Recipe from 4,000 Years Ago: ‘Best Mesopotamian Meal Ever’
A family recipe from your grandmother, something from your mother’s old cookbook or your father’s fantastic fish soup: cooking recipes with a history can turn out to be a surprising experience. Bill Sutherland, a biology lecturer at the University of Cambridge, went a little further back in history. He got to work with a recipe from a Mesopotamian clay tablet and reported on his experiences online.
Sutherland’s cooking experiment began with a book from the Yale collection, in which the recipes had been translated and written out. Still, cooking the dishes was quite a challenge, because the recipes were rather brief at best. One example: ‘It is made from leg of lamb. Make it with water. Add fat. Brown it. Add salt, beer, onion, arugula, coriander, shallots, cumin and beetroot, with spring onion and garlic. Sprinkle some coriander on top. Add kurrat and fresh coriander.’ The result was nevertheless quite good: the Cambridge lecturer made two lamb stews, a soup and a bread.
No sheep’s blood
He did cut a corner a little: he did not use sheep’s blood in the soup, as the recipe called for, but canned tomatoes instead. Yes, where can you buy sheep’s blood these days? Still, it turned out to be a decent dish, says Sutherland. His favorite was the lamb dish with barley cakes. ‘I sprinkled the onions and garlic raw over the stew, because the recipe did not make clear what I was supposed to do with them. Perhaps I should have fried them first, because they tasted rather sharp.’
Good result
Are you thinking the whole time by now: Mesopotamia? What? It is the area between and around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, where Iraq and southeastern Syria are located today. According to Sutherland, the dishes recorded in cuneiform on clay tablets are the oldest known recipes. The result of the cooking experiment: ‘The tastiest Mesopotamian meal I have ever eaten.’
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