Cambridge Professor Tries Out Recipes From Ancient Mesopotamia That Are Nearly 4000 Years Old

These are "the oldest recipes existing"

Damjan

• Published in Interesting
• July 4, 2020

With the lockdown and a lot of free time on our hands (not to mention flour, yeast, and effs enormous home supplies), we all started to cook. Most of us, sadly, with little or no success (which doesn’t prevent us from sharing the dishes online).

Some people take this process to completely another level. One of them is Bill Sutherland, a professor of conservation biology at the University of Cambridge.

He decided to try to create meals from 3770-year-old recipes carved on a Mesopotamian tablet. It is claimed that the dishes like Elamite broth and lamb stew “are the oldest recipes existing.” 

He shared his experience in his, now viral, thread, and said that this is the “best Mesopotamian meal I have eaten.”

The Cambridge professor prepared meals from some of the oldest recipes existing

Bill’s Mesopotamian banquet consisted of 4 elaborate dishes and a loaf of bread

Bill was told about the recipes by Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid, who’s “a real expert on Mesopotamian culture.” Afterward, he got the book about the Yale Collection and felt that “it would be fun to try and cook them.”

“This was about an hour of planning and a couple of hours cooking,” Bill says. But he never expected the Twitter audience to be so interested in his post. “Currently, 3.7 million people have seen this,” the professor says

Lamb stew

Bill stated that the instructions were “astonishingly terse” and “perplexing.” Sometimes he even had to make guesses, like “I didn’t fry the onion and garlic that was sprinkled on top as it wasn’t in the recipe.” He also “added the sourdough breadcrumbs and then baked it, so it was like a crumble, but perhaps I should have used it as a sauce thickener.”

A Tuh’u

But Bill didn’t expect the recipes to be so easy to cook. “You probably wouldn’t consider them odd if served to you.”

The dishes had a lot of garlic, coriander, leek, onions, which he enjoyed very much. Bill’s favorite dish is a lamb stew with barley cakes prepared by his daughter Tessa.

“I sprinkled a couple of cakes in, and they made a lovely thick stew.”

Unwinding. Looks good, but boring...

Elamite Broth with no sheep’s blood in it

In fact, there is an entire book dedicated to Babylonian gastronomy

And how did the people react?

Damjan