Eats History

A nice mix of adventure, medieval cooking, and some family heritage today in Scotland.

I took a day trip from Edinburgh to the town of Stirling, which has one of the best-preserved castles in all of Scotland, with a ton of history (and a medieval kitchen) to boot.

But on a more personal note, before this trip, my mom did some ancestry digging, and my grandpa's family traces its origins to here in Stirling and the nearby town of Falkirk. Due to poor working conditions and the promise of the New World, they hopped on a boat to the Michigan area in the early 20th century, and the rest is history!

Slowly, their children's children lost their accents (as well as their addiction to HP sauce) and became Americanized.

Everyone has their own belief about the afterlife, but I'd like to think somewhere beyond, a pub full of old Scots are raising a pint for one of their descendants visiting the ol' stomping grounds. (At least the thought of it paints a fun picture).

-Donnie

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4 days ago | [YT] | 1,697

Eats History

Recreate the classic doughboy mess-hall staple that fed frontline troops during the Great War.

Canned corned beef, diced potatoes, and a fried egg made for a hearty, comforting camp meal in the misery of the trenches.

Try it out: eatshistory.com/ww1-recipe-corn-willy-hash-eating-…

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,386

Eats History

This was my favorite dessert of my whole trip to Poland.

Full Recipe: eatshistory.com/kremowka-recipe-polands-papal.../

The kremówka, Poland's papal cream cake, is one of those foods whose story tells you everything about a country. Two layers of shattered puff pastry enclosing a cold, thick, impossibly smooth vanilla cream, dusted generously with powdered sugar until it looks like a small snowdrift. It began as an Austrian import, the Viennese Cremeschnitte brought south to Galicia during the Habsburg partition of Poland in the 19th century, adapted by Polish bakers who made it their own while the country they lived in temporarily ceased to exist.

In Wadowice in 1936 it found its most important address, a confectioner from Vienna named Karol Hagenhuber who set up shop on the corner of the market square and whose recipe, made with all natural ingredients and no alcohol regardless of what later legends claimed, became the thing the young Karol Wojtyła and his school friends saved up to buy.

When that young man returned to Wadowice as Pope in June 1999, an elderly man visibly moved by the sight of the square he had grown up in, he looked toward the corner where Hagenhuber's shop once stood and said the words that changed a regional pastry into a national institution. And there was a cake shop. After the matura we went for kremówkas. That we somehow survived all those kremówkas. The crowd laughed. The next morning headlines across Poland were running the story. Within days every bakery in the country had renamed their kremówka after the Pope and pilgrims were flooding into Wadowice to eat one in the square where he had stood. For millions of Poles navigating the economic and cultural uncertainties of the post-communist 1990s, an affordable slice of vanilla cream cake became a way of feeling connected to the man who represented the best of what Poland could be.

I spent a month in Kraków on the Eats History Project and had my first slice at Cukiernia Wadowice in the city. I now completely understand how someone eats eighteen in one sitting. Back at the Airbnb I made the home cook version with pre-bought puff pastry and vanilla pudding powder, the shortcut that Polish babcias quietly use while professional bakers pretend not to notice. It was a 9.1 out of 10. If you ever get to Poland, get the real thing. If you want to make something extraordinary at home tonight, make this.

Full history and the complete recipe on the blog now.

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,488

Eats History

Portokalopita is Greece's traditional orange phyllo cake and it is one of the most remarkable desserts I have encountered anywhere in my travels.

The name comes from portokali, the Greek word for orange, which itself derives from Portugal, because the sweet orange arrived in the Mediterranean via Portuguese traders in the 15th century. Every time a Greek says the word orange they are unknowingly referencing a Portuguese sailor's cargo hold. The cake named after it carries that etymology in every slice.

The cake was born from frugality. Greek home cooks, most likely in Crete where orange groves have been cultivated since the Byzantine era, discovered that the dried out leftover phyllo sheets from making spanakopita and tiropita, the broken pieces that couldn't be used for anything else, could be crumbled into a batter of eggs, Greek yogurt, olive oil and orange juice and baked into something extraordinary. The syrup poured over the hot cake, cold orange syrup meeting the warm phyllo and yogurt batter, penetrates slowly through the entire structure overnight. What comes out of the refrigerator the following morning is deeply, almost aggressively orange, sweet without being cloying, with a texture that is completely unlike any cake baked from conventional flour. Part bread pudding. Part custard. Entirely its own thing.

The key things I learned making this at home: the phyllo must be completely dried before it goes in. The syrup must be cold when it hits the hot cake. And the cake must rest overnight before you touch it. The version you eat the day after baking is a significantly better cake than the one you pulled from the oven.

I rated it 9.4 out of 10 and serve it cold with a freddo espresso which is the only correct way to eat it and I will not be taking questions. Full history and complete recipe linked below:

eatshistory.com/portokalopita-recipe-the-story.../

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1,980

Eats History

This past week I spent the afternoon cooking with about 20 Polish grandmothers in a village outside Lublin. We didn't speak the same language. It didn't matter.

The women I cooked with are members of the Koła Gospodyń Wiejskich, the Rural Housewives' Circles of Poland, an organisation that has been preserving Polish rural food traditions since 1866. They showed me handwritten recipe notebooks from their grandmothers, some over a hundred years old, with recipes that survived two world wars and forty years of communist rule because these women kept passing the knowledge to each other generation by generation. I showed them the ancient Roman cookbook I am currently writing.

They taught me how to make placki ziemniaczane, traditional Polish potato pancakes, and the technique was nothing like what I expected. The pressing of the liquid from the grated potato is the step that makes or breaks this dish and these women were not interested in my early attempts to cut that step short. When I stopped pressing they gestured me back to the cloth. When I stopped again they gestured harder. You press until you think you are done and then you press again. The resulting pancake is crisp at the edges and tender in the middle in a way that an insufficiently pressed one never achieves. Served with a Polish forest borowik mushroom cream sauce and kompot, the fruit drink that is somewhere between juice and tea and which Americans have no equivalent for and should immediately adopt.

Full history of the Koła Gospodyń Wiejskich, the technique the babcias taught me, and the complete recipe with the borowik mushroom cream sauce on the blog now:

eatshistory.com/authentic-polish-potato-pancakes..…

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1,549

Eats History

The first month of the Eats History Project has been a success.

The goal of this long journey is to showcase the historical cuisine and culture of a country in one month, so the viewer at home can cook a meal, learn the history of another place, and maybe get some travel inspiration themselves outside of the tourist hotspots. It's like a cooking show, travel doc, and History Channel episode tied into one.

This past month, Polish babcias (grandmas) have challenged me to vodka shots and told their stories of the communism era; I've fired cannons from old forts on the border of Ukraine and Poland (with a few test sms drone warnings from the war next door), cooked for a king in his palace, cooked in a medieval salt mine and crypt, chilled with sheep in the mountains, got my hands dirty with flour with some regional baked goods, and met some fantastic chefs keeping the regional cuisine alive.

Over this past month, 15 historical recipe has been recorded and documented for the viewers step-by-step; now is the fun part of editing and producing all of these videos.

There is some great content for you all on the way!

Thank you for everything, Poland. Scotland is up next...

-Donnie

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3 weeks ago | [YT] | 1,871

Eats History

Today I cooked for a king.

This would have to be one of my favorite experiences so far in my life, I was invited to the palace of King John III Sobieski, the 17th century King of Poland, who was extremely famous for defeating the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Vienna, preserving Christianity in Europe for centuries to come.

We cooked directly from Compendium Ferculorum, one of the earlist royal Polish cookbooks from 1682, and made the iconic Polish soup Rosół (a rich meat broth simmered for hours, spiced with ginger, lime, and saffron for a royal finish, with an assortment of ingredients to try with it, usually eaten in most modern houses with noodles), and a traditional 17th-century dessert of waffle cones on a tree of rosemerry and whipped cream on the base.

A video will be coming out soon so you can try the recipes out yourself.
I got to check out the palace afterwards: beautiful architecture, paintings, and it really captured the spirit of 17th century Poland.

-Donnie

Thank you for the help putting this together ‪@polandtravel‬

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3 weeks ago | [YT] | 1,722

Eats History

I just spent a month living in Kraków, Poland. I attended the International Pierogi Festival. I took pierogi making classes. I ate late night pierogi at milk bars in Kazimierz. I browsed every vendor at Stary Kleparz. And I am now fully convinced that pierogi ruskie is one of the greatest things humans have ever invented.

Full Recipe: eatshistory.com/authentic-pierogi-ruskie-recipe...…

The history of pierogi is considerably more interesting and more contested than most people realise. The Saint Hyacinth legend says that a 13th century Dominican friar named Jacek Odrowąż brought the recipe to Poland from Kievan Rus, now Ukraine, after a miraculous storm destroyed all the crops and the grateful people made pierogi from the regrown harvest. The connection was so embedded in Polish culture that it produced one of the most common Polish expressions still used today: Święty Jacku z pierogami, Saint Hyacinth with his pierogi, said in moments of surprise.

The historical reality is that the dumpling technique almost certainly arrived in Central Europe via the Mongol and Tatar invasions of 1240 to 1241, tracing back through Turkic manti traditions to China, where archaeological evidence of dumplings dates back 1,700 years. The word pieróg itself may be connected to the Turkic word börek, meaning stuffed food, which is a linguistic breadcrumb pointing directly to Central Asia. A dumpling that started in China, traveled through the Mongol Empire, arrived in Ukraine and became Poland's national dish.

The version I made after a month of living with this food is pierogi ruskie. Potato and Polish farmers cheese filling with caramelized onion mixed through, sealed in a thin hand-rolled dough, boiled and then pan-fried in butter until golden, topped with more caramelized onion, melted butter and fresh chives. After some practice and a lot of technique work in a Kraków pierogi class, these came out as genuinely one of the best things I have made for this channel. There is no single documented historical recipe here. This is Polish grandmother technique passed down orally through generations, which in its own way is a more legitimate form of food history than any cookbook could provide. 9.7 out of 10.

Have you ever made pierogi from scratch? Give these ones a try...

-Donnie

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 1,788

Eats History

After this past month of trying an insane amount of pierogi here in Krakow, I finally took a stab at an authentic recipe.

This is pierogi ruskie, hand-made dough filled with a mixture of potatoes and tvorog (Polish farmer's cheese), topped with slow-cooked carmalized onions and chives.
Let's just say I was extremely proud of how these turned out, and the recipe video will be coming soon (all about the history of pierogi)...

-Donnie

eatshistory.com

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 2,318

Eats History

Big collab in the works.... ‪@tableofgods‬

Btw his cookbook is available for preorder!

www.tableofgods.com/

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4 weeks ago | [YT] | 1,176