Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
babylonian-collection.yale.edu147 points by yubblegum 4 days ago
147 points by yubblegum 4 days 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).
If it's any consolation, their lambs were nothing like ours.
This period is early enough that sheep weren't yet sheared.
Oh! So were sheep just for meat back then?
Maybe also for leather?
And in nature sheep drop their coats without shearing.
do they? there are reports of lost sheep which when found had a very thick fur or whatever the shepherds call it
Sorry, when I said in nature, I meant undomesticated sheep.
Domesticated sheep that get lost for a while don't magically learn how to shed their coat, yes.
Pretty much all domesticated sheep will cast their fleeces.
There are some breeds that don't, and obviously due to random genetics you'll get individuals that don't.
Sheep that don't cast their fleeces are damn near impossible to shear and are mostly kept for meat. Likewise, sheep that don't have much of a "rise" (see my other comment) and are difficult to shear quite often, uh, don't have a particularly long career, as it were.
No, the sheep were harvested for wool, but not by shearing. When they shed, we picked the shed wool from them.
Modern sheep grow their wool continuously, but that took a while to breed in.
> Modern sheep grow their wool continuously, but that took a while to breed in.
No they don't.
In the summer their wool starts to grow out much thinner, like maybe a quarter as thick - it's really noticeable. This gives what's called a "rise", a gap between the sheep's skin and the thicker coarser wool. Once that's high enough to get shears (or these days, machine clippers which are like a big beard trimmer) into you can shear the fleece off.
If there's no rise you haven't a hope in hell of cutting it.
If there's a good rise it practically falls off.
If you leave them long enough or if the rise starts growing in too soon, they'll start "casting" where their wool just falls off in big chunks. This is actually quite dangerous for them because it's itchy and they roll on their backs to scratch, and get stuck upside down with their legs in the air and suffocate.
And you thought sheep farming was easy and fun ;-)
I thought animal farming in general is an arcane science.
My friends have goats but they aren't farmers and they haven't got a clue how to care for them. The females sometimes are left with milk in their breasts after their young are weaned and one of my friends will get anxious about that and ask us to help her milk them. It's impossible. You can't milk a goat that doesn't want to be milked. If you push them too hard they lie down so you can't reach their teats and that's that unless you want to have three people lifting the goat up and another one trying to milk her while she squirms and kicks. I don't trust the milk either. Once in a while they succeed in milking a goat and when I tried the milk (after boiling it) it was sort of gritty, like it was mixed with sand. It was not impurities from the environment because I filtered it through a muslin so I think the animal may have had some infection like a mastitis or something that affected the milk's texture.
I bet farmers know exactly what to do about all that or probably they know how to get the animals used to milking when they're still young so that the won't resist it that much. I've watched videos of goats being milked and it looks almost effortless when a pump is used. The goats just line up in their feeding trays and then someone walks up to them from behind, pumps out their tits and moves to the next one, bish bash bosh. My friends don't even have a dedicated structure to feed the goats, we just throw hay for them on the ground so they end up fighting.
My friends really have no idea how to care for the goats, it's rather sad. The owner of the farm has even said he wants to get "wild" goats that don't need to be cared for. By that he means a herd of goats that have gone feral and roam the hills in a village nearby. He thinks because nobody actively cares for them and the herd persists that must mean the goats are somehow self-sufficient. I think that's a big misunderstanding. Domesticated animals need a lot of care one way or another.
I think I'd prefer to have sheep though, if I had animals. Sheep look much nicer than goats.
The recipe is also similar to Hamedh [0], a delicacy in Iraqi and Baghdadi Jewish households. The only major difference is the addition of tomatoes thanks to the Columbian Exchange, and rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet.
On that note, in Arabic, Farsi, and Hindustani the word for Tomato is essentially shared (tumatar/tamatimu) with the English word "tomato".
But anyhow, a lot of home cooking and traditional meals actually have a pretty long history.
[0] - https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2000/12/12/hamad-iraqi-b...
> rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet
Surprisingly it was still imported in surprising quantities nearly 1000 years before it started to be cultivated. Not significant enough quantities for it to be a common staple, but still an interesting tidbit
One day, someone - someone like you, maybe, someone with the Hacker Nature - was looking at the rice they'd bought and thought "You know what, it just *cannot* be all that difficult to just grow this stuff here, it costs a fortune to import. How hard can it possibly be?"
So they set to digging irrigation trenches, and had a go at it, and maybe a couple of shitty harvests later they'd got the trick nailed.
And here we are.
Actually, in Persian, tomato is literally translated as “western plum”. This is common in our language as we usually say “western” or “foreign” as a prefix to many things that were introduced to Iran (strawberries, sit-style toilets, etc)
As an aside, tomatoes are golden apples (pomodoro), and oranges are Chinese apples (Apfelsin) in some languages.
A lot of cultures appear to name botanicals using apples or, in GP’s context, stone fruit as “reference” points.
Everything is an apple, it seems. You also have earth apples (pomme de terre in French, aardappel in Dutch) for potatoes, grenade apples (pomegranate in English, granatäpple in Swedish, ...), pineapple, ...
Wait 'till you hear about melon - "μήλον" i.e. "apple" in Greek.
Melon, watermelon, pomelo, etc. The ancient Greeks themselves started that with the "golden apples of the Hesperides" a.k.a. oranges.
I guess any fruit people didn't know how to call was ... some kind of apple.
Potatoes are called "earth apples" in french (pomme de terre) and a bunch of other european languages
Thank you for this. Knowing both those words, i could never work out the original/history of the terms.
>A lot of cultures appear to name botanicals using apples
don't know if it makes the point or upends it, but the fruit in the Garden of Eden wasn't specifically an apple.
Chinese does the same thing, using prefixes like 西 (western), 番 (foreign), and 洋 (foreign) for introduced items.
For tomatoes, interestingly, it has two common names that follow this pattern: 西紅柿, literally translated as "Western Red Persimmon", and 番茄, literally translated as "Foreign Eggplant".
Other produce examples include 番薯 (Foreign Yam) for sweet potato, 西瓜 (Western Melon) for watermelon, 洋蔥 (Foreign Onion) for bulb onion etc.
The recorded English-language etymology for "ketchup" suggests that the word comes from one of the Chinese dialect's word for tomato. Do you have any idea which Chinese word sounds like ketchup?
My personal theory based on nothing more than the vibe of the thing is that it comes from the Malay/Indonesian word ‘kecap’ (which is pronounced almost identically to “ketchup”), the word for sweet soy sauce. This is soy sauce that is thickened and sweetened with palm sugar, and I could see European cooks attempting to replicate it based on the vague descriptions given by sailors, and ending up with ketchup.
茄ke2 汁zap1, but if I remember it correctly, Dan Jurafsky believes it is from 喼git1 汁zap1, worcestershire sauce
Not exactly a Chinese dialect, but Vietnamese calls tomatoes "cà chua": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/c%C3%A0_chua .
Are the Vietnamese and Chinese languages related? Or perhaps one of the two cultures was introduced to that fruit by the other, and thus preserved the name?
Not related at all in recent history and I have no insight on the etymology links but Vietnamese used to be written in a mix of original Vietnamese Chinese-style characters before they changed to a Latin alphabet with Colonialism and Communism so there was definitely contact.
possibly Hokkien 膎汁 (kê-chiap, “fish sauce”) via Malay kecap ~ kicap “any dark clear sauce from soy, fish etc”
Interesting, in various European languages those tend to be "Turkish": turkey hens (the bird called turkey now), Turkish corn (maize), Turkish beans (long beans).
Again, trade routes.
> Turkish corn (maize)
And in Turkish maize is called "Mısır", which comes from the country name Egypt (which is also Mısır in Turkish).
When Arabs conquered Egypt, they called it "Mishr" (مصر) which literally translates to "country" or "borderland". Maize was originally imported from the Americas, but because the trade route was through Egypt, Turkish people initially called it Egypt Wheat or Egypt Millet. In time, it is started to be called only Mısır/Egypt.
I wonder what they call maize in Egypt then?
According to Kagi Translate, a term for maize that's specific to Egypt is "الذرة الشامية" (al-dhura ash-shāmiyyah) which could be directly translated to "Levantine sorghum". Can anyone with actual knowledge of Egytian Arabic confirm?
Also I had the idea that "Maize" might have come from "Mısır", but etymonline claims it comes from the native (Arawakan) name for the plant: mahiz.
In Panama they say Chino for foreign versions and in Cambodia they say barang which literally means Frankish (via farang from Thailand).
> maize
Which, in turn, originated in Mexico and didn't make its way to Europe until the 1500s.
There is a bird native to the Americas which in English is called the turkey, from its original name "Turkey fowl", because it was thought to come from "the east" of which Türkiye is the country with which most Europeans were familiar (due to being the closest). In Turkish, the bird's name references India ("hindi"); the same is true of other languages such as French ("dinde", from "poule d'inde", chicken of India).
Appreciate the clarification!
My pleasure! I also find languages very interesting and have had the opportunity to grow up in a bilingual home and learn French and German.
One more fun fact is that potato is a direct translation of the French “Pomme de terre” (“sib zamani” or “ground apple”).
Back to the actual topic, this is a recipe that’s definitely worth trying. Persian shallots are actually more garlicky than oniony. A great addition to lamb dishes and yogurt.
Thank you! In Hebrew we literally call the potato תפוח אדמה which is "ground apple". Now I know where the idea comes from.
It is not a “clarification”. You are wrong and are spreading misinformation. In Farsi, the word for tomato is gojeh farangi.
> On that note, in Arabic, Farsi, and Hindustani the word for Tomato is essentially shared (tumatar/tamatimu) with the English word "tomato".
Huh. Like Pomodoro. That makes sense.
In Russian we use tomat and pomidor interchangeably.
Meanwhile English speakers joke about disagreements over the pronunciation of tomato
Close to a recipe on Tasting History... https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/babylonianlambstew Our current favorite dinner watching along with Alton Brown.
I've made this Roman recipe probably a dozen times and everyone who's tried it really likes it [1].
The strange ingredients are garum [2] and asafoetida [3]. The former is just a fish sauce, so that's not hard to substitute, but you have to find asafoetida on the Internet or at an Indian food store.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y
I can usually find hing (asafoetida) in grocery stores in certain more populous parts of Canada in the spice section, it's quite a good garlic substitute for those who can't do garlic
https://blog.crystalking.com/ancient-roman-food-parthian-chi...
the parthian chicken was stupid easy and tasty
Yep, this is a great shoutout and I'm also a big TH fan. If you haven't yet, check it out!
Came here to mention Max Miller as well. Amazing work putting together historical context and recipes. Always fun, fascinating, and the recipes are generally very approachable.
I've also made the Babylonian stew from this recipe, and it's rich and hearty. It's easy to see how this would knock the...sandals off of ancient people.
Other ancient recipes...let's just say that humans have very much not held the same tastes over the eons. Some recipes were incongruent or sweet and savory in a strange way, or simply a flex about how many spices you had access to and cold throw in a dish, not about what it really tasted like. YMMV.
Yes! Came here to recommend Max. His cookbook is also educational and interesting and some of the recipes are even good! :-)
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 fact that they promote the preorder of a 200$ book without showing even a single page is crazy.
They were sending pages to the people on the kickstarter list, effectively crowd sourcing recipe testing. That was quite clever I thought. And their socials keep showing videos of the actual recipies etc. This is a legit book. It's just a shame that it carries that price tag. I could do with a less "beautiful" version if it was reasonably priced. Maybe a future edition.
"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.
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"
In Australia where lamb is more common than in the US, it'd be pretty easy to keep the fat after roasting a lamb shoulder, or to freeze the fatty offcuts from forequarter chops and render them after I had enough.
Lamb is quite popular down here in Australia. I usually keep some rendered fat from my roasts etc. Sometimes I cook other meats with it and it adds heaps of flavour. I do that with pork fat as well.
I was able to get some tail fat from a halal butcher. But never seen lamb fat anywhere else
if you have a good butcher they might be able to get you some that you can render, but its a hassle. I've done this for beef fat to make some british pie things.
Lamb is usually the red meat of choice, other than pork, almost everywhere besides the US.
You should visit Europe.
I was there for two months a month ago. Is it a lot of beef? I couldn’t really tell I remember a lot of pork and fish and chicken.
I’m not sure that it’s dominant anywhere other than Greece and the Balkans, but lamb would be quite popular in a lot of European countries. Pretty much anywhere on the Mediterranean, plus Ireland and Britain, at least.
I’m not sure there’s anywhere in Europe where it would be as unusual as it is in the US (where it definitely does seem to be seen as kinda vaguely exotic.)
I'd say that in Greece the dominant meats are pork and chicken. That's the main meat in all the grill houses and the meat in gyros and souvlaki. Lamb is beloved but eaten more rarely, particularly in religious feasts, especially Easter Sunday where the tradition is to put a lamb on a spit and eat everything off it down to the bones (except the entrails that are made in a special soup to end Lent, or various sweet meat skewers like kokoretsi, gardoumba, splinandero, etc). It's also more expensive than pork and chicken so it tends to be left for special dinners at home.
But, honestly, nothing beats a nice pilafi with lamb, with garlic wedges and slowly cooked until the meat falls off the bone.
I think the taste of their beer would have been much different from what we drink today?
Nutty, aromatic, yeasty, slightly sour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK4DMt8ARyU
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.
The ingredient ratios are the Yale researchers' interpretation—they're not from the source text,
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ancient-mesopota...
> "Like most premodern cooking manuals, the Babylonian recipes rarely list the quantities of each ingredient, and so basic experimentation is needed to determine viable proportions for the assembly of a dough or the salting of a stew. The “experimental” approach likewise offers answers to questions that can only be addressed through trial and error. For example, many of the identifications of herbs proposed by modern scholars are based mainly on medical compendia, and some of the plants thus identified can produce an extremely bitter or perhaps pungent taste when used in food."
Here's the recipes as literally translated (I used tesseract to OCR):
> "Unwinding. Meat is not used. You prepare water. You add fat. (You add) kurrat, cilantro, salt as desired, leek, garlic. You pound up dried sourdough, you sift (it) and you scatter (it) over the pot before removing it."
> "Stew of lamb. Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. [You crush] (and add) leek and garlic."
> "Elamite broth. Meat is not used. You prepare water. You add fat. Dill, kurrat, cilantro, leek, and garlic bound with blood, a corresponding amount of sour milk, and (more) garlic. The (original) name (of this dish) is Zukanda."
> "Tuh’u. Leg meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You sear. You fold in salt, beer, onion, arugula, cilantro, Persian shallot, cumin, and red’ beet, and [you crush] leek and garlic. You sprinkle coriander on top. [You add] kurrat and fresh cilantro."
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.
No, it's common. People today have no idea how truly poor they eat. Modern fast food is essentially fake food paste.
Which is a shame because you can eat so well today you can easily skip the dead animal carcass. They couldn't really do that back then in many places with short growing seasons.
Why would you skip the dead animal? That is by far the best part of every meal.
PS don’t jump into the whole animal cruelty spiel. I’m aware and I agree, it’s just that I don’t care. Vegetarian food, aside from maybe the narrow slice with how the Indians prepare it, is completely unsatisfying and I’m OK with animals suffering as long as I can continue to have meat because it’s just so delicious. That being said, I would eagerly switch to lab grown meat if they can do it correctly.
Vegan food on the other hand is brain dead food. I mean that literally and metaphorically. Anecdotally every vegan I’ve met seems nutritionally deficient and slow. They also go out of their way to eat food aping meat and that stuff turns out to be the most chemically processed and unhealthy stuff you could possibly imagine.
2/3rds of those herbs grow in the garden of my home as just weed (this in Albania), including mint, cilantro, origano and more.
While some have to be cultivated, a lot these herbs just grow as weeds in the Mediterranean area.
Most of them seem like a pretty common kitchen garden to me.
And all of the plants are native to that area, or close enough that people who had been farming for a few thousand years at that point would have brought them from neighboring lands to use.
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Curious indeed that the Yale Babylonian Collection should, out of all the possible options, choose the cooking of Ancient Babylon. I wonder what we should read into this. I have some theories, but it might be dangerous for me even to mention that I have them.
Cradle of civilization is not an odd culture. Babylon, meaning Gate of God, is one of the more profoundly influential urban civilizational clusters in human history.
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To an archeologist, 'civilization' refers to builders of walled cities inhabited by non-farmers with complex social sructure, division of labor, and usually some form of taxation. Highly moral hunter gatherers living in mud huts are not a 'civilization' in this context. Now you know.
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The vast majority of Africans aren't hunter-gatherers living in mud huts. They have actual cities with highways and skyscrapers and everything.
I'm not arguing for what is a majority. I'm talking about the large portions of Africa that still live in a hunter-gatherer situations in mud huts.
Villages in New Guinea, the Amazon, etc, the word you're looking for is 'cultures'.
Cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Pottery_culture & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corded_Ware_culture & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people
Civilizations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Great_Zimbabwe & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztecs
The reason we're talking about the recipe is because it's one of the oldest recorded recipes, which is because they had writing.
>'cultures'.
That's interesting, because I don't really think of a "culture" as smaller than a "civilization". I think of a culture being a necessary thread that runs through a civilization and without which there are no civilizations.
Traveling overland across Africa will swiftly disabuse you of the notion that hunter/gatherer lifestyles make up any "large portion" of the continent's population. It would hardly even be feasible in the face of massive deforestation and population boom.
Africa comprises an entire continent. There are not large portions of it (or "large swaths") where people still live as hunter-gatherers living in mud huts, for any reasonable definition of "large portion."
its sad that your ideology allows you to tell lies without an oz of shame.