What is the oldest known recipe in archaeology?
Humans have been cooking for tens of thousands of years, but it's only recently that they've started recording their cooking in the form of videos, blogs, and recipe books. Cooking was also practiced in ancient times, but cooking techniques were passed down orally for a long time and were rarely documented. Science media Live Science explains what the world's oldest recipes are.
What's the oldest known recipe? | Live Science
According to Farel Monaco, a researcher at the University of Leicester who specializes in ancient Roman bread, recipes with measured ingredients and clear instructions have only become common in the last few hundred years. In addition, ancient medical concoctions often contained ingredients, making it difficult to tell whether the recipes were for food or medicine. Additionally, recipes can contain words that are hard to translate, or ingredients that no longer exist today.
Against this background, the 'oldest recipe' at the time of writing is from Babylonia around 1730 BC, written on a clay tablet made in what is now southern Iraq.
Analysis of this clay tablet began at Yale University in the early 20th century, but at first, the cuneiform writing was not deciphered, and the contents were thought to be related to medicine or alchemy. In 1945, it was pointed out that it may be a cooking recipe, but scholars at the time were skeptical. According to Gojko Baryamovic, an Assyriologist at Yale University, few scholars believed that there were written recipes in the Mesopotamian period, because until modern times, cooking recipes were thought to have been passed down orally from generation to generation.
In the 1980s, archaeologist Jean Botro
The clay tablet lists 25 different dishes, including stews, pies stuffed with small bird meat, dishes using green wheat, and dishes using small mammals. While the ingredients used are similar to modern Iraqi cuisine, such as lamb and coriander, they also contain ingredients that modern people may find repulsive, such as blood and rats.
One clay tablet had relatively detailed instructions, including: 'Take meat. Prepare water. Add fine salt, dried barley cake, onions, shallots, and milk. Add crushed leeks and garlic.'
The information written on these clay tablets is said to be the oldest known recipes for cooking, and no similar records have been found since then. 'It's like investigating an interesting island of knowledge about the culinary traditions of a specific place and time,' said Valyamovic. 'Studying these ancient recipes allows us to appreciate our own culinary culture and connects us to the ancient peoples in a beautiful way,' Monaco said.
In addition, Yale University is holding an event to recreate ancient Babylonian cuisine based on this recipe, cooking 'Lamb Stew with Beetroot' and 'Green Onion and Barley Porridge'. You can see how it is cooked in the movie below, and detailed recipes are also available, so if you are interested, please try making it.
Interdisciplinary team cooks 4000-year old Babylonian stews at NYU event - YouTube
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