If you have asked questions about your favorite dish, you would do well to name something exotic. It is over the time when a taste for tastes of Italian, Mexican or Chinese cuisine could qualify you as an adventurous eater. Even expeditions on the very edges of the menus of Peruvian, Ethiopian or Laotians restaurants, for example, would probably not be to serious eaters of the 21st century. A solution is to make your culinary trips not only in space but also time, in search of meals of centuries and even millennia. This recently became a little easier to do, thanks to the work of researchers associated with Harvard and Yale as Gojko Barjamovic, Patricia Jurado Gonzalez, Chelsea A. Graham, Agnete W. Lassen, Nawal Nasrallah and Pia M. Sörensen.
A few years ago, this interdisciplinary research team participated in A Lapham's Quarterly round table By doing and eating the old Mesopotamian recipes contained on what are called the “Culinary tablets of Yale”. Dating between 1730 BC and life or the 7th century BC, their Cuneiform Registrations offer only wide and fragmentary advice on the preparation of formerly common dishes, none, fortunately, is particularly complex.
Vegetarian soup pašrūtumOr “take place”, implies flavors without more daring than those of coriander, leek, garlic and dried leaven. The stew puhādiWho uses lamb as well as milk, turns out to be “delicious when served with the peppery of leek and crushed garlic”.
Yale's culinary tablets reveal that the Babylonians also liked to enter the occasional foreign meal – who, there are four millennia, could have mean a bowl of bowl of Elamūtumor “Élamite Bouillon”, named after its origin in Elam in modern Iran. Another dish based on milk, it also calls sheep blood (“the mixture of sour milk and blood may seem strange”, the round table ensures us, “but the combination produces a rich soup with a slight acidity”) and the dill, which seems to have been the height of the exotic ingredients at the time. Tuh'uA leg of legs, has an identifiable descendant still consumed in Iraq today, but this dish uses a white turnip instead of the red beet of the old recipe. Since “the Jews of Baghdad before their expulsion used red beets”, he is “trying to connect the recipe to the European continental Borsch”.
The reconstruction of these recipes, which tend to lack quantities or procedural details, has involved educated assumptions. But no other existing text can bring you closer to the reconstruction of old Mesopotamian cuisine in your own kitchen. If you want to see how it is done before trying it yourself, look at the videos above and below from Max Miller, whose YouTube channel Tasting story Specialized in the preparation of dishes from the previous stages of civilization. Not that the departure of the recipes originally dictated by tradition would have consequences. Most of these recipes can date from an era close to the reign of King HammurabiBut there is nothing in his famous code on what happens to cooks that make occasional substitution.
Related content:
How to make old Mesopotamian beer: see the 4000 year old brewing method put to the test
How to make the oldest recipe in the world: a recipe for pudding in nettle dating from 6,000 BC
Here is the oldest written text in the world: the Kish tablet, around 3500 BC
Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall Written and broadcastTS on cities, language and culture. His projects include the substack newsletter Books on cities And the book The stateless city: a walk through Los Angeles from the 21st century. Follow it on the social network formerly known as Twitter in @ColinmArshall.
At Learnopoly, Finn has championed a mission to deliver unbiased, in-depth reviews of online courses that empower learners to make well-informed decisions. With over a decade of experience in financial services, he has honed his expertise in strategic partnerships and business development, cultivating both a sharp analytical perspective and a collaborative spirit. A lifelong learner, Finn’s commitment to creating a trusted guide for online education was ignited by a frustrating encounter with biased course reviews.