A Mesopotamian Feast

Mesopotamia (as everyone who writes about it is required to state) is a land of firsts: the first cities, the first writing … and the first cookbooks.

Apparently, the Mesopotamians included cooking among the arts of civilization. Along with commemorations of royal deeds and epics of their gods, they saw fit to inscribe the first-known recipes onto clay tablets around 1700 B.C.E., during what is known as the Old Babylonian Period. Today these tablets are housed at Yale University and provide a fascinating glimpse of the culinary practices of almost four millennia ago.

For a graduate student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University who loves to cook, the tablets present a rare opportunity to get inside not just the mind, but the palate, of the people I study. Some of my fellow graduate students and I recently decided to go on a gastronomical adventure.

As all good scholars do, we started with the primary sources: descriptions of meals written by the Mesopotamians themselves. These are found in a book called Textes Culinaires Mésopotamiens by the great scholar and gourmand Jean Bottéro. In his book Bottéro provides translations of the Old Babylonian recipes recorded on the Yale tablets.

Somewhat surprisingly, many of the most frequently mentioned ingredients—mint, cilantro, coriander and cumin —are still staples in many kitchens today. This continuity is nicely illustrated by the fact that the word for cumin in Akkadian (a Semitic language used by both the Babylonians and the Assyrians) is kumunu, from which our word “cumin” derives.

One of the most daunting challenges we faced was that we simply don’t know the meanings of many words, particularly those that referred to ingredients used in the recipes. This problem became especially apparent when we attempted to identify the numerous alliums used in ancient Mesopotamian cuisine. Alliums are piquant bulbs—such as onions, scallions, leeks and garlic—found in cuisines around the world and throughout history. Lacking ingredients like chilies (a New World crop) or ginger (which served a similar purpose in late-Medieval European cuisine) to perk up their food, the ancient Mesopotamians relied heavily on various types of onions to give the foods they ate a kick. Such varieties as leeks (karašu) and garlic (šuømuø) we can be fairly sure of, but others, such as šuhutinnû and samidu, we can only guess at. Virtually all of the recipes call for at least four different alliums.

In the end, we had to rely on a combination of scholarship and intuition to fill in the gaps in our understanding of Mesopotamian gastronomy. For instance, an articled titled “The Philadelphia Onion Archive” by the Assyriologist I.J. Gelb, dealing with cuneiform tablets housed at the University of Pennsylvania, was quite helpful. These late-third-millennium B.C.E. tablets helped us to identify some (but by no means all) of the alliums, as well as to understand what role they might have played in the ancient Mesopotamian economy. We also relied on our intuition, as does any cook worth his or her salt, and found ourselves saying things like, “Mmm, this tastes good, and there’s no reason why the Mesopotamians couldn’t have used this kind of onion.”

Many of the recipes’ ingredients, including types of birds, vegetables and spices, were equally elusive. The meanings of most of these words have been simply lost to time, and it would take other avenues of research to fill up our Mesopotamian plate.

One of these methods was based on ethnoarchaeology, the study of present-day cultures to illuminate how people in the past lived. In the case of 4,000-year-old recipes, this can be quite difficult, but we were able to find some echoes of ancient cuisine among the culinary traditions of the modern Middle East. We came up with the dessert course, a crucial part of any meal, this way. While looking through a Middle Eastern cookbook, we found a recipe for a dish called ma’amoul. This consisted of a pastry made with butter, flour and milk and then stuffed with a paste made of crushed dates. Interestingly, this sounded almost exactly like a sweet mentioned in the cuneiform texts called mirsu, which is often found in reference to offerings to deities. With the exception of wheat flour, for which we exchanged the ubiquitous Mesopotamian staple, barley flour, all of the ingredients meshed perfectly with what we know about the ancient diet from archaeological and textual sources. Besides being authentic, this dessert also happened to be quite tasty, maybe even fit for a god.

As the evening of our Mesopotamian feast drew near, it was time to synthesize our research and experimentation and transform it into dinner. My main challenge as both scholar and chef was to recreate the ancient recipes as faithfully as possible, while at the same time making something that modern diners would enjoy. To slavishly follow an original recipe by including ingredients that wouldn’t be particularly pleasant for today’s palates (spleen, blood, or salted entrails, for instance) might be technically accurate, but certainly wouldn’t convey to us the gustatory pleasure experienced by the ancient Mesopotamians! Compounding our problems was the fact that some parts of the tablets were damaged, resulting in the loss of words, phrases and sometimes whole sections of a recipe.

In the end, we decided that we could produce the most accurate and most enjoyable dishes by choosing one or two recipes to use as guides, relying on others to help us fill in anything that wasn’t clear regarding ingredients or techniques. Our main dish was mê puhadi, or lamb stew (literally, “lamb water”). This is a fairly straightforward recipe, in which lamb is simmered in water with mashed onions, leeks and garlic, and then thickened with fresh bread crumbs. Though not specifically indicated in this particular recipe, we decided to grill the lamb over a charcoal fire first, which is an instruction given in another recipe for cooking a young goat. This decision was also based on many of our own experiences working in the Middle East, where a smoky, charred flavor is prized in dishes from lamb to eggplant—another example of the use of ethnoarchaeology. Also, to the cooking liquid we added cumin and coriander, two spices that are called for in most of the other recipes. In this way we were able to create a dish firmly rooted in the textual evidence.

The other recipe that we decided to make was the very last one inscribed on the first tablet: laptu erisÿtim, or as Bottéro translated it, “garden-variety turnips.” This tasty recipe also included the ubiquitous mashed onion, leeks and garlic, as well as what Bottéro identified as arugula. Luckily, we had arugula growing in our garden. The recipe also called for blood, which we (not surprisingly) decided to omit. This braised dish turned out to be one of the surprise hits of the evening. To all of this we added fresh bread from a local Middle Eastern grocery store and, of course, the true staff of life for ancient Mesopotamians: beer.

When the appointed evening finally arrived, the house was filled with the rich aroma of stewing lamb and the excited chatter of scholars about to see the final results of all of their research. The guests (whose invitations had been written in cuneiform on clay tablets) sat themselves down, beer and wine (an expensive import in ancient Mesopotamia) began to flow, and for a little while we savored the past.

Mê Puhadi “Lamb Stew”

Serves 4

1½ lbs. lamb, cut into 1-inch cubes

½ to 1 Tbsp. light (not dark) extra virgin sesame oil (available at Middle Eastern grocery stores) or a neutral oil (such as canola oil) plus a few drops of dark sesame oil

salt

1 leek, halved, thinly sliced, and well rinsed to remove grit

1 onion, sliced

2 scallions (both white and green parts), sliced

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 tsp. dried dill

1 tsp. ground coriander

1 tsp. ground cumin

chopped cilantro and mint

Coat the lamb with oil and lightly salt. Thread the cubes of lamb onto a skewer and grill until browned. This can also be done under a broiler or on the stove, but the taste won’t be the same.

Put the lamb, leek, onion, scallions, garlic, dill, coriander and cumin into a baking dish with 2 cups of water and a pinch of salt. Bake at 325 degrees for 1½ to 2 hours or until the lamb is very tender and the liquid has reduced to a thick sauce.

Serve with chopped cilantro and mint to taste.

Mirsu “Date-stuffed Pastries”

Makes about 20

½ lb. dried, pitted dates

3 cups barley flour (for utmost authenticity) or 1½ cups each all purpose flour and whole wheat flour

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, cut into small cubes and chilled

3–5 Tbsp. chilled milk

Chop the dates very small, either in a food processor or by hand.

Put dates into a small pan and add about ¼ to ½ cup water. Cook over very low heat until a thick paste forms, stirring often. Let cool.

Add the chilled butter to the flour and work it in with your hands until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal.

Add just enough milk so that the dough holds together. Wrap the dough and place it in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

Break off a golf-ball sized piece of dough and roll it in your hands until it becomes pliable, forming a ball. Make a hole in the center of the ball with your thumb and pinch the sides between your thumb and index finger to enlarge the hole.

Take some of the cooled date paste and fill the hole three-fourths of the way up. Bring the edges together to seal the date paste in the dough. Quickly roll the sealed ball in your hands to make it spherical.

Place the ball on a baking sheet and repeat until all of the dough and date paste is used up.

Bake in a preheated 325-degree oven for 25 minutes.

Laptu Erištim “Braised Turnips”

Serves 4

1 large onion, sliced

1 bunch arugula, trimmed and rinsed

1½ tsp. ground coriander

salt

1 lb. small turnips, trimmed, peeled, and quartered

chopped cilantro and sliced scallions

Put the sliced onion, arugula, coriander and a generous pinch of salt into two cups water and bring to a boil.

Add turnips and reduce heat to a gentle simmer. Cover and cook until the turnips are tender, about 20 to 30 minutes.

Remove vegetables from the simmering liquid and place on a serving dish. Garnish with cilantro and scallions to taste.

Mesopotamia (as everyone who writes about it is required to state) is a land of firsts: the first cities, the first writing … and the first cookbooks.