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Unearthed in an archaeological dig in the Middle East, several little slabs of clay covered with dense, wedge-shaped cuneiform writing were thought by Yale University scholars to involve medicines.

Now, nearly 4,000 years later, researchers have discovered that the stone tablets housed in the Yale Babylonian Collection since 1911 had nothing to do with medicines, but rather writings about stew.

Dated to at least 1730 BC, the four tablets – the larger ones the size of a large bar of soap, the smallest, more than a thousand years younger, a mere round handful of clay – mostly contain descriptions of stews, with the smallest, from a later period, speaking of a broth.

Despite the somewhat ‘mundane’ content, their mere existence is still a mystery.

It was uncommon for people to write about cooking in ancient Mesopotamia, according to Agnete Lassen, the collection’s assistant curator.

“Out of hundreds of thousands of cuneiform documents, they are the only food recipes that exist,” she stated. “We don’t have an explanation.”

The four slabs of clay known as the Yale Culinary Tablets share an odd principle with many other recipes, both old and new: the author assumes the reader is already aware of many food preparation customs beforehand. The instructions are brief and concise, and a further similarity to many old recipes is the lack of a quantity list.

Add to this references of ingredients long lost to time, replicating the recipes exactly how the Babylonians would have prepared it was almost impossible.

But some years ago, Gojko Barjamovic, an Assyriologist at Harvard University, and his colleagues, including Iraqi food historian Nawal Nasrallah, updated the translations of the recipes using new understandings of some of the words. They performed careful experimentation, altering ingredients one by one until they found a good reproduction of the dishes.

Historians are still surprised that stews and broths make up the entirety of the recipes. Stews –  meat and vegetables in a broth – are a staple of modern Iraqi food but seem to have been a major feature of food in medieval Iraq as well.

If you are keen on trying something new, or very, very old, here is how one of the stews is made:

For the lamb stew known as tu’hu, first you get water. Then you sear leg meat in fat. Add salt, beer, onion, rocket, coriander, Persian shallot, cumin, beets, and more water. Crushed leek, garlic and more coriander are added for a fiery taste, and then kurrat, an Egyptian leek, which turns the entire dish an “electric red”.

According to the researchers-turned-chefs, “It’s pungent and it’s very nicely spiced. It has good flavours.”

Keep in mind that tastes might have evolved over the millennia, so not all ancient dishes are likely to be up to our Michelin standards.

The Roman fish sauce garum is a well-known example of a dish that hasn’t aged well in the last few thousand years. It’s a strong, fermented, umami-flavoured sauce that’s no longer found in contemporary Italian cooking, and perhaps too much for modern palates.

“Attempting to define boundaries for the flavour profiles of ancient foods through the tastes and perceptions of modern people is a delicate endeavour.”

In the intervening period, the introduction of Islam to the Middle East resulted in a decline in the popularity of pork, while the Colombian Exchange – a 15th-century commerce between the Americas and Europe – brought potatoes, tomatoes, and aubergines from the New World. So the food in today’s Iraq is not even close to what was consumed in Babylon.

Barjamovic points out that as far as these ancient recipes are concerned, the story is not over. Each archaeological season brings with it the possibility of new texts being dug up, shedding new light on mysterious words for spices and other ingredients.

Who knows, a thousand years from now archaeologists might dig up recipes for skilpadjies and melktert and marvel at our culinary skills.

[source:bbc]