Posted on 04/27/2025 5:24:43 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Cooking how-to videos, recipe blogs and mass-produced cookbooks may be relatively recent inventions, but our ancestors liked to cook, too. Archaeologists have found remnants of food resembling our own all over the world, from traces of burnt porridge on Stone Age pots to "beer loaves" of bread in ancient Egypt. Yet, for much of history, cooking was an art passed down orally and not often documented in writing.
So what's the oldest known recipe?
The answer hails back to one of the oldest civilizations, although their recipes look a little different from the ones we see today...
In fact, what we now know as the "oldest recipes" weren't identified as such for a long time. When four Babylonian clay tablets arrived at Yale University in the early 1900s, archaeologists struggled to translate the cuneiform script they contained. The tablets, each about the size of an iPad mini, hailed back to about 1730 B.C., and were written in what is now southern Iraq...
In the 1980s, archaeologist Jean Bottéro confirmed 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...
They 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. In many ways, the recipes resembled modern-day food from Iraq, with ingredients such as lamb and cilantro. But they also included some ingredients that might offend some palates, such as blood and cooked rodents...
One read, "Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. You crush and add leek and garlic."
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
I’m thinking raw meat with a touch of dirt and fur.
I would think there are much older recipes that were not written but handed down from generation to generation. I can imagine the whole family got involved, from the hunt to the preparation with whatever edible foliage they could find to the fire. That unwritten knowledge still carries on today. I have several recipes from my mother that are only in my head, and are the same ones she got from my grandmother. Many people I know have unwritten recipes from their ancestors. I wouldn’t be surprised that more and older recipes written or in hieroglyphics are found in the future. I’m thinking that not too long after mankind learned how to make a fire and cook meat some form of recipes followed.
How to serve mankind.
[[What’s the oldest known recipe?]]
I’m guessing a recipe for lutifisk?
I thought for sure it would be something like “Small mammal (Rat) Tartare”.
Someone once drank something fermented. From that day on there was no turning back. Thousands of different beers, ales, wines, whiskeys, brandies, etc. It’s really amazing the variety that’s available.
Lemonaide??
Ping to Tina…this reminds me of your story yesterday about your mom’s sopapilla recipe!
Did they use cups and tablespoons? Or grams and milliliters?
Or cubits?
> In making beer, recipes are only needed by those who have had too much beer.
and they don’t look for them, because at that point, they just need more beer and don’t worry about the taste.
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Thank you that is exactly right. I was the one trying to transcribe the recipe onto the tablet for future generations. lol.
Beer is the clear winner. First of all, it is food. Second it is much safer to drink than water. Third, it happens naturally, fermentation of grain and water. Fourth, it needs a recipe, because if it happens improperly it tastes bad.
There are all sorts of food grains in the West. In the East, rice dominates, so you get rice beer, aka Sake. Also a very ancient recipe.
Nope. Somewhere there has to be a cave painting of a pot over a fire. Boiling water is cooking — talk to any nonSTEM graduate of any Ivy league school. A piccie = recipe when written language is not created yet.
"Let there bud light!"
And sure enough, people boycotted!
Put leaves in cup; add hot water.
A handful of this, a partial handful of that. :-)
It’s still the way the pros do it. I ran across a recipe the other day that said “A two count of EVOO.” I wondered “What the heck is a ‘two-count’?” Then it dawned on me you could “one thousand one, one thousand two”
A chef friend of mine knew it right away.
Provided they trim off the beak, feet and things like that, oh, and the feathers.
Back rent? You’ll be lucky if you get the front rent...
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