Jon Townsend, the proprietor of an Indiana-based store selling eighteenth-century-style clothing and accessories, is also the host of a popular YouTube series. In hundreds of videos published over the past eight years, he has offered an elaborate, and disarmingly earnest, tutorial in early American living, with a focus on culinary matters. Twenty-first-century viewers tune in for detailed instructions on how to craft such dishes as cabbage farce, potted beef, pickled smelts, and parched corn, along with lessons in eighteenth-century hygiene, tobacco, cheese-making, and whiskey toxins. The products used in the videos are usually for sale, marketed toward historical reënactors—called “interpreters” in the videos. Turn to Townsends, Jon’s company, if you wish to buy a pipkin (a “utility pot” for making gravies) or a spider (a multi-legged skillet “great for hearth as well as campfire”), beef tallow or a butter churn. Further highlighting his wares, Townsend often cooks sporting an eighteenth-century cloth work cap, which looks like an upturned bowl or perhaps a very fetching diaper; sometimes a soft, brown tricorne hat; and, nearly always, a broad smile. He travels to historical sites—Gunston Hall, in Mason Neck, Virginia; the Conner Prairie Interactive History Park, in Fishers, Indiana—and welcomes as guests other historical reënactors, who arrive on camera fully dressed in their own period ensembles. Watching them labor over the coals feels like looking into a fully intact, parallel world, in which the eighteenth century never ended.

But even this sweet and cloistered world, it turns out, is not immune from the corrosive forces of contemporary politics. Early American history has recently returned to the headlines as the legacy of slave-owning and slavery-defending Americans has become a renewed subject of debate; “I wonder, is it George Washington next week?” Donald Trump asked last month as he defended the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, against the dismantling of Confederate memorials. As any historian would point out, contemporary sentiment inevitably colors our view of the past. So perhaps it’s not altogether surprising that, earlier this summer, when Townsend teamed up with a fellow historical interpreter to present the Orange Fool—an orange-flavored custard, from Martha Washington’s own cookbook—some viewers assumed that the dish’s name must be intended as a veiled reference to the forty-fifth President.

In the video in question, which was posted in July, Deb Colburn, the director of historical interpretation at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, stands with Townsend in an outdoor pavilion, wearing a mobcap and a pattern-trimmed blue dress. As rain falls around them, Colburn pours orange juice from a pipkin into a bucket of cream. She seasons the mixture with nutmeg, then stirs long and slow as the custard heats over the coals. When fully cooked, the pale cream is poured at last into cut-crystal glasses, and the two toast in Townsend’s honor before indulging with wooden spoons. “I can imagine this coming at the end of the meal, a very special evening, and out comes the Orange Fool,” Townsend says between bites. “Almost like a sherbet, the way we do today, to soothe the palate and calm the tummy a little bit,” Colburn replies.

Below this seemingly innocent exchange, comments poured in by the thousands, alternatively berating and praising Townsend for a perceived affront to Trump. “Used to like your show, was just bragging about it yesterday,” one viewer wrote. “But the timing and the title of your video here reeks of tasteless and repugnant attacks on our president by the multi media at large. . . . Clearly a fake desert story poking fun at the physical characteristics of a national hero.” Others were more sardonic. “I live in DC and this looks familiar,” one wrote. “Will they be having this at the White House?”

Townsend’s YouTube channel has not shied away from the political realities of the eighteenth century. One notable and frequent guest is the culinary historian Michael Twitty, the author of the recent book “The Cooking Gene,” who specializes in the ways in which slaves contributed to American cuisine. In one video, shot at Mount Vernon, the historical reënactor Brenda Parker gives a moving account of portraying an enslaved woman: “In speaking for them,” she says, “I let them speak through me.” But drawing the voices of history into the present is not the same as allowing the present to spoil dessert. Three days after his controversial custard lesson, Townsend posted a follow-up video titled “The Intrusion of Modern Politics on Our YouTube Channel.” Sitting under a tree in his tricorne, while text appears on the screen to announce “I’m frustrated,” the normally mild-mannered host vents his wrath.

“We have entered an era—and other eras in the past have been equally disturbing—where everything has to do with politics,” he says. “I believe we are better served by studying individuals and how they relate to each other in history, so that we can understand that today, in our daily lives . . . that’s ten times more important, a thousand times more important, than what’s happening in the political realm! I don’t have time for that.” Birds sing in the trees. A shaggy golden retriever lumbers by. “We don’t need all kinds of innuendo, political or otherwise, in the comments section,” Townsend says as his friendly face widens around wounded blue eyes. His air is of genuine hurt and bewilderment.

Sometime later, the title of the Orange Fool video changed without ceremony. Though the custard remained the same—in the eighteenth century, it would have been made with tart Seville oranges, and “a little Piece of Butter”—it was now called, simply, “A Dessert Fit for the Washingtons.” “Change the name back!” one forlorn commenter wrote, unheeded. As Washington wrote in 1791, “It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”