History Teacher's First Reaction to Max Miller | What did WWII Soldiers Eat?

hey there I'm Mr Terry I'm my high school history teacher welcome back to another history teach reacts video So lately I've been getting a lot of suggestions from the channel tasting history with Max Miller but rather than go with just the most recent stuff that's been coming out that usually gets suggested to me I went into the catalog to find the most popular video and it seems right at my alley cuz it's called what did World War II soldiers eat by the way if you like this Channel right now currently on my channel on the Community page there is the current poll to FasTrack a video to get on my list to check out and that's his most recent video which is about what miners ate during the gold rush so be sure to go to the Community page when you go to my channel and enable notifications because I put up lots of polls to get videos on the channel now this original video is going to be linked down below please support Max big shout out to all the people that are currently Patron pledgers or our YouTube channel members because you'll get to see them between when I upload the video and when I schedule it to go public all right let's get started all right so I don't know what the style of this channel is I mean obviously from the title it looks like it's about food history which is awesome history I'm a big guy I love food this should be cool and I mean obviously super popular so yeah um let me know let me know what you think got my World War II stuff on we're ready to go few things improve troop morale better than a hot meal even if the name of that hot meal War like this favorite Frontline breakfast from World War II creamed dried beef on toast better known as on a shingle so thank you to my patreon patrons for I mean I'm not going to lie this looks like you know like biscuits and gravy is it that type of of gravy I love that gravy with some beef that doesn't look that bad to me beef on toast better known as on a shingle so thank you to my patreon patrons for constantly supporting this channel especially on videos like this that will probably get demonetized because I keep saying on a shingle this time on tasting we're getting demonetized a lot now those Patron and YouTube memberships they go a long way they're keeping us alive right now so I am releasing this video on Veterans Day or Armistice Day or Remembrance Day depending on where you are and every Veterans Day I remember my grandpa Gramps who used to tell me stories about when he was in World War II he was part of the Medical Corp and he would tell me these stories about when he was over in England and France and and even in Germany just after the end of the war and I credit those stories with giving me my love for history because here I am a seven-year-old playing with his micro machines and this old guy about stuff happened to a s-y old so long ago but the way that he told the stories was so engaging and and made it so personal that I I was entranced and and I just loved him I couldn't get enough and uh so I guess you can kind of say that the reason that tasting history is a thing is because of those stories that my veteran Gramps used to tell me nice any of you have similar situations like that you know history has always been such an intrinsic thing with me my parents will tell you when I was a little kid I got even like elementary school and stuff I was always into history and geography by time I was a sophomore probably in high school I was already about I remember being a sophomore being like yeah I'm GNA I'm going to stay in history I'm going to keep teaching it but I love hearing those stories my grandfather was um Switzerland and uh during World War II now Switzerland didn't fight but all people in Switzerland are military train you have to be in the military and he was in the military at that time and they were very much on you know high alert and he used to say where they were stationed was right where the Border where Switzerland and France and uh Germany meet and you could literally see the war basically from rooftops it's crazy to hear about that then my my father was a marine so you know um appreciate you know all that all that kind of stuff but and so I figure what better way honor my grandpa here on this Veterans Day than to make a dish that he might have eaten when he was in the military even if he very purposefully left it out of the stories he was telling his 7-year-old grandson because there was no way my Grandpa would ever say the phrase on a shingle or is the recipe now big difference though is going to be eating okay what you eat during wartime and what you just eat in the military right I'd heard that you can get fed quite well in the military now if you're out of the trenches of World War I or here in World War II that's not going to be so good from the US war department in 1944 called it creamed dried beef which for six gallons called for 7 lbs of dried beef a pound of fat melted flour evaporated milk water and pepper what's what's in the like biscuits and gravy like that white country gravy what are the ingredients for that is it similar just's got to be some butter in there too into small pieces mix melted fat and flour stir until smooth mix milk and water heat add gradually to flour mixture stirring salt and there you're beef and pepper heat to Boiling Point reduce heat and simmer about 10 minutes note serve hot over toast now obviously since this makes six gallons or 100 servings I'm going to make a reduced quantity today but I do think it's really interesting how they give the quantities in the original recipe besides pounds and gallons they also measure in number 56 Dippers like one pound of fat would be a half number 56 Dipper because you wouldn't often have a scale on hand when you out in the field but you would probably have the standard quart sized number 56 dipp and the W on the so standard that you could use measurements as well another book specifies one cup of liquid comes to the top of the date figure two cups to the top of the manufacturer's letter and three cups of liquid will come to the top of the US letter that's pretty that's ay of course have no Dipper and I'm not making six gallons worth so for a smaller portion what you'll need is just over half a pound or 250 Gams of chipped beef so this that looks like salami it is just over half a pound kind of that looks good under 250 g of chipped beef so this chipped beef or dried beef and they come now in these little jars you'll need four for for this recipe and it's basically ground very salted beef that is then pressed into a form dried and then sliced very thinly and when you open it good on a sandwich this prob stink right kind of reminds me of the smell of a a can of dog food when you open it but it it that that smell goes away that's any me up like this and they kind of remind me of Pringles um yeah so this is what you need for this recipe then 2 tbsp or 30 G of fat this recipe is not speciic in the cooks manual from 1910 which may be the earliest recipe for this dish it says butter is preferred so that's what I'm using a heaping thir cup or 40 G of flour 1 and 1/2 cup 350 m of evaporated milk 1 and 1/2 cups or 350 mL of water 1 teaspoon of black pepper and a few slices of bread for toast so the recipe from 1910 which was probably used during World War I also includes parsley and uses beef stock it also uses 15 lbs of chipped beef for 60 servings rather than seven for servings like the World War II version so it was 4 oz per serving and then by World War II it was just over 1 oz per serving thought that was interesting but to make the World War II now anything you get too too much of you're going to get sick of and if it's one of those things where it's like you ate this every day for breakfast or whatever like that's going to get old version of SOS chop the chipped beef into small pieces and then peel everything apart and put it into a bowl and soak it with some water some old recipes say that the beef is so salty that it needs to be scalded in boiling water I don't think the modern version is as salty so if you soak it for 15 or 20 minutes that's let's get some more history going here why so much salt for preservation right he was saying this stuff was coming out of can that's something that needs to be preserved for a long time this is one of the biggest reasons going back to the spice trade go back to the 1600s 1400s or uh 1400s 1500s 16th century you know and Europeans you know going to get spices and things like that one of the things that were used although Europeans you know what had salt but like other spices and things was for preservation of meats right we I think take advantage take for granted I should say the fact that we can preserve food so well because we have refrigeration we have freezers but again think about that centuries ago and how valuable things would be that would be able to preserve something like meat because you do not want meat to go bad meat's a delicacy right the further you go back in history the more of delicacy it's going to be and you got to be able to preserve it otherwise it becomes so wasteful so that makes sense then why I guess the meat would be so salty while it does mix the evaporated milk and water together and heat it over low heat then separately melt the butter over low heat in a pot and add the flour and whisk together let it cook for about a minute then slowly pour in the hot milk mixture you want to constantly be stirring and let it cook for 3 or 4 minutes while I got a question I don't know if a lot of your Foodies and the ones that are probably watching this what is evaporated milk what does that mean how is that different than like the milk like what have you evaporated the the water out of it or what then whisk in the pepper then finally add the chipped beef then bring the pot to a boil and so it just simmers for about 10 minutes and it'll thicken up even more that time now one of the things that actually inspired me to do a video for Veterans Day was a conversation that I was having with an old friend that I used to know in New York who now runs a website called veteran life.com the site is dedicated to providing veterans and military families with different resources and benefits that they might not otherwise know of and it actually also has a lot of wonderful things for civilians because I am about as civilian as you can get and yet I spent time on this site because they have a whole area of military history I read a wonderful story about the Navy's ice cream barges from World War II they were basically Giant floating refrigerators in the Pacific that provided ice cream to the sailors and I think that that is I think it's so important to you know people at War stuff getting food cuz just think about how crappy things are you know it's like it's like one of the few things that maybe can give you a few moments of joy you know what I mean you're out there depending on the war and all this stuff you're totally expecting to die think about World War I World War II it's like you've already mentally accepted you're going to die you're just you have that uh going on and then you're far from your family and you're not you're you're going to be hungry anyways and it's like one of those few moments where you can just like enjoy something and so yeah I I do I think it's so important going to have to be the topic for a video in the future but for now let's talk talk about the men who would have been making that ice cream or more specifically on a shangle is that like one of the one of the jobs like you you you know you have all those jobs uh that you get assigned whatever in the military it's like you got assigned the ice cream Chef on the ice cream party barge hey heck yeah all right what we so we're never discussing a topic as large as American Military so I was wondering how much of this food how much there are so many variables and situations that there are going to be ceptions to everything and exceptions to the Exceptions there was fighting going on all over the world and there were different levels of preparedness at any given time so even the military's best-laid plans often went arai but in general this is what things should have been like if you were cooking in a field kitchen typically each company of about 150 to 200 men would have their own field kitchen with maybe a half a dozen cooks with some help they could set up the entire Kitchen in under 30 minutes the goal was to have the kitchen close to the men that they were feeding but depending on a lot of things terrain the proximity to the enemy sometimes they could be 100 yards back or 10 miles back yeah that would suck you have some delicious meal going but it's wafting in the air the the the great Aroma of it is like it's giv off your position and all of a sudden the enemy is like they're over there you know and then blown up that would suck the nice thing about being further back is then they could often team up with with three or four other kitchens to become a battalion-sized kitchen also being further back meant that they would be L likely to be the target of enemy fire so that they could maybe do some cooking during the day because if they were too close then all the cooking had to be done before Sun up and after Sundown now the kitchen could be anywhere from a nearby building tent to the back of a truck but they all had the same equipment most important was the gasoline powered m1937 Range gas versatile and could perform all of the functions of I'm just Imaging like you started with a lawn mower right just and then it goes up like hey you do what you got to do you're going to have fuel there look at that look got a couple turkeys or something going there going to what deep fry it any Stove Top and oven in a normal kitchen they were of course rather compact but usually a company had two or three training video from World War II said take a couple of vales cover them with clay and bake your bread now some of the other equipment included large immersion heaters that could heat up or even a huge tub of water rather quickly that could be used then for cleaning dishes or for making food and for taking a hot bath preferably using new water and speaking of water when another thing we would take for granted today huh another thing we take for granted is just to be able to be clean how rare and how opportun take that would be you know drinking water it needed to be purified and then was kept in a Lister bag This was meant to distribute purified water for up to 100 men cans these were insulated containers usually 7 gallons and meant to hold three or four inserts like a giant thermos they kept things hot or cold and were often used when the kitchen was far from the front line food could be prepared at the kitchen and then put into the containers into the mermite can put on a truck and brought to the front line to serve the men but if you were doing this you really wanted to pay attention to which mermite can you took because some were labeled with etto blood bank with blood meant for transfusions given near the front lines mixing those up would be a mistake you would not make twice but assuming that you got the right can what kind of meals are you Lo what what are we eating here is this blood pudding them with well officially it's the you have very little say in it especially starting around World War II there was a big push to make sure that the TR groups were getting enough of the right minerals and vitamins and so dishes and entire menus were created by nutritionists back in Washington by the way this is such a stark difference between World War I and World War II the starvation that was going on in World War I was just crazy was so rampant um and World War II it did seem like there was much more attention to again food and food is a huge part of warfare a lot of people forget about that it's it's just as important as the resources of say having oil you know you got to have food and World War I um World War I with the trench warfare is so limited and what they can have and they were again they were you know these stories of them having to you know they kill the mice that are feasting on the Dead Infected bodies you know in the trenches and they were so hungry that they would kill a mouse and skin it and and eat it and stuff like that and just think about how bad of a soldier you're going to be when you already have the psychological things your exhausted you don't sleep you don't eat and how important that was for morale and morale is such an important part of warfare right things get too bad it's possible to get too bad you're going to have mutinies and something like starving and not having food and just having the all the health benefits that come from that it's going to play with that it's part of winning the war and in one video from 1943 about the nutrition program they talk about how they started out by examining the diets of the enemy armies the Japanese were supposed to to have extreme energy given to them by a simple handful of rice and the Nazis are supposed to by the way this is also why you're going to hear of of stories of them you know getting these uh getting soldiers on drugs to get them hyped up coke meth whatever and uh just so they can be able to to to be able to stay awake and stay alert cuz if you're losing all your energy from not having nutritious food it's like there's your next option and that happened a lot in World War II have a Superman vitamin pil though the attempt at replicating the effects of this pill with mere vitamins did not really work because actually this superhuman pill was something called pervitin which had methampetamine that would give the Germans a lot of energy shortlived some say that the BL couldn't have happened without pervitin because some soldiers had to stay up for days at a time have you guys heard of that stereotype of like the meth fueled you know uh uh Nazis Hitler being one of them like that was a real thing but while vitamin B might have not replicated the effects of pervitin the military did put together a topnotch diet plan for the cooks out in the field to follow menus for dinner could include Chicken alak King with leonise carrots and an apricot upside down cake for dessert and all of the ingredients would be dried or salted or otherwise preserved and shipped all the way from the US to the front lines all over the world all infrastructure important ingredients never actually made it to where they were going or at least not in a timely fashion so you didn't have everything at once so the field Cooks usually had to Cobble something together with what they had available though depending on their location that could be something pretty nice depending on where you were like like a job that would be very rewarding you know obviously you have your Frontline people and stuff but if you're not built for that or it's not going to work like I think you would you could take a lot of pride in that you know and like making sure these guys are fed in the 10th Mountain division was in Italy in 1945 Corporal JN Stone said we used lots of fresh Italian ingredients as much as we could no matter what we were cooking we also learned to cook a lot of pizza this woman and her daughter they taught us how to do it right you may do with what you had and many times that actually meant field rations basically if you were near the front at least one meal a day was going to be prepackaged field rations and for some troops it could be every meal every day for days weeks on end now I want to do a whole video the field rations world and how they evolved into the modern M or meal ready to eat and actually I should try to do that with Steve M uh who who actually eats these These Old Foods I'll put a link to where you can watch him eat actual rations from World War II but this is about the time where you start to get like with with this and some of it's a little bit experimental again like being able to preserve good freshh kind of food into that kind of prepackaged meals and stuff becoming standard in um in for for civilians um in post World War II peace time right frozen dinners TV dinners those kind of things and now they're such a big part of uh what people consume right you take them to work and you just heat them up and stuff like that this is when that kind of technology stuff was going there you what added that too was astronauts you know being able to preserve food and things like that um also came from that from the space program it was part of a Cook's job to make sure that everyone had the field rations that they would need we should touch on it now so there were lots of types of field rations that you could get depending on where you were and at what point during the war you were at but between 1942 and 1945 the two most common were the C ration and the K ration the C ration was three meals each made up of an munit or meat unit and a B unit which was the bread or dessert the M unit was the main dish you we call it something more appetizing like yo bro pass me that a unit no I just got B units man beef stew with peas or a canned meat and vegetable stew at the beginning of the war there was pretty much only different stews but later on you might have meat and spaghetti and tomato sauce eggs and potatoes or pork and beans then the be unit had some hard tack though it was supposedly softer and easier on the teeth than that of previous Wars the biscuits being made of soybeans wheat egg and lard pretty tasty biscuit then there'd be some coffee it's like the stuff salmon froto ate on their quest to destroy the ring lambus spread or sometimes lemon drink then there'd be some sugar salt maybe chocolate and often cigarettes and gum all told the three meals provided 37 to 3800 calories per day and could be eaten cold but were better when they were cooked now the SE ration was a good amount of food and was quite they may be like wow that's pretty good I remember when you're in the military though how much how many calories you are burning 3,800 is nothing if you are out in the military you are Marching all day it's not going to feel like a lot but it was heavy and so if you were remote or a paratrooper you would get the K rtion they weighed less partly because they had less calories they had 2,830 calories per dayf and were supposed to be much less edible things like the fatty pork Loaf and the malos and dextr the troops the thing is the K ration was meant to be used for no more than 5 days but there are stories of soldiers living almost exclusively off of them for weeks at a time one unit known as Merill Marauders lived almost exclusively on K rations for 5 months in look at this guy look how skinny he is like just came from aitz gosh see this is where I how can you be an effective Soldier Burma and after 5 months of fatty pork loaf every day you can eat a lot better in Europe than howy to walk into a field kitchen and be offered something like a plate of hot on a shingle so once everything is simmered for about 10 minutes toast your bread and then ladled the creamed beef onto the toast and at first I thought that might have been like cabbage like cream Cabbage which again sounds like a food from the depression when he said it was like beef you know like I thought this sounded pretty good and here we are World War II creamed dried beef can make like a sand spread around here on the on the shingle um cuz I feel like they got to go together what do you think Max here we go be honest [Music] it seems so British to the way what's it need all right is there a taste after taste it needs the shingle the toast is is really necessary for the for the texture because once the once the toast kind of had had softened um the texture of the actual beef it's not terribly Pleasant uh it's it's just kind of chewy that said the flavor of the whole thing not that bad in fact but he pretty much like boiled it if you didn't soak it as long would that have been been better you don't want it to be in there too long what if you what if you um put the meat on like you you you didn't put the meat in the um in like the the gravy stuff like uh what if you kept them separated and then at the end you put you know again the sauce and the meat it wasn't so chewy I guess make sense fact it actually reminds me of the gravy that my grandpa used to make though he would put it over biscuits and it was made with bacon fat so if you want to make bacon fat well the best one for that is sausage if you ever done biscuits and gravy you want sausage sausage gravy that's oh so hungry now it's quite good um I'm eating right after this that said the the flavor is is good it could use more more spice probably um some more pepper I mean it's a pretty small amount of pepper for that quantity that they used so you could add more pepper um you're not being rationed hopefully what I would is actually really good is just a different meat like ground up sausage or or cut up bacon or something like that something that just the texture is a little more pleasing to the pette that said when you compare it to a lot of military Foods the question is can you preserve that stff especially the older military Foods uh out in the field this one I could see I could see looking forward to it anyway if you are a veteran or in the military or part of a military family or just interested in military history and lifestyle make sure to visit veteran life.com and for those of you lucky enough to have a grandparent still around even if they weren't in World War II go ask them to tell you a story because I'm sure that they would love to and uh you'll appreciate it when you're older so don't forget to like subscribe have a fantastic Veterans Day or Armistice Day or Rememberance Day and I will see you next time on tasting history all right final thoughts yeah totally true about you know talking to your grandparents especially you you know you have grandparents that have been through so much we've lost this generation of like my like my grandfather was you know in World War II and now we you know you're going to have your grandparents for watching this maybe maybe they were involved in Vietnam or something like that there's so many stories to tell yeah and again if they weren't uh if they weren't in any war or something like that there's so much wisdom that that comes with age and I think that's that's important so if you got you know older people in your life make sure you're in their brain they're probably a lot wiser than you think and they've experienced so much so anyway um this was cool so this is my again my first time checking out Max and this was kind of a cool concept it was cool to to learn about the history and then the food and stuff like that I guess that it made me hungry and again I've been seeing this uh Channel talked about a lot recently in my Discord server and now videos are starting to come out looks like he's putting out maybe every week or so um so if this is something you'd like me to continue obviously if you like this video If you literally give it a like that's going to say a lot and also again right now if you're watching this about the time I posted this on the polls um on YouTube you go to click the community tab um the his most recent video at the time of this recording is up there if you want to see me jump into that um and it's how Gold Rush miners um ate in the wild west but there's also other videos up there if you're seeing this when the poll is down there's probably a new poll up there so check that out and love to get you more involved in the community and with that we'll see you all next time bye [Music] oh [Music]