BAR Test Kitchen: Eat Like an Ancient Babylonian

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A favorite way for me to familiarize myself with a foreign culture is to sample its cuisine. Not only do you learn its ingredients and cooking methods, but also the setting in which meals are typically shared and with whom.

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Endnotes

1. Jean Bottéro, “The Cuisine of Ancient Mesopotamia,” The Biblical Archaeologist 48.1 (March 1985), p. 42.

2. Jean Bottéro believes that samīdu and šuḫutinnū—two of the ingredients we omitted—were “probably in the onion family.” See Bottéro, “The Cuisine,” p. 42.

3. Jean Bottéro, The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 125–126.