How to cook 1000-year-old dishes today that the inhabitants of Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt or Rome ate

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Cooking is one of the oldest arts. Even in very distant times, a person tried not only to cook food, but to combine the ingredients so that a satisfying and tasty dish was obtained. Also, since ancient times, people began to write down recipes, so today scientists have the opportunity to cook dishes that the inhabitants of Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt or Rome ate. Interestingly, many of the oldest recipes have survived to this day, being part of the national cuisine.

For a long time, scientists were unable to decipher the clay tablets from Mesopotamia. It was believed that these were pharmaceutical records, but later researchers realized that they were in front of the oldest cookbook. It was cooked for it almost four thousand years ago. Bill Sutherland, a professor at the University of Cambridge, while in quarantine, decided to adapt these recipes for today and prepared four dishes of Mesopotamian cuisine. After sharing the results of this historical culinary experiment with his followers on Twitter, the professor wrote:

Lamb ragout included, in addition to meat and fat, dried barley cakes. Some of them were crumbled for the sauce, and some were then added to the plate. In addition, the recipe included onions, shallots, crushed garlic, and milk. Bill called this dish "simple and delicious." I must say that barley was very common in ancient societies. It was domesticated about ten thousand years ago, and wild barley began to be eaten in Palestine no later than 17 thousand years ago. One of the oldest drinks of the Neolithic period was barley beer, and in ancient Rome gladiators were called "barley eaters" due to the fact that this cereal promotes rapid muscle gain. Today we eat barley in the form of two cereals - pearl barley and barley, so that any housewife will be able to reproduce the ancient recipe following the history professor. The cooking times and dishes were not indicated in the clay tablets, so here you will have to rely on your culinary experience and flair.

The second version of the ragout of lamb's legs looks more like borscht, as it is prepared with the addition of beets. In addition, the recipe contains beer, arugula, cilantro, caraway seeds, onions and garlic. Top the stewed ingredients sprinkled with coriander and fresh cilantro. In general, as scientists have found out, it was stews - stewed vegetables, cereals and meat in various combinations that constituted an important part of the ancient cuisine. Babylonian tablets, for example, list 25 recipes for similar culinary variations. A civilization that fully mastered agriculture could offer a huge range of vegetables for the creative imagination of ancient cooks. The researchers concluded that most of the stew recipes from the national cuisines of Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey are the successors of dishes from ancient tablets.

Another dish prepared by Professor Sutherland was "a leek and green onion mash baked with sourdough." This dish is prepared without meat, which is also very typical of prehistoric cuisine. Scientists believe that only very rich people could afford to eat meat every day. Cattle in ancient Mesopotamia were raised primarily for other purposes: bulls were kept for plowing, sheep for wool, and goats for milk. Most often poultry meat or hunting prey was used for food. River fish, which was probably abundant at that time, was mainly the food of the poor. According to the description from a clay tablet, a kind of casserole is prepared from water, fat, cilantro, salt, leeks, garlic and dry sourdough, which must be sieved and distributed over the bottom of the baking container.

The last dish the professor experimented with was Zukanda soup. As he himself admitted, in this recipe he cheated and replaced one ingredient - instead of sheep's blood he used tomato paste. This is not to say that this is a full-fledged replacement, since the rest of the components: fat, dill, cilantro, leeks, garlic and a little sour milk obviously should have served only as an addition to the main flavoring and nutritional component. I must say that blood soups were very common in antiquity. Today, recipes for blood dishes (German Schwarzsauer, Polish Chernina, Portuguese Blood Potatoes and Blood Sausages) can also be found, although they sometimes surprise, but in the old days this valuable and nutritious product was never thrown away.

There is evidence of the famous "Spartan Stew" or "Black Blood Soup" - a dish that terrified the ancient Hellenes. (J. Miller, "Food and Evolution") Overall, the Cambridge University scientist was very pleased with his experiment. He noted that the ancient food seemed tasty and nutritious to him, despite the abundance of fat onions and garlic, which may seem somewhat rude to a modern gourmet.

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