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 ...
Please write them down.
Yah know? I just happen to have a laser. I could engrave it onto brick for you. Fired clay has a proven 5,000 year durability...
(That possibility just came to mind between my last post and this one)
Oldest recipe?
Probably something with berries and fruit. You just pick it off a tree.
Didn’t Eve bite an apple?
I wish I could remember Granny’s measuring system from an early Beverly Hillbillies episode. Something about two smidgens is a pinch, three pinches is a little bit, etc.
30ish years ago I lived in a duplex that had dense conifers planted directly behind and taller than the house.
From time to time there would be a sound that seemed to be someone hitting the back of the house once with a bat. When I went out, no one was there. I eventually realized that it was the sound of primarily doves but some other things too flying into the back of the house at full speed. I would find them just dead or dying from a broken neck.
They were overall too small to clean properly so I would just breast those out and put it in zip locks with a bit of water in the freezer until I had enough to make a pie.
Overall quite good.
Those are considered food in China today.
Blood pudding which is a sausage has been on menus locally for many years
I have a church ladies recipe book from 1913 and some of the recipes use measures like a piece of butter the size of an egg or cook over a low fire…back when wood fired ranges were still in use. I also learned some of my grandmother’s recipes from my mother that were based only on rough estimates of quantities.
Unknown. What she ate was probably destroyed along with "The Garden".
EASY!
Boiled water.
Must have been real hard regulating the temperature in a wood stove!
I bought several pieces of cast iron cookware around 1970 at “absolute auctions” at farms in Missouri. I could get a circa 1890 or 1900 frying pan that had been in the family for only $1. Some of them have the ring cast into the bottom so they would fit into the wood stove opening after you removed the cover plate.
you, in the eyes and hunger of the other person or animal
Kill mammoth.
Make fire.
Take pieces of mammoth put on stick over fire.
When warmed enough for taste eat mammoth off stick.
Bon appetite...or Ooga booga dis goood mammoth!
Next time rabbit easier!
A falsehood that persists for no reason other than lazy writers perpetuating it. She partook of "the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil" that grew in the unique garden God created just for them - a "one shot" the Lord made for a test of their character.
Then again, Genesis is rife with mysterious allegories that defy rational analysis. To me Evolution is clearly a real process that can only fit Biblically if one considers OUR idea of a day totally different from God's scale of time.
Back to subject - the oldest recipes probably involve fermenting alcoholic beverages because that's widely cited as the reason mankind shifted to agriculture from hunter/gatherers.
😊 great idea!
Reminds me of when I went to Sunday school and I learned about the tablets that Moses had. Stone tablets, very impressive!
I used to draw on things, and my mom said she was gonna buy me a tablet. I was so excited. I wanted a tablet just like Moses! But the one she bought me was made out of newsprint. It was incomprehensible to me that I was supposed to draw on something that could be thrown away like trash. I wanted the lasting impression. I was probably five.
Spotted owl. Fried.
No way. But one is for a beef stew, another for a roast beef, simple enough, then we get to the baked haddock or fluke stuffed with different shellfish, crab stuffed crepes, a lot of different chicken dishes, coquilles St. Jacques, marinated beef tongue, a marinated roast pork loin, and a bunch more. I have forgotten her roasted rabbit dish with some kind of sauce that was from heaven. Sherried kidneys over wild rice is another one I don’t remember. No Silence of the Lamb jokes, please (hah!). I rarely make the same dish the same way, each time is a little different then before, since I don’t measure ingredients that much. Sorry, gotta keep the recipes in the family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup
Some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the very hungry travelers. Then the travelers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making “stone soup”, which tastes wonderful and which they would be delighted to share with the villager, although it still needs a little bit of garnish, which they are missing, to improve the flavor.
I would propose stone soup as one of the early recipes.
I don't think The Garden was destroyed. Why would there be the need to post an Angel with a flaming sword to guard ashes and rubble?
Ah, Central Park then.
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