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- Hacker News
- If you like this, you may like the "Tasting History" YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@TastingHistory
He basically covers a different historic dish every week ranging from the oldest recorded dishes to cafeteria food from 1990; or what they served on the Titanic, etc.
It's a great channel, and covers history well.
by lettergram - What's enlightening is how astonishingly little salt is used, by our standards.
- The original text linked by another poster says "salt as desired".
So the quantity of salt is not specified in the original recipe, therefore it could be the same as any present cook would choose.
by adrian_b - The ingredient ratios are the Yale researchers' interpretation—they're not from the source text,
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ancient-mesopota...
> "Like most premodern cooking manuals, the Babylonian recipes rarely list the quantities of each ingredient, and so basic experimentation is needed to determine viable proportions for the assembly of a dough or the salting of a stew. The “experimental” approach likewise offers answers to questions that can only be addressed through trial and error. For example, many of the identifications of herbs proposed by modern scholars are based mainly on medical compendia, and some of the plants thus identified can produce an extremely bitter or perhaps pungent taste when used in food."
Here's the recipes as literally translated (I used tesseract to OCR):
> "Unwinding. Meat is not used. You prepare water. You add fat. (You add) kurrat, cilantro, salt as desired, leek, garlic. You pound up dried sourdough, you sift (it) and you scatter (it) over the pot before removing it."
> "Stew of lamb. Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. [You crush] (and add) leek and garlic."
> "Elamite broth. Meat is not used. You prepare water. You add fat. Dill, kurrat, cilantro, leek, and garlic bound with blood, a corresponding amount of sour milk, and (more) garlic. The (original) name (of this dish) is Zukanda."
> "Tuh’u. Leg meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You sear. You fold in salt, beer, onion, arugula, cilantro, Persian shallot, cumin, and red’ beet, and [you crush] leek and garlic. You sprinkle coriander on top. [You add] kurrat and fresh cilantro."
by peri-cl - I'm reading Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones' Babylon - The Biography of a Metropolis which just recently came out, and that's how I ended up hearing about Yale's culinary adventures.
The book, btw, is kind of breezy in style and 'he of many LLs in his name' (Lālu-mullālu in Akkadian as suggested by my friendly AI) uses a lot of contemporary pop (nerdy) references to carry the narrative, yet very engaging and am learning a lot about this fabled city (and civilization).
It sets certain records straight ...
by yubblegum - I think the taste of their beer would have been much different from what we drink today?by bornfreddy
- Nutty, aromatic, yeasty, slightly sour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK4DMt8ARyUby 0xbadcafebee
- They certainly didn't use hops!by applicative
- Gonna be quite challenging to get "1/2 cup of rendered sheep fat"by cantalopes
- Lamb is usually the red meat of choice, other than pork, almost everywhere besides the US.by dyauspitr
- Easy... Just go to a Trader's Joe, and get a lamb leg and roast it....by ardit33
- if you have a good butcher they might be able to get you some that you can render, but its a hassle. I've done this for beef fat to make some british pie things.by s0rce
- I was able to get some tail fat from a halal butcher. But never seen lamb fat anywhere else
- You need sheep with tail fat like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_fatby bgnn
- Lamb is quite popular down here in Australia. I usually keep some rendered fat from my roasts etc. Sometimes I cook other meats with it and it adds heaps of flavour. I do that with pork fat as well.by jp0d
- I usually put away a nice amount of fat at the lamb slaughter and then render it, it keeps very well. We also put away a good amount for the birds.by yesbabyyes
- In Australia where lamb is more common than in the US, it'd be pretty easy to keep the fat after roasting a lamb shoulder, or to freeze the fatty offcuts from forequarter chops and render them after I had enough.by strken
- The Babylonian Collection was left to Yale by J.P. Morgan in 1913. His estate at the time was estimated to be worth about $68.3M ($1.59B in 2024 dollars).
When I read that on his wikipedia page I thought "is that all?" I know I'm probably missing a bunch of other considerations, but geez, the 500th spot on the 2024 Forbes World's Billionaires list was shared by multiple individuals worth approximately $5.8B.
by johnohara - The source texts are available here, if anyone wants to read the literal translations:
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ancient-mesopota...
by peri-cl - How's the presentation? Just imagining it, it would seem that the meet would have a weird color.by comrade1234
- It looks great. When I first saw it, I thought "this color can't be beet"by debo_
- "Rocket, coriander, cumin? Somehow I doubt the Babylonians had Mexican herbs and spices." Turns out I was wrong about where these come from! All three are native to the Mediterranean/Middle East and would certainly have been used in this recipe at the time.by alex-moon
- Coincidentally this book which has been a labour of love of his creator is going into print this week: https://www.tableofgods.com
It's quite expensive though, but it does look amazing.
by harel - The fact that they promote the preorder of a 200$ book without showing even a single page is crazy.by ragazzina
- Close to a recipe on Tasting History... https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/babylonianlambstew Our current favorite dinner watching along with Alton Brown.by eikenberry
- Yes! Came here to recommend Max. His cookbook is also educational and interesting and some of the recipes are even good! :-)by greatquux
- Came here to mention Max Miller as well. Amazing work putting together historical context and recipes. Always fun, fascinating, and the recipes are generally very approachable.
I've also made the Babylonian stew from this recipe, and it's rich and hearty. It's easy to see how this would knock the...sandals off of ancient people.
Other ancient recipes...let's just say that humans have very much not held the same tastes over the eons. Some recipes were incongruent or sweet and savory in a strange way, or simply a flex about how many spices you had access to and cold throw in a dish, not about what it really tasted like. YMMV.
by 3RTB297 - https://blog.crystalking.com/ancient-roman-food-parthian-chi...
the parthian chicken was stupid easy and tasty
by maxglute - Yep, this is a great shoutout and I'm also a big TH fan. If you haven't yet, check it out!
- I've made this Roman recipe probably a dozen times and everyone who's tried it really likes it [1].
The strange ingredients are garum [2] and asafoetida [3]. The former is just a fish sauce, so that's not hard to substitute, but you have to find asafoetida on the Internet or at an Indian food store.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y
by Rendello