Eats History

Looking for a last-minute dessert to impress your Valentine… but don’t want to spend three hours in the kitchen?

This Byzantine cheesecake might be your move.

It’s one of my most viral and most made recipes ever, and the reason is almost suspiciously simple. Ricotta. Egg. Honey. A bit of flour. A pinch of salt. That’s literally it.

No crust. No water bath. No complicated technique. Just ingredients that have been around for over a thousand years. Versions of this style of baked cheese dessert show up in Byzantine and late Roman culinary traditions, where fresh cheese, honey, and eggs were common staples. It’s simple, elegant, and feels ancient in the best way.

And here’s the thing… it tastes like something far more complex than it is. Light but rich. Slightly sweet from the honey. Creamy with a delicate structure that feels somewhere between cheesecake and custard. It pairs beautifully with berries, a drizzle of extra honey, or just eaten as is.

If you want to make something that feels thoughtful, historical, and wildly easy, this is it.

Here’s the recipe: eatshistory.com/cheesecake-recipe-from-the.../

1 day ago | [YT] | 788

Eats History

A follower hit my inbox in desperate need for Valentine's Day...

Just so you all know, I'm always here to help!!! 😉

1 day ago | [YT] | 988

Eats History

This might be one of the most underrated chicken dishes I’ve made all year… and it’s 2,000 years old.

FULL RECIPE: eatshistory.com/parthian-chicken-pullum-particum/

While testing recipes for my upcoming Ancient Roman cookbook, I decided to really put my garum to the test. So I made Parthian Chicken from Apicius using bone-in chicken thighs and a proper Roman spice blend.

First, I seared the thighs in olive oil until the skin turned deeply golden and crisp. Then, in that same pan, I bloomed a ground mixture of long pepper, dried lovage (celery seed works too), and caraway. The aroma that hits you is unlike modern Italian or French cooking. It’s warmer. Slightly sweet. A little resinous from the long pepper. It feels eastern, which makes sense since the Romans associated these spice profiles with Parthia and the East.

After the spices opened up, I deglazed with sweet white wine and stirred in a tablespoon of garum. And this is where it all changes. Garum doesn’t make it taste fishy. It makes it deep. Intensely savory. Almost like anchovy and soy sauce had an ancient Mediterranean ancestor. It rounds everything out and gives the sauce this layered complexity you don’t expect from such simple ingredients.

I added the chicken back in and let it braise gently before reducing the sauce down until glossy and spooning it over the thighs. The final result is rich but not heavy. Slightly sweet from the wine, aromatic from the spices, and deeply umami from the garum. It tastes refined, but still rustic enough that you can imagine it being served at a Roman banquet.

Garum is going to be a major player in this cookbook. This dish convinced me why.

1 day ago | [YT] | 552

Eats History

This salsa was being made nearly 200 years ago, and it looks and tastes shockingly familiar to our modern tomato salsa.

This is an authentic Mexican salsa recipe from 1831, pulled straight from El Cocinero Mexicano, one of the first cookbooks ever published in Mexico after independence. Long before blenders, bottled sauces, or restaurant menus, this is how salsa was actually made: tomatoes roasted over heat, peeled and crushed by hand, mixed with chiles, raw onion, vinegar instead of lime, a touch of oil, oregano, and finished with sliced avocado.

What surprised me most is how little has changed. The technique is slower. The texture is more rustic. But the flavor is unmistakably salsa. Bright, balanced, and grounded in the ingredients themselves rather than intensity or excess.
I recreated this recipe exactly as it would have been made in the early 19th century and wrote up the full history and method on the site.

👉 Full recipe here: eatshistory.com/authentic-mexican-salsa-recipe.../

1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 1,117

Eats History

There are certain foods that instantly take you back to being a kid, and for me, Watergate Salad is one of them.

I remember seeing this pale green bowl show up at family gatherings, holidays, and potlucks, usually tucked between the deviled eggs and whatever casserole someone’s aunt brought. I didn’t know what it was called back then, and I definitely didn’t know why it was green. I just knew it was cold, fluffy, sweet, and somehow always gone by the end of the night. It felt less like a recipe and more like a tradition.

As I got older, I realized Watergate Salad is a perfect snapshot of mid-20th-century American food culture. It comes out of the era of “dessert salads,” when whipped toppings, canned fruit, marshmallows, and instant mixes ruled the kitchen. Pistachio pudding mix hit the market in the 1970s, and a simple pistachio-pineapple dessert took off almost overnight. Around the same time, the Watergate scandal dominated headlines, and somewhere along the way, the name stuck. The dish itself is sweet and innocent, but it ended up forever tied to one of the most infamous political moments in U.S. history.

That contrast is what makes it so fascinating to me. It’s nostalgic, a little strange, unapologetically American, and deeply tied to memory. Whether you grew up eating it or you’re seeing it for the first time, Watergate Salad tells a story about convenience, culture, and the way food sneaks into our lives without us even noticing.

I recreated the original Watergate Salad recipe and wrote up the full history behind it on the site.

👉 Full recipe here: eatshistory.com/the-original-watergate-salad-recip…

If this was part of your childhood too, I’d love to hear where you remember it from.
— Donnie

1 week ago | [YT] | 857

Eats History

Could you eat like a Swashbuckling 17th Century Pirate for the entire day?

Full Recipe: eatshistory.com/how-to-eat-like-a-pirate-what.../

The romantic image of pirate feasts stacked with roast meat and overflowing rum barrels is mostly fiction. In reality, pirates ate almost exactly what most British sailors ate during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Their diet mirrored that of British naval and merchant crews, shaped by logistics rather than pleasure. Food needed to survive heat, humidity, long storage, and months without resupply.
Written evidence from the period consistently reinforces this.

Naval provisioning records from the late 1600s show rations dominated by ship’s biscuit, dried peas, and salted meat. William Dampier, writing in A New Voyage Round the World in 1697, describes pirate life as nutritionally repetitive, with food valued for durability rather than enjoyment. Pirates did not eat differently because they were pirates. They ate differently only when circumstance allowed.

One interesting exception was salamagundi. This was not everyday food, but was a celebration dish. A cold, assembled meal made from whatever ingredients were available after a successful capture or landfall.

The structure of salamagundi appears clearly in pirate-era writing. By the early eighteenth century, English dictionaries defined salmagundi as a medley or hotchpotch, reflecting its culinary and cultural meaning.

So, how did it taste?

In reality, pirates spent roughly ninety percent of their time eating biscuits and porridge. This recreated day represents a rare feast rather than daily life. The pease porridge genuinely surprised me. Paired with salt pork, it had a deep, satisfying flavor. Simple, but effective. Salamagundi felt like a salad’s older, more rustic cousin. Bright, salty, and communal.

The sea biscuits were outright unpleasant. Even soaked, they were dry, dense, and joyless. There is no romance there. Only endurance.

Taken as a whole, this full day of pirate eating earns a 5.7/10. Not terrible.

Occasionally enjoyable. Mostly repetitive. Historically honest.

1 week ago | [YT] | 826

Eats History

Coming soon...

1 week ago | [YT] | 583

Eats History

Officially kicking off recipe testing for my hardcover cookbook, Ancient Roman Recipes (set to release in early 2027).

Have quite a busy month ahead of me but extremely excited to perfect these 2,000-year-old recipes! Let’s get cookin

1 week ago | [YT] | 718

Eats History

Would You Try Renaissance Pasta for a Pope?

In 1570, the most powerful kitchens in Europe were not royal courts, but the Vatican. At the center of that world stood Bartolomeo Scappi, personal chef to the pope, whose cookbook Opera gives us a rare look at what elite Renaissance food actually looked like.

This chicken and bone marrow pasta was not comfort food. It was intellectual cuisine. Finely chopped capon enriched with custardy bone marrow, ricotta, saffron, rosewater, sugar, and imported spices, all wrapped in thin handmade pasta. Sweet and savory lived side by side, because refinement meant balance, not restraint. Even the pasta shape was different from what we know today, closer to large ravioli than modern tortellini, designed to showcase the filling rather than the fold.

What makes this dish truly striking is its cost. When you translate Renaissance prices into modern terms using wages and purchasing power, a single serving of this pasta would represent roughly $1,500–$3,000 in today’s money. Saffron, spices, sugar, and capon were global luxury goods. Serving this dish was a statement of power, education, and access, not excess.

This is what eating at the height of the Renaissance actually looked like. Thoughtful, layered, symbolic, and deeply intentional.

Full recipe and historical breakdown on the blog:

eatshistory.com/luxury-renaissance-pasta-recipe...…

#history #pasta

1 week ago | [YT] | 573

Eats History

The favorite dish of the man who conquered Constantinople wasn’t decadent. It was strategic.

Full Recipe: eatshistory.com/mutancana-recipe-the-favorite.../

When Sultan Mehmed II breached the walls of Constantinople in 1453, he didn’t just change history. He cemented the Ottoman Empire as a world power. And his tastes at the table reflected that same mindset.

One dish closely associated with Mehmed’s reign is mutancana. A lamb stew built on balance. Meat for strength. Dried fruit for preservation. Honey and vinegar for a controlled sweet-and-sour edge. Light spice, not excess. This wasn’t indulgence. It was food that could feed a court, sustain campaigns, and still feel worthy of an emperor.

Ottoman cuisine prized harmony over heaviness. Mutancana shows that perfectly. It’s rich without being overwhelming, refined without being fragile. A dish designed for an empire on the move.

History isn’t just written in battles and walls.
Sometimes it’s written in what kept conquerors fed.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 858