Scholars try to recreate dishes from world’s oldest known recipes
By Dana Schuster, New York Post, November 9, 2019
You thought your grandmother’s matzah ball soup recipe was vintage!
A group of international scholars have been working to recreate four dishes from the world’s oldest known recipes, including a 4,000-year-old one for lamb stew that reads like a mystery novel: “Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. You crush and add leek and garlic.”
There is even one reminiscent of a chicken pot pie.
“It’s like trying to reconstruct a song; a single note can make all the difference,” Harvard Assyriology expert Gojko Barjamovic told BBC, of deciphering tablets from Yale University’s Babylonian Collection that include the ancient recipes.
Three of the tablets date back to 1730 BC; another is 1,000 years older.
The four recipes don’t merely satisfy an empty stomach. A soup called Pashrutum is served to someone sick with a cold. Meanwhile, other foreign dishes show an appreciation between cultures.
“I was really surprised to find that what is a staple in Iraq today, which is a stew, is also a staple from ancient times, because in Iraq today, that is our daily meal: stew and rice with a bread,” culinary historian expert Nawal Nasrallah told BBC.
“It is really fascinating to see how such a simple dish, with all its infinite variety, has survived from ancient times to present, and in those Babylonian recipes, I see not even the beginnings; they already had reached sophisticated levels in cooking those dishes,” Nasrallah said. “So who knows how much earlier they began?”
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