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The World’s First Recipes: Babylonian Cooking

Beets for Babylonian Cooking

Thanksgiving Cheer from Babylon

cuneiform tablet like those with these Babylonian Cooking recipes
Cuneiform tablet like those in Babylonian Collection (NY Met)

Happy Thanksgiving. In honor of the U.S.’s holiday of festive eating, I’ll share some Babylonian cooking. The recipes found on the clay tablets of Yale’s Babylonian Collection are some of the very earliest extant recipes. Some researchers experimented with them in the kitchen and the results were tasty.

Babylonian Cooking with lamb and beets

You’ll find a fully interpreted and adapted recipe for lamb stew with beets. The 3 minute YouTube video of the preparations is charming and lots of fun. I enjoyed that one of the “experimental” chefs is a young girl, and she’s clearly getting into the spirit. So for some happy food fun for Thanksgiving, here’s Yale University’s Babylonian Collection “Babylonian Cooking.”

Bon Appetit!

Here is one of my older posts that discusses two cookbooks that adapt directly from ancient Near Eastern tablets and sources. (Amazon affiliate links: The Silk Road Gourmet and Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks).

2 thoughts on “The World’s First Recipes: Babylonian Cooking”

    1. I actually love beets and hadn’t realized/focused on them before as an ancient Near Eastern ingredient I could use when designing my fictional food. I will apologize in advance for any unappetizing fictional meals you read in the future 🙂

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