Donnie Dodson is cooking and eating his way through history, one ancient recipe at a time.
The creator of instructional videos on his Eats History website, Mr. Dodson showcases what ancient Romans snacked on at the Colosseum, shares an ancient Mayan hot chocolate recipe and explains how the Vikings believed they would eat pork in Valhalla, their version of heaven.
What began in 2024 as a series documenting each of the U.S. presidents’ favorite meals turned into a historical and cultural collage that has garnered more than a million followers on Instagram and half a million on TikTok.
A finance graduate from Arizona State University, he developed a passion for cooking post-college.
“One of my biggest inspirations was Anthony Bourdain because when he traveled the world, he did such a good job of bringing the storytelling aspect of the dish into the food itself. So that’s how the account started,” Mr. Dodson said.
Each of Mr. Dodson’s videos goes into detail not only about the recipe, but the time and place in which the dish originated.
Many videos invite viewers to imagine what it would be like to step into someone else’s (very old) shoes.
“If you think life sucks in 2025, let’s see what a day of eating was like for a Victorian child factory worker in the late 19th century,” the 25-year-old content creator says in a video.
He has produced a similar video documenting what it would be like to eat as a Soviet gulag prisoner for a day.
Mr. Dodson dives fully into the social experiment and actually eats like someone in that given situation. He describes attempting to eat three bowls of gruel for breakfast, lunch and dinner when he ate for “a day in the life of a child factory worker,” which he notes is not ancient history.
“It’s definitely a way to both empathize with the past and really build that gratitude into where we’re at as a culture right now,” Mr. Dodson said.
While those videos may not seem inviting, many would leave viewers salivating.
Mr.Dodson’s gumbo recipe from 1903 is not only his favorite historical dish, but one of the most popular recipes on his site.
“That was just an encapsulation of over a hundred years of Cajun cooking in New Orleans,” he said.
However, not all the recipes can be simulated exactly as they were originally made, and some are based on speculation of what is historically recorded.
“Let’s take, for example, the video I did on the pyramid builders,” Mr. Dodson said. “So we actually have written records of their salaries and for their salaries, they received onions. They received bread loaves. They received garlic and they received beer.
“So basically in my videos, I take whatever the source material we have and then recreate that into what that recipe would look like. So maybe make a stew from that or some sort of dish,” he said.
Certain spices or types of meat are not easily accessible or may not even be legal to consume.
Mr. Dodson uses meat or spices most closely related to the original to complement an ancient dish. Take Mexico’s Pozole Rojo, which is a popular holiday dish made with pork. In the days of Aztecs, the original recipe contained bits of human flesh from sacrificed victims.
In his videos, Mr. Dodson explains how recipes were adapted and changed over time.
He doesn’t claim to be a chef or a historian, “just a guy attempting to cook and rate every dish from history out of 10!”
The Scottsdale, Arizona, resident runs the podcast “Talks History,” which “explores the echoes of the past through the lens of culture, conflict and connection.”
Mr. Dodson is writing his first cookbook, “Roman Recipes,” which he describes as a “love letter” to ancient Roman culinary traditions. It is set to be published in 2027.
