Summary
A team of scholars are recreating ancient recipes from cuneiform tablets. Three of Yale’s tablets date to around 1730BC, and a fourth is from about 1,000 years later. All of the tablets are from the Mesopotamian region, which includes Babylon and Assyria.
There is a notion of ‘cuisine’ in these 4,000-year-old texts. There is food which is ‘ours’ and food that is � ‘foreign’ The four dishes culled from the list-style tablet also each have unique uses.
Showmanship and skill carried over among chefs through the millennia. One dish resembles a chicken pot pie, with layers of dough and chunks of bird smothered by a sort of Babylonian béchamel sauce. The bird dish was served covered by a crusty lid, which diners then opened to reveal the meat inside.
Modern eaters might recognise elements of several cultures’ comfort foods in these Mesopotamian meals. Tuh’u uses red beetroots and shares similarities with both the borscht prevalent in Ashkenazi cuisine, as well as a stew prevalent among Iraqi Jews.