Cooking has remained an art passed down orally and not often documented in writing for much of history.
Mass-produced cookbooks, cooking how-to videos and recipe blogs may be relatively recent inventions, however, our ancestors liked cooking too, reported Live Science.
Remnants of food resembling our own have been found by the archaeologists all over the world. These include traces of burnt porridge on Stone Age pots to “beer loves” of bread in ancient Egypt.
So what’s the oldest known recipe?
The answer hails back to one of the oldest civilisations, even though their recipes look a little different from the ones we see today.
Figuring out if an ancient document is a recipe actually poses big challenges for archaeologists, while it may seem obvious with modern-day recipes.
According to Farrell Monaco, an honorary visiting fellow and doctoral candidate at the University of Leicester who specializes in ancient Roman breads, “recipes” as we know them are a modern invention.
Ancient instructions for making food often didn’t have weights and measures the way today’s cookbooks do; precisely measured recipes became common only within the past few hundred years, Monaco said.
Additionally, in the 1980s, archaeologist Jean Bottéro confirmed that the Babylonian tablets were actually recipes.
Still, he declared the food described on the tablets as inedible. It wasn’t until recently that any of the recipes were revisited.
Parallel to this, Gojko Barjamovic, a senior lecturer and senior research scholar in Assyriology at Yale, worked with an interdisciplinary team at Harvard to translate and recreate the recipes.
Because many of the tablets were damaged, this was a challenge as it made them difficult to read.
Barjamovic’s team was able to fill in the blanks to reconstruct the ancient foods even though some important ingredients on the tablets were untranslatable.
It was found that the tablets contained instructions for broths, a pie stuffed with songbird, green wheat, 25 types of vegetarian and meat-based stews, and some sort of small, cooked mammal.
The recipes resembled modern-day food from Iraq in many ways, with ingredients such as lamb and cilantro.
Notably, these tablets are the oldest known recipes, and there are also no known recipes that come after them for a long time.
