The Oldest Cookbooks in the World

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When the three messengers visited Abraham to announce the forthcoming birth of his beloved son Isaac, Abraham demonstrated his hospitality by inviting the messengers to a meal before even learning what their mission was. “Let me fetch a morsel of bread that you may refresh yourselves,” he said (Genesis 18:5) with modest understatement, before proceeding to entertain them with a feast fit for kings. For in the same breath, he instructed Sarah: “Quick, three measures of choice flour! Knead and make cakes!” while he himself “ran to the herd, took a calf, tender and choice, and gave it to the servant-boy, who hastened to prepare it. He took curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared, and set these before them; and he waited on them under the tree as they ate” (Genesis 18:6–8).^a

This familiar passage is probably the nearest thing in the Hebrew Bible to a description of culinary methods. For all its intense preoccupation with food, the Bible concerns itself very little with the preparation of the food. What it provides in abundance is dietary laws, blessings of fertility or curses of infertility laid on field and barn, sacrificial regulations, narratives of provisioning in the wilderness, of feast and famine, of Jonah’s gourd and Esther’s banquets—but nary a word about what might be called the ancient Israelite “cuisine,” the combination of ingredients and their preparation that went into the making of a meal—in short, recipes.

We need not, however, be daunted by this silence of the biblical text, for its lacunae can be filled from other sources, notably the findings of biblical archaeology, both artifactual and textual.

The ancient Near East is particularly rich in archival documents, those records of daily life that are lacking from the literary or canonical writings of which the Hebrew Bible exclusively consists. These archival documents provide us with extensive information about ancient food production and consumption. They are known from Egypt,¹ ancient Turkey (Hittite texts)² and elsewhere. The most abundant documentation, however, comes from ancient Mesopotamia, that writing-happy land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, the breadbasket of the ancient world, where the fertility of the ponds and fields was matched only by the prolixity of the scribes who, beginning before the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E., left us countless clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform with every detail of food production, preparation and consumption.³

For example, a cuneiform tablet that was excavated at Nippur, the great religious capital of Sumer and Akkad, records the offerings to various deities at one of the temples in Nippur during the course of one lunar year.⁴ It is dated to the 35th year of Hammurabi, who ruled Babylon from 1792 through 1750 B.C.E. (according to the best current estimates).⁵ In the meticulous bookkeeping for which Mesopotamian scribes are noted, this tablet lists the daily amounts needed for what has been aptly described as “the care and feeding of the gods.”⁶ Thanks to this fastidious record-keeping, we know that they consumed—or at least were offered—one boiled pasture-fed sheep and one “good fish” daily, along with a variety of more complicated dishes whose ingredients are carefully listed, providing us with some unintended recipes. Thus, the fine (thin) bread is made of two kinds of flour, “quality flour” and finely ground flour. This thin bread is probably the equivalent of the “unleavened wafers” mentioned in the Bible (Leviticus 2:4; there too it is an offering to the deity). Another bread—a coarse kind, so-called large loaves—is also described in the cuneiform text. Six of these large loaves require 12 liters of coarse flour and specific amounts of spices and other additives such as emmer or groats, a variety of different herbs and, finally, a tiny amount of salt—one-twelfth of a liter, to be exact—in order to allow the dough to rise or, literally, to ferment.

This same tablet also describes a concoction made of finely ground flour, ordinary dates, special dates from Tilmun in the Persian Gulf, butter, cheese, a kind of wine, apples and figs. The whole mixture is described as a kind of sweet roll and was served up both on golden vessels and on assorted ordinary dishes.

These and similar texts are intended not as recipes for cooks and bakers, but as records of expenditures carefully kept by the scribes in charge of temple kitchens against the possibility of a future audit by some higher authority.

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Another such account dates to the 32nd year of Hammurabi and details the “offerings to the temple gates of Ur” in southern Mesopotamia.⁷ It describes another crucial component of the Mesopotamian cuisine—beer. While wine grapes grew in the northern part of Mesopotamia, mainly in Assyria, in the south, or Babylonia, dates and especially barley were available in abundance. As a result, barley was the preferred ingredient in a beer that was mass-produced by the simple device of putting barley bread into a vat of water, adding malt and letting the mixture stand until it fermented. Sometimes the imbibers did not even bother to pour the finished drink out of the vat; they simply drank it through long straws while standing or seated at the vat (see photo of impression of cylinder seal from Ur).

There were many different qualities of beer. The tablet from Ur lists no less than five varieties. The best kind was a dark beer identified as 2:1 beer, meaning that it required two times its volume in barley to produce a given volume of beer. Two other kinds of beer are specified as 1.5:1—one a “fine beer” and one probably mixed with wine. Finally, two kinds of beer are specified as 1:1, one of them made from emmer rather than barley.

Not all delicacies were reserved for the gods, however. The gods were represented in effigy, that is, in the form of statues; the dainties were fed to them in their guise as statues, seated at the “table of the god,” not unlike the “table of the Lord” in the Bible (Malachi 1:7, 12). What they deigned to leave over was, after a suitable interval, distributed to the clergy and, at their discretion, to the faithful masses waiting patiently outside the sacred precincts.

Moreover, secular texts galore catalogue spices, condiments and all manner of other comestibles in the possession of private entrepreneurs or otherwise involved in a variety of transactions. One text dated to the reign of Amar-Suen of Ur, almost 300 years before the texts already described from Hammurabi’s time, will suffice to show that culinary delicacies were not confined to the tables of the gods but could equally adorn those of the king—and perhaps even of lesser mortals. This text tells us what went into a royal banquet. It reads in part: “six pigs, their daily fodder being three liters each, for three months and 17 days, from month IX (day 1) to month XII day 17. Their barley is 1,926 liters; fodder for the pigs of the royal banquet.”⁸ The king, it appears, was a veritable glutton.

Until very recently only two isolated cuneiform texts could claim to be true recipes. One contains instructions for making beer. The other has been described as “a recipe for the preparation of a hot and pungent sauce.”⁹

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In 1985, however, three clay tablets of unknown provenance from the Yale Babylonian Collection changed all this. These three tablets can indeed be regarded not just as recipes, but as whole collections of recipes or, in other words, as cookbooks. In fact they constitute, as of now, the world’s oldest cookbooks. At first the three tablets were published only in the form of cuneiform copies, prepared many years earlier by Mary Inda Hussey, an Assyriologist who died in 1952. They were included in a volume entitled Early Mesopotamian Incantations and Rituals (Yale Oriental Series 11), hardly a title calculated to call attention to cookbooks. The three tablets were neither incantations nor rituals and were in fact listed as “Akkadian recipes” in the catalogue of the volume prepared by Professor Jan van Dijk.

The three “recipe” tablets were assigned for translation and editing to Jean Bottéro, who is indeed the ideal person for this job. Directeur d’études at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, Professor Bottéro is not only one of the world’s leading Assyriologists, but well known among his colleagues and friends as a devoted gourmet cook. Although he has not yet published his edition of the texts, he has given us some preliminary glimpses into them.¹⁰

While the results are in many respects fascinating, they failed to meet Professor Bottéro’s exacting gustatory standards: In a letter to an American colleague, he confessed that he “would not wish such meals [as described in these texts] on any save his worst enemies.”¹¹

But at Yale we were not so easily discouraged. In 1986 we hosted the annual meeting of the American Oriental Society. We took the occasion to invite some 150 scholars to sample one of the more elaborate recipes in these cookbooks, prepared according to our best understanding of the text by Alexandra H. Hicks, editor of the Herb Society of America and a food historian at the University of Michigan, who flew to New Haven for the occasion with spices and other ingredients gathered from as far away as Italy. Everyone survived 030the experience and indeed pronounced the result a resounding success.

Here follows one of the simpler recipes (in Bottéro’s preliminary translation)—meat stew:

“Take some meat. Prepare water, throw fat into it, then add [break in the text], leek and garlic, all crushed together, and some plain shuhutinnu [probably a kind of onion].”

Leeks and garlic, the principal identifiable ingredients added to this dish by way of spicing it up, were already familiar from earlier Sumerian mythology as staples in a normal diet. Because of their smell, however, they were to be avoided by cultically clean persons.¹²

The three tablets, which we may now call cookbooks, have been designated A, B and C. They date to approximately 1750 B.C.E., judging by their script and language. Tablet A includes 25 recipes, summarized at the end as “21 meat dishes and 4 vegetarian dishes.” In fact, however, three of the so-called vegetarian dishes contain meat.

Each dish on this tablet is named at the outset, thus providing us with what is in effect a table of contents. Of course, some of the names still elude our identification or translation. The first is the simple meat stew already mentioned. This is followed by a dish called “Assyrian”—somewhat surprising in a text dating to a time when Assyria was far from prominent in Babylonian affairs. Next comes a dish called “red”; then another called “bright” or “clear.” Then come three meat stews named for the stock—of deer, gazelle and (nanny-) goat, respectively. After that come three somewhat obscure entries, and then ten more stews named for cassia, lamb, spleen, pigeon, mutton, vinegar, wild dove and three uncertain ingredients, as well as an Elamite stew and one uncertain concoction.

The so-called vegetable dishes include one apparently made of leftovers, one from an herb of uncertain identification and one from an unidentified vegetable, perhaps a kind of turnip. The tablet ends with the only true vegetarian dish, the “choice” or “cultivated” turnip.

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Here is how the leftovers are prepared:

“There must also be the meat from a leg of lamb. Prepare the water. Add fat, [break in the text], vinegar, beer, onions, [an herb called] spiney, coriander, samiµdu [a spice plant or vegetable], cumin [a spice that has retained its ancient name to this day] and beetroot. Then crush garlic and leeks and add them [break in the text]. Let the whole cook into a stew, onto which you sprinkle coriander and shuhutinnu.”¹³

If this isn’t a recipe for leftovers, it should be!

By modern standards all of these recipes are tantalizingly brief. Even when we can identify the ingredients, we are still faced with many unclear steps that are left to the imagination or, more likely, to an oral tradition that probably accompanied these written instructions. Most notably we are left in the dark as to the quantities of ingredients or the yields to be expected. Perhaps, like some modern cooks, you just added a pinch of this and a smidgen of that. Not even the longest recipes provide such instructions—or the time taken to cook anything.

Cookbook (or tablet) B is bigger than Cookbook A by a good 40 percent. It contains at least 245 lines of text compared to only 75 for tablet A. It is inscribed in two columns on each face. Yet it contains only seven recipes. Each is written out in lavish detail. All of them seem to deal with one sort of fowl or another, including the unidentified kippu, which was served in our banquet at Yale for the American Oriental Society. (If the word is a loanword from Sumerian ki-ib or kib, it could be a seagull or a swallow or even a cormorant.¹⁴) We resolved the problem of identifying the kippu by substituting chicken for the uncertain word of the recipe, perhaps in the silent hope that we could compare the Dutch word for chicken, which is kip! Possibly we also chose this recipe because it is the shortest in this otherwise prolix tablet. For the recipe, in Bottéro’s translation,¹⁵ see “Kippu Stew,” right.

The third Yale tablet, Cookbook C, is the smallest and most fragmentary of the three and has the least to add to our knowledge.

For whom were these recipes written and who dined on such elaborate fare in the age of Hammurabi? Hardly the common man, who barely eked out a subsistence level of nutrition to judge by the abundant indications of ration lists that have survived. Nor yet the priesthood, for the accounts of sacrificial offerings such as those with which I began are far more modest. Perhaps it was the aristocracy—or even the king himself. We know of royal repasts that were little short of astounding in quantity if not in quality. Here for example is the menu for a royal banquet hosted by Yasmah-Addu of Mari, a contemporary of Hammurabi:

“900 liters of KUM-bread, 60 liters of bread made with sammidatum-flour; 2,020 liters of sour bread made of burrum-cereal, 950 liters of cake, 2,185 liters of sour bread made of barley, 940 liters of mead, 100 liters of chick-peas, 11 liters of fine flour, 6 liters of semolina, 3 liters of sammidatum-flour, 70 liters of (linseed) oil, 3 liters of honey (or date-syrup), 4 liters of linseed, 5 liters of dates—meal of the king and his men in Mari on the fourth day of the eleventh month.”¹⁶

This record of gluttony can be matched nearly a millennium later at the dedication of the palace of Assurnasirpal in the capital city of Kalah (Nimrud) in 879 B.C.E. It included 10,000 doves and an equal number of turtledoves, other small birds, fish, gerbils, eggs, loaves of bread, measures of beer and skins of wine, to mention only part of the menu.¹⁷ Two centuries later, the last great king of Assyria, Assurbanipal (668–627 B.C.E.) decorated the walls of his palace at Nineveh with scenes of the royal cuisine—of the service at the royal table (see photo of Assurbanipal feast scene), as well as of the preparation of the food in the royal kitchens.

Such scenes lend at least a semblance of plausibility to the biblical assertion that “Solomon’s daily provisions consisted of 600 bushels (30 kor) of semolina, 1,200 bushels of (ordinary) flour, 10 fattened oxen, 20 pasture-fed oxen and 100 sheep and goats, besides deer and gazelles, roebucks and 056fatted geese” (1 Kings 4:22f. = 5:2f. in Hebrew Bibles).¹⁸ And thus our journey has ended where it started, with the Hebrew Bible. Along the way we have sampled the cuisine of ancient Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria, and I hope that you have found it to your taste.

When the three messengers visited Abraham to announce the forthcoming birth of his beloved son Isaac, Abraham demonstrated his hospitality by inviting the messengers to a meal before even learning what their mission was. “Let me fetch a morsel of bread that you may refresh yourselves,” he said (Genesis 18:5) with modest understatement, before proceeding to entertain them with a feast fit for kings. For in the same breath, he instructed Sarah: “Quick, three measures of choice flour! Knead and make cakes!” while he himself “ran to the herd, took a calf, tender and choice, and gave it […]