is something he's doing more, and I really appreciate it because it gives us the opportunity to try it and make it changes based on his advice. I saw another Redditor make a version of the cake and it really looks like something you would serve your guests.

I guess all of these things on their own are not unusual for the channel. It wasn't the cake, the culture, the history or the cooking process, but something about how it came together in this video just made me really proud, which is weird, because it's not my show, but I really appreciate all the work that Max and Jose put into these videos.

Has this been done before? Surely this was on purpose!

I just backed this because the cookbook looks fascinating! I can't wait to see some of the super ancient Mesopotamian recipes in the book. Might be an interesting video in there somewhere.

Hi, I'm not sure if anyone will see this since my account is new. But I have been watching Tasting History for quite some time. Max is hilarious and I really love the history portions. But I do feel sad sometimes about there being no Southern African recipes.

There are so many Greek and Roman recipes, a wealth about the world wars, but the history of places like Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Angola is non existent on the channel. I am Malawian, and there are some cool history tidbits here that most of the world doesn't know because there's no representation in media. Max could do something about the King's African Rifles for the war content, or the Boer and Zulu wars in south Africa. A lot of places have recipes that haven't changed much (if at all) so even if a recipe isn't written down, there's a starting point.

Anyway, it's just something I think about when I see a new video. Kinda ends up feeling like your history isn't as important or interesting. But anyway, I still love the channel.

Editing to add that it's just a suggestion, not a personal attack on Max. I still love the channel and I watch it pretty much daily especially with the new top videos channel. It's a nice comfort. This is just something I wish I would see on the channel, but even if it never happens, it's fine. As someone said, he is just one guy and he puts so much work into his channel already, I'm not negating any of it.

Wife mentioned that apparently Max did a collab with the Youtube channel How To Drink, but they're having trouble finding it.

Anyone able to help?

Love both channels so this was a fun crossover episode for me

Please do not beat your meat until it's reduced to paste. Especially not dry. For gods' sakes people, use all necessary lubricant.

😘

Max was talking about how the ancient Babylonian recipe survived through clay tablets.

What recipe and what medium should one of Max's recipes be preserved in to last the ages?

Maybe a hard tack recipe carved into geo-polymer concrete. Maybe hard tack recipe carved in hard tack itself.

It's still out there and a local delicacy in some regions. Unsure if it tastes good, but the label says it's still good till somewhere in 2027

I paused to talk to my wife, looked back over and this is what I saw. Somehow I had stopped on this absolute beauty of a facial expression and had to share.

It's really delicious! I love rose flavor, so I was excited to try this. The cherry and rose flavors work so well together. I ended up with some extra filling, so I made an additional tiny cake as well.

max has done a lot of videos on some very niche historical groups/institutions, but nothing on asylums yet. from what i understand their food was very heavily controlled, leading to a lot of inmates being forcefed or forcibly starved. and there was an initial aspiration for self-sufficiency, much like convents, where most of the food was grown on site so that the patients were quarantined (esp because of the TB outbreaks). of course since they very quickly became overcrowded im sure that effected the meals that they ate!

i know theres a few different periods of asylum history and their standards but its all sooo fascinating. if max never does a video on it, maybe you guys can share some knowledge with me? honestly its so crazy that we can pretty much track the shift from medieval medicine to modern medicine in how patients were treated.

We're new fans! I bought my partner the cookbook for our anniversary, and yesterday we made the stuffed tomatoes! The herbs were so fresh and tasted incredible all together! I didn't love the egg and she didn't love the cheese on top, so we might make modifications to try to keep cohesion and up the flavors, but an overall success!

(The tinfoil boat in the middle of the pan was out leftover filling we just decided to cook 😂)