Just a reminder that there is now a channel of Tasting History marathon videos. It’s made through YouTube as a way to bring old videos back to life and to let people fall asleep to my droning voice. https://youtube.com/@tastinghistorywithmaxtopvideos?si=PMuOauonQlZLl-nb

Tasting Mythology'd be a fun miniseries!

I agree with the others before me: Tasting Mythology would be a fun series to have from time to time because of how mythology has played a role in our history.

Instructions unclear, I followed the recipe and am now a swine.

One theory I've heard is that the Illiad/Odessy's beef-centric diet was actually a mnemonic aid; these big-ass poems would be memorized and recited, so a lot of short-cuts were used to make them easier to remember, including stock phrases where similar actions in different contexts (either in different times or different poems entirely), like, say, the characters eating a meal, were given the same description every time. Poets would want as few redundant stock phrases as possible to simplify things, so eating the same food repeatedly would save the poor poet from potentially mixing up the one time their guys ate beef with the time they had mutton or venison or forgetting that the dinner scene existed.

TL;DR: Stock footage equivalents go back a long way. Roasted beef was essentially the Ancient Greek version of the Wilhelm Scream.

Max describing how Polyphemus ate two of Odysseus' men had me worried that the next thing he'd say was "For this recipe what you will need..."

“His cheese racks were loaded with cheeses…”

If I won the lotto, I wouldn’t tell anyone—but there would be signs.

Of note, the only one to recognize Odysseus was his dog Argos, who had been waiting 20 years. Old, blind, and covered in fleas, he gave a wag of his tail and then died.

"Sacrificing" a god's own cattle to that god is a wild play for a crew that's already 5 years late to get home due to divine shenanigans.

2:33 Hey, that's the Roman name! He's Hermes.

15:21 As one author noted, when these men told the stories about their own exploits, they made themselves out to sound like adventurers, warriors and heroes. But the people they robbed and the women they assaulted saw them more as marauders, murderers, thieves, bandits and rapists. If Circe ever suffered attacks by any of the sailors who found themselves on her island with a seemingly helpless woman as sexual prey, it makes sense that she would start turning them into swine. She simply couldn't trust them to behave towards her with civility.

If the moly was given by a god, does that make it a holy moly?

Tasting Mythology would be fun if only because mythological food is usually described like “Hestia’s raspberry pie was so good it made Perseus’s brain explode out of his mouth” and then Max would eat it and say something like “it’s alright.”

We got new "clacks" people!  New "clacks!"

@TastingHistory Next, you gotta find a meal in an Agatha Christi novel, and do a Tasting Mystery episode.  Maybe something eaten by Poirot.

4:20 if you have to use pre-grated cheese, wash it under cold running water and pat it dry with a paper towel first. That gets rid of the starchy powder they add to most shredded cheese that tends to throw recipes off.

Weird that Osysseyus took Moly and was immune to the mental anguish of being transformed into a pig, but when I take Molly I am transformed into a flying pig and am immune to the mental anguish of being man.

Brand new "clack clack"! Yay!

"...[I]t was miraculous, the dwarf bread.  No-one ever went hungry when they had some dwarf bread to avoid. You only had to look at it for a moment, and instantly you could think of dozens of things you’d rather eat. Your boots, for example. Mountains. Raw sheep. Your own foot."

"what we know about Trojan food."

It's made of wood and has people hiding in it.