Growing up, my older sister used to do that to me all the time. Here, taste this it's awful! You gotta taste this! After the first time, I'd just give her the stink eye and say no. I still have no clue why she still does it today and if I'm around... I say NO!!!
I am reminded of Jeff Foxworthy's comedy skit about the courtesy sniff. Here, you have the courtesy taste. The third guy now has a courtesy taste token that he can cash in with Jon at any given time.
I love how universal it is for guys when they taste/smell something gross to INSTANTLY need to share it and get their friends to also experience it. There is some sort of primal joy watching your friend also be disgusted.
“Maybe we got the recipe wrong, maybe their taste buds were different” Or maybe you just discovered why people refused to eat it more than three times a week!
@@BluJean6692 I agree. You would have gotten scramble egg pieces. Totally different flavor. Plus, light and gentle stirring so the crab pieces do not break up so bad. They screwed this recipe up badly. They should have been lumps of crab and small pieces of egg.
With how easy is today to get your hands on all kinds of food you`ll think sea food will be mostly cheap with few excepciones and idk why people think shelves or crabs are food for the rich when they are easily mass produced. Like for example my country has a big part of it like the whole east border is just beaches and sea right. So finding shelves in buckets in just a day is quite normal yet if you go to a bistro at the beach they`ll charge you almost as much as for a beef stake or something like that and it just doesnt make sense. So i never payed for a restaurant food that i know i can get for cheap easily cuz its all based on making the client believe the lie. If im eating at a place i`ll pick the stuff i dont know cuz its new to me or its rare in my country
I believe there was a pickled fish recipe that Ryan ate rather a lot of, but that Jon found pretty repulsive. The next day when Jon found out that Ryan had survived the night and felt fine he was rather surprised.
@@TheBeanHome When did he say he didn't like coffee? I remember him doing a ideo on a dish where it was eggs mixed with coffee and he hated it, but as for coffee by itself I don't recall him ever saying he dislikes it.
You also have to keep in mind that shellfish expires quickly if it isnt kept alive or frozen, and they probably wouldnt be getting nice fresh shellfish.
@@arthas640 Until widespread refrigeration seafood was mostly a costal/extremely wealthy thing. There are a few good documentaries and essays explaining how trans-continental rail/canning/nascent refrigeration tech all came together to make lobster into a fancy food in the American (now global) psyche.
@@DAndyLord It's still just a big bottom-feeding sea bug that tastes like a sea bug. I don't get it. It's like people use Lobster as an excuse just eat a ton of butter the most expensive way possible. Fish is so much better and actually has variety. All sea bugs taste roughly the same.
Lmfaooo I loved the reaction at 8:40 it's like he's always so cheerful and he finally broke character because the dish was so poorly constructed in the recipe lmao. He knew he was about to eat some bullshit.
That’s the reaction of people who have tried something horrible and want their friend to try and find their reaction absolutely hilarious, its also almost a universal reaction as well and absolutely hilarious at that
Precisely, get rid of the nutmeg and I’m sure this dish would be more than palatable. I would also sub out the tinned anchovies for some “white fish” of some sort, although an oily fish may be a better fit for others tastes. But I really do think the admission of nutmeg caused this dish to come in subpar.
@@brandonswitzer6957 Well in the nutmeg's defense, it's meant to be used sparingly bcuz its so pungent. Pretty sure a light dash would've been more than sufficient. This dude was piling it on with a grater like it was friggin' parmesan cheese! 🤦♂️
There is nothing worse than badly cooked seafood. I rarely make it at home, because like white fish it is easy to mess up, and it isn’t a cheap thing to mess up.
@@jurissilins8644 yeah, back when lobster was considered trash food they boiled huge vats of them and just ground them up, shells and all, as food for prisoners. They did it bc lobsters were absolutely everywhere at the time; I just wish lobsters were as common now xD
I often come back to watch this video solely because the opening never fails to have me in absolute stitches. That undignified *THWAP* as you see the crab stew go airborne and Jon trying to stay in character throughout it just never gets any less hilarious to me 🤣
@@LukeL007 Hey, as a 'bro' you are obligated to one 'courtesy sniff' when it comes to something awful that might be presented to you by a fellow bro. 😁
Fun fact: It was used a narcotic in an open prison where the prisoners where allowed to order their own provisions. The prison staff couldn't work out why everyone was ordering so much nutmeg! It's allegedly hallucinogenic (I've never personally tried it) in high concentrations.
@@richbuilds_com it’s a really bad hallucinogen in my experience, gives you this terrible grinding headache inducing high when you’re awake and when you sleep it gives you crazy abstract dreams, in my experience anyway. Still the best spice out there though.
The fact that Mike keeps tasting it and trying to think of how he can make it taste good really shows how great of a chef he is. I really appreciate that guy and what he has to say.
The cook doesn't have to feel bad at all... this wasn't his fault. He did his best and followed the recipe. That music cutting off was the funniest thing on this channel so far. 🤣
Crazy theory: maybe the alcohol of the wine hadn't been completely burnt off? I imagine that the egg yolk would solidify pretty quickly, perhaps thus "trapping" the wine, causing the "yuck!" effect? Maybe it'd be better to first add crab and bread into the frying pan, then add the wine, burn off the alcohol, and then stir in the egg yolk? Just my tuppenceworth. 😎
@@danielvanr.8681 I'd say possibly even cutting the "beloved" nutmeg all together, replacing wine with some cream or milk and some salt maybe with the crab cooked more first? Making it more like kedgery that way a very nice dish by the 19th century (thank you for that recipe btw Mrs. Crocumb!)
@@Rach1313 Honestly I'm a fan of just boiling in salt water then adding salt, pepper and some citrus etc and I'm happy. Hell, it doesn't even need citrus or pepper lol :)
@@trygveskogsholm5963 Cooked crab by itself + butter is amazing. But it can also be eaten with things other than butter. Chinese king crab with ginger and scallions is tasty. I don't know what's going on with the nutmeg and anchovies in this dish though.
It could be a thickener; they put the egg with the wine and that was wrong; The recipe should be wine in crab meat, egg in bread crumbs and use the egg/breadcrumbs to thicken the wine/crabmeat. It should be an American gravy like mix to pour over biscuits. It should be wonderful.
Me in the 18th Century: _"Crab, Lobster? SURE! Just boil it and give me some salt, butter, and garlic! I'll be happy!"_ Every noble within a mile: _"I sense a disturbance in my purse..."_
My friend's parents were french acadians and when they went to school the poor kids had lobster rolls for lunch and the rich kids got baloney sandwiches on white bread.
Lobsters were considered cockroaches of the sea and often fed to prisoners as a very cheap meal, until they became a delicacy by WW2. The School thought they were being slick.
I love bologna. Stuff is great fried and goes well with an egg between some bread. I think the real lesson here is that the value of food is arbitrary and ever changing. What's garbage to one person is a delicacy to another.
One of my favorite stories about lobster comes from a tour guide in Boston. She told a story about how her dad was a lobster fisherman, and they were treated as poor because they often had to eat lobster. How the times have changed...
Yep, though of course that was also coming from a time when all seafood, especially shellfish, was still so plentiful and hadn't been _overfished_ yet!
When my mom was a little girl in the early 50s they had a lot of lobster for Lent -- because they were poor and it was cheap. It was considered "trash" even that recently!
It's still pretty cheap in places where it's harvested. You can buy good, fresh lobsters for 2-3 dollars a pound if you live near the coast of new england. And they'll be better than any you'll find in the supermarket.
The problem could be that the legs were stewed. Crab only needs to be cooked very briefly, and should never be cooked twice, or it'll be ruined. If you overcook crab, it gets a strong, fishy, nasty flavor and smell. It sounds like whoever made this recipe just had no idea how to cook crab, and didn't know how to cook it to be palatable.
@@MrAsaqe How so? You can do all this today with no refrigeration and not overcook the shellfish. Why is refrigeration needed? For this recipe, you kill the animal, remove the meat, and cook.
Just had one of the biggest laughs I have had in weeks. Even a "fail" is a success on this channel. Love you guys and Michael is always a treat to see.
The crab and lobster at the time was in clean waters. No plastics. No freak oil spills. No pollution. Wooo. If you could go back in time and freak out the locals by eating the headfat and guts. Wooo...so good. Screw the peasants. They were living like kings.
@@LuisAldamiz yeah, they lost me there too. Thanks, but no thanks. I think maybe some of these kinds of things were maybe acquired tastes and people just trying to make due with what they had access to. Maybe it would be better without the anchovies?
@@alexanderkupke920 - I was taught that "anchovies are the ham of the sea", what means like the greatest thing outside of land, because in land that's Iberian ham. Also the taste somewhat similar. But, unlike ham, I would not use them for anything. Also nutmeg is for sweets, omelettes and backpain, never heard of nutmeg with seafood.
The way John tries to hype himself up by stating he’s liked almost every single recipe is one of the funniest body language betrayals. It was like he knew it would taste foul.
Interesting, I watch some historical channels about kitchen, mostly in medieval times and in XVIII century, and what I noticed is that most of the food that was really cheap then, now became really expensive. I love to watch such shows, thank you for making one!
Being from Baltimore, and knowing my way around a crab, this was a primitive recipe for crab cakes. They have all the right ingredients, but they should have used WAY less liquid and WAY more breadcrumbs to form a cake for frying in the pan over the fire. I'm sure they used pasteurized crab as well which doesn't have a great flavor. Back to the drawing board and think cod cake instead of stew. It'll come out way better!
As a cook of 10 years at 29. I have a decent amount of experience and I definitely thought crab cakes too. Definitely less white wine and a lot more breadcrumb, otherwise it’s just a hot crab salad type of situation
@@CallanElliott An open wood flame is VERY HOT. Most fire cooking is done either on a thermal mass like a rock, or clay oven, or on low coals. A google search and bare bones research tells me that for there to even be a flame from wood, the material must be at least 500 degrees. What do you think eggs do at 500 degrees? They don't cook, they curdle. The meat probably dissolved into a sludge of strange compounds. I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be a nice pudding consistency with chunks of nicely cooked shellfish. Instead it became curdled egg and crustacean goop.
@@ramblinevilmushroom Did your research tell you how much of that heat is lost to the surrounding air, how much is transfered into the pan, how much heat is then lost by the pan, and finally how much of that heat actually gets into the food.
I had a dear friend from Maine who said her grandmother used to hide the lobster stew in the fridge when people came over. The recipe she showed me would go for, like, $39 in a restaurant today!
My grandfather (I'm also from Maine) wouldn't touch lobster for the same associations. "Our family didn't climb up from the ditch of poverty to eat garbage feeding ocean bugs" is a pretty close quote.
I remember that I was once told certain fish here in Germany was poor men's food. Not only on the coast, but also along the rivers. Especially salmon and eel, things everyone could get by catching it himself as any game was considered property of the regional lords, early, counts etc. Or not available in the towns and cities back then. Hard to imagine that salmon was poor men's food on the one hand or that you could catch anything edible from the Rhine. A few years ago if you would catch anything you would have been worries about glowing in the dark after eating it.
amazing how so many foods from over a hundred years ago that were originally " poor people foods" are now considered foods for wealthier people. lobster, crab, clams, salmon, and even cavier were all foods that people hated for how cheap and common they were , but now people can't get enough of it.
@@grzegorzbrzeczyszykiewic3338 At the same time. There were former "upper class" foods that have become cheap foods in modern times. Pineapples, bananas, chicken, white bread, and pasta.
@@louisazraels7072 Yes, the very first time I tried it, I was in Mexico. They had grilled it and it was all rubbery! I thought that was normal for years until I got to try some really good tender lobster, so good!
Having worked in supermarkets I have witnessed as much as half of the seafood seen displayed in the cases thrown out. That's why seafood is so expensive, and it's why our fisheries are being depleted. Almost all seafood has to come in frozen because quantities of fresh can't be kept for more than a couple of days. Oily fishes like Salmon (and trout-basically the same family) are not fish that freeze well and are shipped from a farm (or wild-caught, often flown in.) I think Salmon's popularity drives its sale in restaurants and in grocery but still so much is thrown away. The point is because there is such waste there is much markup. This causes seafood to be priced out of the diets of many families, which in turn leads to more waste and more mark up and depleted stock and then more thrown away etc., etc. The price of seafood also puts it out of reach of younger cooks who experiment with different foods. Many can afford to take a loss on a recipe that uses boneless, skinless, chicken breast at $4.99 per pound over a recipe that calls for Turbot at $12.99 per pound. In chain grocers, the price of seafood can even be exorbitant in coastal areas, especially tourist areas because many local fishermen have given way to larger corporate fleets (or sell exclusively to corporations) and aquaculture who seek higher markup for the sake of investor profits. Locals do however know where they can still get fresh fish for a reasonable cost. One thing I loved about living in Northern Virginia, along the Potomac, near the coast was the ability to pull up to a roadside convenience store and buy blue crab by the bushel almost as cheaply as I can buy peaches at the roadside stands in the Carolinas in season!
Yeah, there are very few fresh fish/meat counters left in the main supermarkets here in the UK and where they do have them, it's an incredibly overwhelming smell of fish that tells me it's way past its best! Not very appealing at all and it's why I tend to have to go frozen or tinned as an (almost) always fresher tasting option! As crazy as that sounds heh. I agree on the prices as well, for sure it is way of reach for most and eventually I probably won't be able to be as selective!
I was laughing tears. Simply marvellous. No idea what' could be done about this recipe. Obviously the texture is just wrong, but also the taste. Hmmm......
I imagine that the freshness of seafood was far below what we expect today. The abundance of rotten seafood quite possibly may have been why it was considered more a food for the poor rather than the rich, I wonder. For this reason perhaps it often needed more cooking and cloaking with other flavours. Disclaimer: not a historian.
I'm guessing the anchovies that were mentioned were the salted and dried kind. If that's the case then that would be the one that will bring the necessary salty/savory flavor to the dish.
I adore shellfish, but my cats don't care for it. If I give them a bit of shrimp or crab to taste, they sniff it and look at me like "Okay, Mom, not funny. How about some canned tuna?"
A simpler use of only a subset of these ingredients can make something that would be better, at last to modern tastes. This is definitely not a survival food.
Thats interesting. In my country during middle ages, salmon was in very similar position as lobster or seafood as described here, even including workers demanding not to be fed salmon more than 3 times a week. How times change
After finishing this video I wonder if these types of food situations were because of how the dish was prepared and not the food itself is the problem. Then again stuff like Salmon is really good even with just a bit of salt and pepper so this change in attitude towards certain foods very interesting lol
Salmon is delicious, but everything gets old if you eat it every day, so I get where they were coming from. It's the same reason the upper class gets a kick out of eating peasant food once in a while.
Salmon was a very common protein for commoners in feudal Europe, in part because it wasn't reserved by local lords, and so could be harvested freely without worrying about being executed for poaching. Most forms of game (rabbits excluded) were the lord's property by default.
In Portugal it's called "açorda", in my humble opinion the egg yolk should be the last thing to add to the crab and bread. While everything is hot, take off the heat and add the yolk. As always great content!
My dad grew up in Newfoundland, and lobster being for the poor was true even 50, 60 years ago. He ate a peanut butter sandwich for lunch every day of his adult life because when he went to school, peanut butter was the fancy food. In Newfoundland anyone could drop a lobsterpot in the water but buying peanut butter took money. He almost never ate lobster because of that association.
Yup. Same with my dad. He lived on Bayport Long Island during the depression and had to gather and sell and eat oysters. He hated them his entire life. His mom kept chickens so he had a lot of egg salad sandwiches for lunch. Hated the way they smelled but still preferred them to those oysters!
I can't even begin to fathom hating seafood lol , that too because some sort of classist prerogatives. I mean heck if something tastes that good , I don't care who eats it cause I'm gonna be the one tasting it 😋
My mom doesn't eat meat. She's not a vegetarian and loves fish. But when your uncle was a butcher, you just can't see that stuff anymore at some point.
Ryan's reaction! Oh my, he wasn't as polite for the camera as John and Michael. I am so tempted to try this myself as I want to know what it tastes like now.
@@thisorthat7626 I feel the same. And half a nutmeg for such a small portion? My brother recently put too much nutmeg in our mashed potatoes. Yuck. And that was way less than half a for a family sized batch. Someone suggested putting in garlic instead and I could see that tasting much better.
@@raraavis7782 I love strong flavors but I have ruined dishes by putting too much of one flavor in the dish. I will try nutmeg in mashed potatoes though. Just a small amount to start. Thanks!!
@fred McMurray Having a phone doesn't make life worth living. Just saying...it's not always about stuff we have don't have, sometimes it's the things happening to us.
@fred McMurray Point being: 2 things can be true at once. You can be thankful for what you have and still acknowledge that there are crappy things happening.
That's great! One day our dear John is going to release a video entitled "It Was All About The Nutmeg". "Welcome to 18th Century...look, it's never been about the 18th century, or cooking, or history! It's always been all about the nutmeg! I'VE SEEN THE FUTURE, AND IT'S NUTMEG! HAPPY NOW?! WAKE UP AND SMELL THE NUTMEG!"
Baltimore here. Gotta say that my stomach turned just watching this. I’m thinking it should be more like a crab cake or crab soup? Old recipes like that are more ‘suggestions’ than anything, right?) Eggs, crabmeat, breadcrumbs, seasonings... Maybe the wine was for drinking!! Who knows...
or the wine could have been used to poach the crab cakes if no animal fat was available. I believe the bread crumbs should have been larger chunks of hand-torn stale bread to soak up the wine, egg and crab juice which would have become custard like if not stirred too much., NOT PULVERIZED OR POWDERED TOAST. Or was the stewed crab understood to be a base for something else like a chowder?
I was thinking crab cakes too....eggs/breadcrumbs...makes sense. Although it wouldn't be called "stew" then would it? What a sad thing to loose good crab meat.
Something I never thought of; all the beaches we sunbathe on now ... used to be covered with seafood; crabs, easy access lobsters, clams, limpets, periwinkle ... All the beaches. We've made them expensive food items.
@@christianh4723 These things aren’t really that scarce at all in my experience. You can get them all pretty easily if you know what you’re doing. Especially crabs and shellfish. I can easily get a few dozen clams at even the most crowded beaches with suitable conditions. I don’t think the high prices are a matter of scarcity, for the most part. There is high demand for seafood all across the world, and in places that don’t have access to the ocean. Combine that with the fact the mostly all seafood isn’t really farmable, and when it is, it’s considered undesirable.
9:14 "It Should have been right!" - lolol... love the clean-up.. such a great host .. lolol... did i hear.. "..a cat wont even eat it..", in the background?? LOL
"Maybe we did the recipe wrong, or maybe their taste buds were different from ours." Or maybe the reason they all hated crab and lobster so much was that they sucked at cooking it lol
Keep doing what you're doing. I'm a chef, professionally, and intake massive amounts of food and cooking-related RU-vid content. Rivaled only by the mount of history-based content I enjoy. This channel gave me meaningful perspective in my line of work and passion, with applicable knowledge for why dishes are what they are today and piecing together the evolution of cuisine. An informative, applied anthropological dive into what and how we ate. Truly one of my all time favorite creators. You guys do a really good job.
And asked that question right after having assembled and cooked the recipe. Hmm, short memory? Or perhaps he was thinking that those assembled items should not have tasted like that.
@@presidentlouis-napoleonbon8889 you're nitpicking ... really; he made the recipe then said "I don't know what's in this" ... what is wrong with this video? Can you see what is going on?
@@427Arbok I bet it was the wine. do what I do and drink the wine separately.....if you have enough of the wine beforehand, the stewed crab might taste okay.....maybe. The next day may be less pleasant though.
The beauty of being a midwesterner and going to see some historic preserved 18th century sites in Missouri growing up was that if we got to try some of those recipes, you appreciate the arts of Culinary, because some of the olden days' food was just PLAIN FREAKING BAD. Case in point, this recipe by John and his cameraman's reactions.
Reenactor from the Eastern Seaboard here (I live 15 minutes from Colonial Williamsburg) and I love your show! This recipe, in my opinion, failed because of several things: The type of crab has to be very specific for it to work. Atlantic blue-crab (I'm partial to Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab) is a very different taste to Snow Crab, Alaskan King Crab, etc. Also, fresh crab is vital to getting the flavor right. Crab meat that you can buy in the grocery store is sometimes "padded out" with pollock and other white fish to bulk it up, so that may also be an issue. The white wine would have different flavor, depending on whether sweet or dry, and that would make a huge difference for taste. More breadcrumbs! The egg yolk should not have been added with the wine, in my opinion, it should have been added after taking it off the fire, kind of like you make a bechamel sauce slowly and without scrambling to thicken. From experience, crab benefits from a thick sauce (or mayonnaise.) My husband and I love your show, please take these as constructive criticism from huge fans of historical cooking!
I suspect the wine. Any of those crabs are delicious in any preparation and all go with pepper and nutmeg. The only other ingredients are an egg yolk which to be fair could have been bad or an inappropriate wine for both shellfish and cooking.
I was thinking the same thing. When you cook mussels in a white wine sauce it's delicious, and I was thinking that the egg yolk could be used as an emulsifier
We love to watch Townsends! But this was the REALEST episode we've ever seen! The body language and facial expressions...! You can feel it! 🤮 🤣 Thanks Team Townsend!
In my village in northern Norway workers lost their minds if they got served salmon more than three times per week. My great grandfather had it in his contract but before that it was an issue that could result in violence. We live next to a salmon river, but still, wild salmon is expensive.
"About a half a nutmeg?" "Ahhhh I think that's more than en--" "About a little bit mo--" "Ahhhh stop it, thank you" Recipe might've been a failure but that interaction was worth it
In my experience, crabmeat don't taste that good when it's cooked without the shell. Also, I don't think the breadcrumbs were there for thickening, I think they were there for filler, like meatballs.
collections.nlm.nih.gov/bookviewer?PID=nlm:nlmuid-2731642R-bk#page/74/mode/2up/search/To+stew+crabs No; it was there for thickening; as taken from the section of the book they were reading on STEWING.
Yeah, that was my thought--this is like two steps away from a crab cake, someone must have iterated on this until they figured out how to make it less sad.
Oh my gosh when the music just cut out perfectly and then “Well I haven’t dropped dead yet” “I don’t know if our cat would eat it!” And then the cameraman tries and the reaction hahaha! “That is foul!” Hahahaha! I love this video as much as several dishes I’ve tried and loved. Think I’ll refrain from trying it.
I understand something may have been lost in translation but 'Peculiar' seems to have a negative connotation. I like the vagueness of of 'interesting' 😁
He said "Stop it >:( Thank you 😊 " 😂 I love their episodes together. This channel re-awoke my childhood dream of being a historical interpreter and I'm actually pursuing that now!
