A group of international scientists specializing in the history of cooking, food chemistry and cuneiform writing have deciphered and recreated culinary recipes written on ancient Babylonian tablets.
These tablets were kept at Yale University – 3 of them date from about 1730 BC, and the fourth was about 1000 years younger. All tablets belonged to Mesopotamia, which included Babylon and Assyria – today it is the territory of Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
Most intact was the tablet containing 25 recipes for stews and broths, while the rest of the tablets were less legible due to damage.
After deciphering the recipes, the scientists decided to prepare all these dishes, of course, preserving their authenticity in the face of limited modern ingredients.
All the recipes turned out to be not very informative (some consisted of only 4 lines), so the specialists had to make a lot of assumptions. “However, all food today and 4000 years ago is the same: a piece of meat is a piece of meat,” says Patricia Jurado Gonzalez, a research fellow at Harvard University. “The science of cooking is the same today as it was 4000 years ago.”
Among the deciphered recipes, there is lamb stew, which is still widespread in Iraq – in the recipe, lamb meat is fried in lamb’s tail fat, and then cooked with the addition of leeks, Persian shallots, garlic, milk, water, dry barley tortillas and salt.
Also on Babylonian tablets were found recipes for meat broth for colds with leeks and coriander and a dish resembling chicken pie. To enhance the taste and aroma, the ancient Babylonians used saffron, coriander, parsley and chard, as well as fish sauce, which was prepared from fish caught in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The researchers note that the decoded 4000-year-old texts include the concept of “kitchen”, and also distinguish between “our” food and “someone else’s” food.
We will remind, earlier we told what we ate in Ancient Rome, as well as what our ancestors put in the Christmas basket.