UNCOVERING the World’s Oldest Recipes

The year was 2019. I was lying on my couch and browsing Amazon when I suddenly saw this book. The Oldest Cuisine in the World. In the 1980s, the author Jean Bottero translated three cuneiform tablets that had gathered dust at Yale University for decades, initially thought to be medical texts. But after years of deciphering, Bottero uncovered the world's oldest recipes, by far. More than 2,000 years older than the oldest recipes known at the time from the Roman cookbook This was breaking news, and the New York Times cover read As an Assyrian with DNA that connects me to the origin of these tablets, I immediately ordered the book. A few days later, the book arrived. I eagerly dove into the chapter with the recipes, and this was one of the first. Assyrian style. Meat is used, prepare water, add fat, garlic and zurumu with blood, and mash leek and garlic. It is ready to serve. I was so confused. What type of meat? How much water should I use? What kind of fat? What is zurumu? And what if I don't want to use blood? And besides, was this a soup, broth, stew or something else? Here's another one. Franklin broth. Fresh leg of mutton. Prepare water, add fat, trim the franklins, add salt to taste, cake crumbs, onion, samedo, leek and garlic mashed with milk. Once the franklins have been cut up, put them into the broth in the pot, but they should first be cooked in a kettle. Then return them to the pot. It is ready to serve. More descriptive than the first one, but honestly, would you be able to make a dish from this? If so, let me know in the comments. In any case, I felt deceived. I had bought a book with the world's oldest recipes so that I could taste them. Then I went back to the Amazon page and realized I should have read the reviews first. If you want recipes, this is not the book for you. Not a cookbook! Somewhat unique, somewhat incomplete. The author himself refused to try any of these recipes. He even went on to say, I did not have any intention of preparing a cookbook of ancient Mesopotamian cuisine. Such a project, for which we might naively hanker, must be abandoned once and for all, as it could never be written by a reasonable historian worthy of the name. Good that I am not a historian or have a worthy name, because I decided I would be the one making a cookbook out of these recipes. If you want to learn more, click the link in the description or head over to my website, TableOfGods.com. Anyway, I started researching these tablets, and the only thing connecting them was the time and place they were written in. The first tablet contained 25 recipes written in short form. The other two tablets, which combined contained 10 recipes, were more damaged, but also more detailed. Here's a paragraph from one of those recipes, describing how to prepare a bird for the Timru ceremony. Once it has been decapitated, you pluck the animal, you wash it in cold water, you slit its throat and take out its ribs, open its belly carefully and remove its gizzard and pluck, wash them in cold water, split and peel the membrane of the gizzard, disjoint the legs and wings. The recipe does not only cover how to prepare and cook the bird, but also how to serve it. Just before serving, you take the platter prepared with the lining of crust and place the cooked birds on it carefully. You scatter over it the pluck and the cut up gizzards that were being cooked in the pot, as well as the sebetu rolls that were baked in the oven. You set aside the fatty broth in which the meat was cooked in the pot. You cover the serving dish with its pastry lid and bring it to the table. After reading the recipes over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, I still didn't understand what I was dealing with. So I decided to take an analytical approach. Of the 35 recipes, there were 29 broths or stews, 3 pies, 1 porridge and 2 that I couldn't identify. 32 of the recipes included meat, 2 were vegetarian with ancient measures, 1 of the recipes seemed to be fully vegan with today's standards. The most popular meat were mutton, gazelle, venison, lamb, ram, pigeon, small birds, kippo birds and agaruko birds. And these were the most popular spices and herbs, vegetables, liquids and sauces and unidentified ingredients. I thought these were the most boring recipes I've ever encountered and was on the verge of giving up on my cookbook dream. Then I read another quote from Bottero, where he said, In these tablets we only find a meager selection of the foods that we know were eaten and cooked in ancient Mesopotamia. Bottero believed the culinary tablets were part of a much bigger collection, which means there must have been more. I started researching the food history of ancient Mesopotamia and even travelled there to gain a deeper understanding of food and agriculture. I discovered other tablets with more than 800 terms related to food and drink, which predated the tablets containing the world's oldest recipes by 200 years. I came across 300 different types of bread with various sizes, flavours and textures, as well as 80 stews, 50 different types of flavoured cheese, fresh cheese, honey cheese, mustard cheese, round cheese, large cheese, white cheese etc. Numerous types of beer, ordinary beer, good beer, very good beer, golden beer, red beer, dark beer, date beer, pomegranate beer, fig beer etc. And a variety of sweets, fruits, syrups, pastries, cakes, cookies and much more. But the big question is, can this cuisine with its striking richness, refinement, sophistication and artistry, to cite Bottero, be recreated? First, let me quote someone else, Magnus Nilsson, the Michelin-starred chef of the epic restaurant The only way for traditions in food to be kept alive, is to let them adapt. If you keep them in museums, they will eventually die out. We'll never be able to recreate any dish from the distant past in its entirety, but we can let them adapt, by using the same ingredients and cooking methods as far as grocery stores and kitchens allow, and by using cuneiform sources that describe when, why and how food and drink were enjoyed in ancient Mesopotamia. So if you want to learn how to recreate food and drink from the cradle of civilization, subscribe to my channel, and click the link in the description to get on the waiting list for my upcoming book, Table of Gods.