alt Hacker NewsBabylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
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Close to a recipe on Tasting History... https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/babylonianlambstew Our current favorite dinner watching along with Alton Brown.
"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.
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.
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.
How's the presentation? Just imagining it, it would seem that the meet would have a weird color.
Gonna be quite challenging to get "1/2 cup of rendered sheep fat"
I think the taste of their beer would have been much different from what we drink today?
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 ...
The source texts are available here, if anyone wants to read the literal translations:
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ancient-mesopota...
What's enlightening is how astonishingly little salt is used, by our standards.
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.
Honestly the recipe sounds like adding beets to a regular lamb stew recipe. If I havent watch this video and saw the dish, I would think some fancy restaurant is trying to be "innovative"
I dislike lamb but the rest sounds great. Maybe I could sub beef.
I mean, this had to be a dish for royalty or something right? How on earth that they have all of those fresh and dried ingredients on hand 4000 years ago.
Apparently their beets looked the same as ours:
> The kind of beets used in such an ancient recipe should not be different from the beets we use today, even in name. We read in Dictionary of Assyrian Botany (by Campbell Thompson, 1948) that in the ancient Mesopotamian region it was called ‘shumundar,’ it was as red as blood, and has a spinning-top shape (pp. 49, 51).