No history on Safari drop-down menu displayed

The only way to view my Safari search history is to select "all History" in the drop down window.

This opens another full window with all the history, as does adding the search icon to the safari toolbar. I have to either select something, or manually close the window. I don't know how to get the search history in the safari history drop down menu, which was so much faster. The problem is intermittent. Sometimes it shows up...sometimes it does not.

The problem is with Monterey on my Mac Studio. Has been present through several versions of MacOS at this point.

Menu looks like this: