The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Jean Bottero

By JULIETTE ROSSANT How far does Western cuisine go back in time? You can get a good sense of what Romans and Greeks ate from passages in The Satyricon and The Illiad and The Odyssey and other works of Classical Greece and Rome, but what about further back? Jean Bottero writes in The Oldest Cuisine in the World (University Of Chicago Press, 2004): One can, therefore, through such a detour "of the mouth" obtain an original and solid introduction to the great paradigms of Mesopotamia's refined and intelligent civilization, which already shows signs of our own. (p. 4) Luckily, Bottero, a world renowned French archaeologist, realized the importance of three cuneiform tablets in the Babylonian Collection of Yale University that contain the earliest recipes in the Western World. His book, carefully translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, is a fascinating account for the layman, of the cuisine of the Mesopotamia. It weaves the poetry of The Epic of Gilgamesh and the shards of pottery and cooking utensils that archaeologists have uncovered, into a fascinating picture. What must it have been like to eat at a table in ancient Ur? Even if you don't remember you ancient history, Mesopotamia (see map) is important – it is essentially modern Iraq (see map), the land that encompassed the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys. Once the inhabitants, the Sumerians and the Akkadians, figured out how to irrigate the river valleys by building canals between the two rivers, the region became the bread bowl of the ancient world. At the end of the 4th millennium writing was discovered. Clay tablets with menus and lists of what kings ate and drank, letters that listed foods that were sent as gifts, and fragments of other tablets are also used to understand the cuisine. The Yale tablets contain about 40 recipes that Bottero carefully translates and then analyzes. The first tablet has 21 recipes for meat broth and four for vegetable. These are quick summaries of recipes like: number 21 for francolin broth: Fresh leg of mutton is also used (?) Prepare water; add fat. Trim the francolins; (59) add salt to taste; cake crumbs (?) onions, samidu, leek and garlic, mashed with milk (?). (60) Once the francolins have been cut up, put them into the broth in the pot, but they should first be cooked in a kettle [ ]. (61) Then return them to the pot. It is ready to serve. (p. 28) [The numbers in parenthesis refer to line numbers for the text and the parenthesis refer to missing text.] The second tablet has seven much longer, more complete recipes on how to cook various small birds, including how to pluck and clean the innards, and how to prepare quite complicated pastry presentations. The last tablet only contains three incomplete recipes. Bottero describes the hearths and equipment available to the Mesopotamians cooks and the kinds of bread, leavened and unleavened, that they ate. He compares the rolls they ate to "those flaky pieces of baked dough that the French call fleurons" (p. 48). The Mesopotamians knew about searing, simmering in broth, high and low heat in an oven and presentation of the dish: Just before serving, you take the platter prepared with a lining of crust, and you place the cooked birds on it carefully; you scatter the pluck and the cut-up gizzards that were (being cooked) in the pot over it, as well as the (little) sebetu rolls that were baked in the oven. You set aside the fatty broth in which the meat was cooked in the pot. You cover the serving dish with its pastry "cover" and bring it to the table. (p. 72) This recipe read like instructions for a professional chefs who already knows how to do many of the steps. In the conclusion to this handsome slim volume Bottero states: It is inconceivable that anyone will ever boast of having filled with certainty the numerous gaps that have been left by thirty-five centuries of erosion. Nor will anyone ever be able to identify, from such a distance in time and space, the authentic flavor and quality of the scores of ingredients that were used in these culinary creations. (p. 125) Nevertheless, this book succeeds in bringing to life what meals must have been like, how much these ancient people were like present-day foodies, and how central cuisine has been to civilizations stretching back in time. It is often difficult to identify authentic flavor and quality even in our current world but the attempt to revel in this imaginative game is half the pleasure of food, yet thanks to Bottero, we can better savor the moment when Gilgamesh's great rival Enkidu first tastes human-cooked food, so many centuries ago: Enkidu ate the food until he was sated, he drank the beer -- seven jugs -- and became expansive and sang with joy! He was elated, and his face glowed. (p. 37) This is the moment each chef, each cook lives for. Alain Ducasse described as much once in the midst of his New York restaurant, the extreme lengths to which he goes to elicit such deep pleasure. Great cuisine takes us even further, and so a French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel was would write of Ducasse, "When we taste the cuisine of a very great artists for the first time, our initial thought is: 'I had no idea such things were possible' " (L'Atelier of Alain Ducasse, p. 11). And so we come full circle, back to the present. Now, centuries later, we can appreciate again the joyous beginnings of cooked food: thank you, Dr. Bottero, for sharing this treasure. Previous articles: Suvir Saran Spins Indian Home Cooking Biro: European-Inspired Cuisine July 4: Paul Gayler's The Gourmet Burger July 4: East Meets West Robert Klein: The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue Christy Campbell: The Botanist and the Vintner Kathleen Daelemans: Getting Thin and Loving Food! 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