Modern chefs cannot reveal the secret of cooking the dishes that were popular among the inhabitants of ancient Babylon. And this despite the fact that all the ingredients are known.
Yale University deciphered the inscriptions on the Babylonian cuneiform tablets, which are approximately 3,800 years old. That is, long before the founding of Rome, exquisite dishes were already prepared in Babylon, the recipes of which have survived to this day. As follows from the cuneiform writing, a thick soup of lamb and beets, meat broth with cumin (in another way, this spice was also called "Roman cumin") and ground coriander were served. And the dishes should be decorated with thinly sliced Egyptian leeks.
The fact that the menu of the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom was very diverse is also evidenced by another recipe - a puff pastry made from poultry meat. It was served under a dough lid, and it was necessary to remove it only after the dish was served on the table. The tablets also mention how to cook fish and desserts. Researchers believe that traditions originated in ancient Babylon, which are still preserved in the cuisine of some peoples of modern Iraq.
The found cuneiform tablets are very rare: more than half a million of them have been discovered, but only four of them have scientists found culinary recipes. It is these rarities that now allow us to look into the everyday life of the ancient Babylonians. On the tablets, dozens of descriptions of dishes were found - thick soups, roasts, desserts, pies. The oldest of the tablets is 38 thousand years old. These are the oldest recipes in the world.
However, the task of preparing dishes according to ancient Babylonian recipes is not as easy as it might seem. The fact is that the tablets indicate only the ingredients from which to prepare, but there is no mention of the proportions at all. Therefore, they can be restored only by relying on the experience of modern chefs.
A team of Assyriologists, archaeologists, food chemists and experts in the culinary tradition of the Middle East worked to prepare such dishes. True, they turned out, according to experts, not tasty enough. But whether they were improperly prepared or simply not suitable for a modern person is still an open question.
