What Kinds of Historical Foods and Recipes Does Tasting History Cover?

Updated

Tasting History covers historical foods and recipes spanning from Ancient Babylon to World War II, organized by time period and region. Each episode pairs a history segment with a recipe you can actually cook, and the range runs from familiar dishes like salsa and mustard to military rations and 18th-century preservation techniques. The site describes itself as "the cooking show for history lovers and the history show for food lovers," and the episode list bears that out: you get both the story behind a food and a version of the recipe to make yourself.

The range of periods and regions

The catalog is deliberately broad. Based on the episode listings, coverage includes:

Region Periods covered Example episode
Mexico 16th & 19th century The Aztec Origins of Salsa
Italy 20th century (WWII) What Italian Soldiers Ate in World War II
Rome, France, British Isles Ancient, Medieval, 19th century Making 2,000 Years of Mustard
British Isles 18th century Potted Meat – How to Preserve Leftovers in the 18th Century
Caribbean 20th century Who Invented the Piña Colada?
North Africa & the Near East Ancient History's Worst Copper Merchant & His 4000 Year Old Cake
Italy Medieval What Grocery Shopping Was Like in the Middle Ages

The stated scope runs "from Ancient Babylon to WWII," so expect ancient, medieval, early modern, and 20th-century material rather than a single era.

What a typical episode contains

Two things usually come together in each entry:

  • Historical context — the origin, evolution, or daily-life setting of a food. The salsa episode, for instance, is described as "an overview of the history of salsa," and the piña colada episode traces "the history and evolution" of the drink.
  • A workable recipe — often more than one. The salsa episode includes "both an Aztec version and a recipe made with dried chiles from 1831." The mustard episode draws recipes from Ancient Rome, Medieval France, and Victorian England. The WWII Italian ration episode offers "two recipes that would have been part of the garrison ration."

Some episodes are built around a single historical figure or document: the Ea-Nāşir episode uses the life of a "shady copper merchant" as the frame for an ancient date cake, and the potted meat episode works from "a recipe from 1747."

The "delicious and sometimes horrific" angle

The site's own description flags that not everything is appetizing: it promises "history's delicious and sometimes horrific foods and their stories." In practice this means the catalog mixes crowd-pleasers (salsa, piña colada, mustard) with foods whose interest is more about survival, preservation, or military logistics than flavor — 18th-century potted meat and WWII garrison rations being the clearest examples. If you're browsing for something to actually cook for dinner, the drink and condiment episodes are the safer starting points; if you're in it for the history, the ration and preservation episodes carry more of the story.

Where to start

The site surfaces its newest episodes first, each tagged with region and century, so you can scan the list and pick by era or place rather than by dish. There's also a companion cookbook, The Tasting History Cookbook, available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and a newsletter signup for new episodes. If you want a single entry that shows the format at full stretch, the mustard episode — three recipes across roughly two thousand years — is a good demonstration of how far one episode will range.