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What's the oldest known recipe?
Live Science ^ | April 19, 2025 | Marilyn Perkins (exotic animals cuisine?)

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 ...


TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: babylonia; beer; bread; cuneiform; dietandcuisine; epigraphyandlanguage; food; gazpacho; godsgravesglyphs; porridge; recipes
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To: GingisK

T-Rex Wellington


61 posted on 04/27/2025 2:22:17 PM PDT by N. Theknow (Kennedys-Can't drive, can't ski, can't fly, can't skipper a boat-But they know what's best for you.)
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To: N. Theknow
Funniest T-Rex movie scenes ever: Caveman
62 posted on 04/27/2025 2:28:53 PM PDT by GingisK
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To: GingisK

Where can I get some of those flowers? (Asking for a friend...)


63 posted on 04/27/2025 3:18:23 PM PDT by null and void (Democrats: fake news, fake presidents, fake beliefs, fake policies, fake protesters & fake voters!)
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To: SunkenCiv

Oldest recipe: Mammoth stew


64 posted on 04/28/2025 12:57:33 AM PDT by minnesota_bound (Need more money to buy everything now)
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