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Max Miller cooks British wartime stew and biscuit scones

A military catering manual supplies the recipes, but the bigger question is how British troops got a hot meal at all.

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Tasting History with Max Miller Story of October 26, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? 1,168,321 views so far, and here is what is inside it.

Feeding the British Troops of World War 2

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1:54Corned beef, onions, carrots and potatoes become a scaled-down stew from the army's catering manual.
3:49Crushed plain biscuits replace flour in scones made with fat, sugar and evaporated milk.
11:06Poor cooking helped prompt catering reforms; mobile kitchens offered ways to prepare meals in the field.
16:56Composite ration packs aimed to provide balanced meals, alongside smaller emergency packs.
25:09Miller finds the stew greasy, soft and short on seasoning, then explains nested military mess tins.
26:24The dense biscuit scone, served with jam, reminds Miller of a graham cracker.

The stew tastes like beef that has gone too soft. The scone, made from crushed biscuits and topped with jam, earns a rather different verdict from Max Miller: "That has no right to be as good as it is."

In "Feeding the British Troops of World War 2," Miller cooks from the 1945 Manual of Army Catering Services, scaling military quantities down to a kitchen-sized meal. Corned beef, onions, carrots and potatoes go into the stew; finely crushed plain biscuits join fat, sugar and evaporated milk for the dense, flat scones.

The episode has drawn more than a million views, but its substance is the gap between issuing food and getting soldiers fed. Miller traces supply disruptions at Dunkirk, criticism of army cooking and the creation of the Army Catering Corps. As he puts it, "And it was really less about the food itself and more about the cooking."

From there, the practical ingenuity takes over: improvised burners, balanced Composite ration packs and self-heating soup tins. A cooking fire could reveal a position, so a hot meal was not simply a matter of finding something to put in a pot.

Miller also makes heavily sweetened tea with evaporated milk, and explains how vintage mess tins nested together. The episode includes a sponsored closing segment for Squarespace.

At the tasting table, the plain, greasy stew gives way to the biscuit scone, whose flavor reminds him of a graham cracker. The catering manual's most unlikely-looking bake turns out to be the part he wants another bite of.

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