Jesse Browner's Podcast History of Cooking - Episode 2: Mesopotamia and the Holy Land
Posted by Jesse Browner 10/1/2008, Sponsored by Oxford University Press

Today, we’re taking the giant leap from Neolithic culture to the dawn of civilization. And we’re going to start with the very first recorded cuisine in history – that of Mesopotamia, the civilization that arose about 5,000 years ago in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, most of which lies within present-day Iraq.

Some of you might question why what is essentially a history of European cooking should begin in Asia. It’s a reasonable question – after all, Mesopotamia is a good 1,000 miles from Europe, and neither their histories, cultures nor languages intersected all that much in the ancient world. Still, there are good reasons to begin here. The two earliest cultures of Mesopotamia were the Sumerians and the Akkadians. No one knows much about who the Sumerians were or where they originally came from, but the Akkadians are a different story. They were a Semitic people who spoke a language closely related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Phoenician, and even though they were conquered early in the history of the region, their language remained the common tongue of the various local empires for almost 2,000 years. And it was the Phoenicians, a seafaring nation, whose writing was the model for virtually every alphabet in the world, including the Greek, on which our own Latin alphabet is modeled. So the Akkadians did indeed have a direct impact on our own civilization. The same is true, more or less, for their pantheon of gods, handed down to the Hebrews, Greeks and Romans.

Most importantly, though, the Mesopotamians were the proud possessors of the world’s very first haute cuisine, which, unlike any of their contemporaries in Egypt or the Holy Lands, they took some trouble to write down for posterity. Now, we ought to keep in mind that Mesopotamia was home to many ancient peoples over its long history. In addition to the Sumerians and Akkadians, there were Babylonians, Arameans, Amorites, Persians, Elamites and Assyrians, among others. The Jewish patriarch Abraham was originally from Mesopotamia, and of course the Israelites spent many centuries in captivity there, so early Jewish history and culture were shaped by Mesopotamian influences, although the Torah has virtually nothing to say about cooking. But since all these cultures lived in the same place, with a consistent ecology and climate, and since this is only a very brief history, for culinary purposes we’re going to treat it all as one culture, beginning with the invention of the sickle by Sumerian farmers around 5,000 years ago, through the first Mesopotamian empire under the Akkadian emperor Sargon the Great circa 2,300 BC, through the rise of Babylon under Hammurabi 500 years later, and subsequent domination by the Assyrians, Persians and Greeks. By the time Rome was becoming the center of power in the West, Mesopotamia had for all intents and purposes become a cultural backwater, and that’s where we’ll leave it.

This era saw most of the major milestones in agriculture and cooking: the domestication of the cow, sheep, goat, and pig, as well as barley and early forms of wheat such as emmer and spelt; the dome oven and leavened bread. By 1500 BC, all the major foods that are still used in the 20th century, with the exception of the sugar beet, were being grown somewhere in the world.

Geographically, Mesopotamia’s most important asset was its two great rivers. The Egyptians had the Nile, of course, but agriculture there was essentially limited to the river’s flood plain. The Mesopotamians’ solved that problem by building a vast, intricate network of irrigation canals that allowed them to turn the entire country into productive farmland. The Greek historian Herodotus claims that Mesopotamia’s canals gave its farmers a 300-fold return in grain. And it was in building those canals that they learned how to organize themselves socially, and thus create the world’s first great cities: Ur, Babylon, and Nineveh, among others. Not to mention one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens, about which more later.

According to Herodotus, the Mesopotamians wore long linen tunics down to their feet, covered by another tunic of wool and a short white cloak, and sandals on their feet. They wore their long hair under turbans and perfumed their entire bodies. With their water and technology, the Mesopotamians were able to grow just about everything they needed or wanted to eat. Except for wine, they imported hardly any foodstuffs. They had plenty of domesticated meat, except for chicken, and, contrary to speculation, did not eat dog or horse. They raised pigs, but their consumption was considered dirty. They grew barley as their principle grain, and some wheat, but no rye or oats. The river banks were lined with date palms, from which they harvested not only fruit, but sap for wine. They pressed sesame seeds for oil, as they did not yet have the olive. Mushrooms and truffles were plentiful, as they still are today. They cherished their honeybees and were highly-skilled beekeepers. Most of all, they loved their orchards and cultivated fruit trees from all across the ancient world: apples, cherries, apricots, peaches, plums, quince, pomegranate, medlar, figs, pistachios and citron, a citrus fruit that is still used ritually by the Jews during the Feast of Tabernacles.

When all else failed, they were perfectly happy, like most of their contemporaries in the Near East, to devour the locusts that plagued their fields. Locusts were savored by all, including royals; in fact, while the many creatures listed as forbidden eating in the Book of Leviticus include pigs, camels, shellfish, vultures, eels, lizards and bats, four species of locust are explicitly singled out as perfectly kosher.

Obviously, bread, mostly made of barley, was a central part of every meal, and critical to the diet of the poor, supplemented by onions, chickpeas and leeks. The great Sumerian epic poem Gilgamesh mentions bread seasoned with sesame seeds and onion. Leviticus describes three kinds of unleavened bread that would have been equally common in Mesopotamia: unleavened cakes or wafers baked in the oven, bread cooked on the griddle, and bread fried in the pan. Barley was also eaten in a simple gruel.

The biblical Book of Ecclesiastes further names salt, milk, bread and oil as essentials of life, and presumably even the poorest were able to get their hands on most of these basics. With easy access to the rivers, as well as an early form of fish farming practiced by the Assyrians, fish was probably cheap and available to the poor as well. Fried fish vendors were known to have plied the streets of Ur, and Herodotus mentions three tribes who ate nothing but fish, drying them in the sun, grinding them down with a pestle, squeezing the paste through a linen cloth and baking the fish meal into cakes.

The Sumerian fable of the poor man of Nippur is instructive. He dreams of being invited to dine with the mayor, but can only afford an old nanny goat as his share, and is sent home. The point of the story is to stress his poverty, but it also demonstrates that even the poor got to eat meat on occasion.

Dairy & Sweeteners

The Mesopotamians also made broad use of butter, sour milk, and cheese, mostly from goats. Because of preservation problems, this cheese was most likely in the form of curds and eaten fresh, not aged. They had a variety of sweeteners at their disposal, and made liberal use of them all. Honey was popular, but expensive. Date and fig syrup were more common. They also used a white secretion harvested from the tamarisk tree, which many historians identify as the heavenly manna that sustained the Jews wandering in the desert. It’s still in use today; a diligent worker can harvest as much as four pounds of the stuff in one morning, and it keeps indefinitely.

Herbs & Seasonings

The Mesopotamians were also very sophisticated in their use of herbs and other seasonings. A rare Babylonian document lists 72 trees, shrubs and plants cultivated by King Merodach-Baladan of Babylon in his gardens – not the famous Hanging Gardens, which were built later by Nebuchadnezzar, but probably very similar in size and ambition. In addition to the usual lentils, chickpeas, onions, garlic, and leeks, they include chives, radishes, lettuce, carrots, fennel, beets, chard, asparagus, cucumber, melon and almonds. The spices – coriander, cumin, black cumin, mint, anise, thyme, asafetida, bay, saffron and sage – give us a pretty good sense of what Mesopotamian cooking at its best must have tasted like, though as we’ll see, we should probably be cautious about imagining some delectable ancient equivalent to a modern Arab or Persian feast.

Shiqqu - fish sauce

The Mesopotamians were also very fond of a condiment they called shiqqu, a very salty brine made of fermented fish, shellfish or grasshoppers that they added to many of their meat dishes. It may sound unappetizing, but it probably tasted a lot like the Vietnamese sauce nuoc mam, and as we’ll see in later episodes, it had its almost exact counterparts in ancient Greek and Roman cooking.

Food Preservation

In Neolithic times*, reliable methods of preserving excess food had been important to a community’s survival; in the new urban civilizations, with their larger populations and extreme divisions of labor, they were absolutely essential. The Mesopotamians soon mastered every technique available in the ancient world. They dehydrated their food, including meat, fruit, cereals, pulses, herbs and fish, either in the sun or in a cooling oven. They salted their meat and fish, candied fruit by drenching it in honey, and soured milk and curdled cheese with salt. They also malted their grain for later use in bread and beer.

*Neolithic Period, also called New Stone Age, final stage of cultural evolution or technological development among prehistoric humans. It was characterized by stone tools shaped by polishing or grinding, dependence on domesticated plants or animals, settlement in permanent villages, and the appearance of such crafts as pottery and weaving. The Neolithic followed the Paleolithic Period, or age of chipped-stone tools, and preceded the Bronze Age, or early period of metal tools.

Beer & Other Alcoholic Beverages

And speaking of beer, they were one ancient civilization that really enjoyed a good drink. The rich had a healthy appreciation for good wine, which they imported from Phoenicia and Canaan on the Mediterranean coast, and understood the concept of vintages. Like all ancient peoples, they drank it diluted or adulterated with water or honey. The super wealthy also drank it cooled with ice carried down in blocks from the northern mountains. Herodotus claims that Phoenician wine was commonly shipped down the Euphrates from Armenia on circular boats that also carried donkeys. When the boats arrived in Babylon, they were dismantled and the watertight skins of their hulls were carried back to Armenia by the passenger donkeys. Liquor was also manufactured from date-palm sap and from fruit, including amurdinnum from blackberries and shikar siluppi from dates. But by far the most popular and ubiquitous drink was beer. One of the very earliest pictographs in the Mesopotamian lexicon is a long-necked jar – the symbol for beer. And one of the most ancient homilies ever set down on paper is a Sumerian cure for a hang-over – “He who drinks too much beer must drink water” – which is kind of hard to argue with.

In Egypt and in Mesopotamia, mead was made from fermented honey, but that was too pricy for most people and by far the most common varieties were produced from sprouted grain or bread soaked in water. The Sumerians recorded at least eight distinct kinds of barley beer, eight more of emmer and three mixed. The varieties included “white”, “russet,” “light,” “dark,” “cloudy,” “sweetened with honey,” and flavored with herbs and fruit of all kinds. It was drunk straight or diluted, direct from the jug or in clay jars with built-in straws and filters to strain out the husks. Some jars had two straws for couples who enjoyed their intimacy over a brew. Drinking beer was so much the national pastime that contemporary accounts of Mesopotamian festivals begin to sound like a German Oktoberfest, replete with the world’s very first drinking song. It goes: “I will summon brewers and cupbearers To serve us floods of beer and keep it passing round! What pleasure! What delight! Blissfully to take it in, To sing jubilantly of this noble liquor, Our hearts enchanted and our souls radiant!” Unfortunately, the melody has been lost, but you get the picture.

Communal eating and drinking was a normal part of sealing the deal in legal contracts, such as marriage, land sales, and the summoning of warriors by the king. It was also an intrinsic element in kispu, a ritual meal to share food with the dead and thus keep them in the family. The Mesopotamians had several ways of cooking. They didn’t much care for direct roasting or grilling over an open fire, which some historians have suggested might have smacked of the archaic and primitive. Like the Greeks, Egyptians and Israelites, they used it mostly in religious ceremonies when offering sacrifices to the gods, including Yahweh himself, who was said to enjoy the smell of wood-scorched flesh. As Leviticus puts it, “All the fat belongs to Yahweh.” But grilled meats never appear in their written recipes.

Grains

Grains were sometimes roasted before being made into porridge, and were then mixed with water to form cakes, known as bappiru, that would be malted, dried and stored, later to be crumbled into broth for thickening or fermented for beer. They also baked directly in their domed ovens – usually bread, because, as we’ll see, they did not often cook their animals whole.

Tinuru - Vertical Clay Oven

But their greatest innovation was the vertical clay cylinder oven known as tinuru. The tinuru was such a perfectly adapted piece of technology that it is still in common use today, known as tannur in modern Arabic, tanura in Farsi and tandoor in India. One meter high, one meter in diameter, and anchored to the ground, the tinuru could be used to cook anything. Flat bread was cooked by simply plastering it to the side of the cylinder. For “pie crusts”, bread dough was flattened onto a clay dish, which was often designed with animal and human figures or geometric patterns that would imprint on the crust; the dish was then placed in or on top of the tinuru. Food could also be steamed by putting it in the tinuru with a pitcher of water. I would venture to say that it must have been the invention of the tinuru that gave the Mesopotamians their first inkling of what fine dining could really be.

Yale Babylonian clay tablets

And for us, the first clue that they had stumbled onto a world of haute cuisine is the fact that, along with these differentiated cooking technologies, they developed new and differentiated terminology for food preparation. The Mesopotamians were the first civilization to use distinct names for baker, pastry chef, saucier, and so on. The head chef of an establishment, usually a royal house, was known as the mubannu, or embellisher. The Yale Babylonian Collection has three recently discovered 4,000-year old clay tablets in Akkadian cuneiform that clearly show recipes – the oldest in the world. Unfortunately, none of these recipes is intact or complete, and many terms, such as the names of herbs and birds, remain untranslatable to this day.

The tablets also include a Sumerian-Akkadian dictionary with some 800 entries on food. They list 20 varieties of cheese, 100 soups or stews, and 300 types of bread, varied by type of flour, leavened or not, milk or beer, sweet, flavoured, with fruit, etc. Since most people were illiterate, including cooks, we ought to assume that this was some sort of administrative list, handed down from generation to generation of chefs in the royal kitchen. The instructions are far from thorough, assuming a basic professional knowledge in the user. The French Assyriologist Jean Bottéro has made a thorough study of these tablets, and most of what I know comes from his work.

The very earliest of the recipes – and thus the oldest recipe in the world – dates to the early second millennium BC and describes the preparation of mersu, a kind of sweet bread or tart with filling. Much of the recipe cannot be translated or is missing, but mersu starts with a dough made of flour; water, milk or beer; and oil. It’s stuffed with dried fruit – grapes, figs, apples or pine nuts – and seasoned with nigella (a species of ranunculus also known as black cumin), as well as regular cumin, coriander and garlic. While perhaps a strange conjunction of flavors to our palate, the recipe for mersu reveals a perfectly evolved, refined and distinctive style of cooking. For the first time, we see deliberation and taste as intrinsic elements of food preparation, elevating it above mere cooking to cuisine. Mersu must have been an important component of the sophisticated diet, as it’s listed as a dish prepared for the king and has its own specialist, the episat mersi, or maker of mersu.

A second, later recipe, circa 4th century BC, is a kind of reduction sauce for braised meat. Water is infused with mustard and cucumber, then boiled with fennel, watercress, cumin and dodder (a climbing vine of the morning glory family). The sauce is reduced by five fifths, then used as a braise for meat. Braising and reduction, as a way of combining and intensifying flavors, represented a dramatic leap forward in the evolution of cooking. Again, it’s clear evidence of an evolved cuisine with its own signature flavors.

Several other recipes for preparing small birds seem perfectly, almost freakishly modern. In what appears to be a recipe for pigeon, the bird is washed and browned in oil and the pan is deglazed with water and vinegar. The deglazing liquid is seasoned with mint and salt, and the bird is returned to the pot and braised.

Another recipe, possibly for francolin (a kind of pheasant), has the braised bird served over a polenta of coarsely-ground white flour or lentils cooked with buttermilk or beer in which a piece of aromatic wood has been steeped. One puzzling anomaly of Mesopotamian recipes is their insistence that meat be washed thoroughly in the course of preparation, often more than once. No one is quite certain what purpose this served, but it was surely more than a case of unusual fastidiousness. Perhaps there was a step in the cooking process, such as charring, that was so taken for granted that it was not mentioned in the recipes. It may simply have been a way of cleaning freshly butchered meat of blood, viscera or the remnants of fur or feathers, but that doesn’t explain why it had to be done repeatedly. It may even have been some sort of rudimentary purification ritual. Or maybe it was just neurotic. We may never know.

Yet another recipe is for pigeon pie. The bird and its gizzards are seared. The instructions then specify that the meat must be boiled in a new, clean pot with milk and fat, and seasoned with rue, garlic, leek and onion. In the meantime, a crust is prepared with wheat, milk, shiqqu, leek and garlic, and allowed to rise. A large plate is lined with half the dough and cooked, presumably on top of the tinuru. It is then loaded with minced vegetables, the cooked birds and their gizzards, and sauce. The pie is then covered with the pre-cooked pastry top and served.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that these recipes are over 3,000 years old. But before we start sharpening our carving blades and preparing ourselves for a delicious Mesopotamian feast à l’ancienne, we need to take a look at one of the other tablets. This one offers some 25 recipes for broth, which, along with bread and onions, seems to have been the mainstay of the Mesopotamian kitchen. These broths were used both as cooking mediums for meat and as soup in their own right; in any case, they were not served with the meat that was cooked in them, which was usually rubbed with garlic, sprinkled with vinegar or siqqu, and served with greens. The broth was reserved for another time.

Virtually all the recipes call for mutton fat, onion, leek and garlic. Herodotus describes the fat-tailed sheep of Arabia, with tails so heavy that shepherds tethered them to little carts on which to rest their burden. These sheep were long thought to be a myth, but are quite common in the Near East. It was probably these beasts or their ancestors that provided the grease that went into almost everything the Mesopotamians ate with gusto. Cooked in a bronze pot over the tinuru, most broths were made with meat: venison, gazelle, kid, lamb, mutton, pigeon and other birds, offal, especially fresh or salted spleen, and other salted meat. The flesh was sometimes cooked whole, sometimes cut up into chunks; milk was sometimes added, sometimes not. The broth could be thickened with blood or with grain, usually malted barley that had been baked into a hard cake then broken up into crumbs.

The most common seasonings were cumin, mustard, coriander, mint and dodder. The 25 recipes include four for vegetable-based broths, but even these are thickened with fat and blood. This is where it’s a little easier to remember just how ancient and alien to us was the civilization that relished such food and devised these recipes. The Mesopotamian cultures created a remarkable, inventive, sophisticated and resourceful civilization, enthusiastically taking full and creative advantage of the wealth of natural resources at their disposal. That doesn’t mean that we moderns could stomach their cooking for a minute. I remember my grandparents’ building in the Bronx, and how the smell of fried onions and boiled cabbage emanated from every apartment, permeating the halls and elevators. Imagine now a whole city, an entire nation, reeking of fatty broth, every portion of meat, every garden vegetable draped in a shroud of grease. In all honesty, I have often tried to create palatable meals from ancient recipes, and sometimes I’ve succeeded, but it’s very hard to get around all that mutton fat.

Now let’s picture ourselves as guests of the ninth century BC emperor Ashurnasirpal as he celebrated the inauguration of his new palace in the capital city of Calah. As was only fitting for a monarch who viewed himself as overlord of the entire world, Ashurnasirpal threw a banquet the scale and lavishness of which still resonate 3,000 years later. The palace itself was a marvel: built atop a terrace 120 bricks high, it boasted seven halls roofed with imported boxwood, ash, cedar, cypress and juniper. The doors were of bronze and the blue walls were covered in murals depicting the host’s foreign campaigns and conquests. The glazed bricks above the gates were the color of lapis lazuli. The vast gardens, ingeniously irrigated, were fragrant with trees brought back from the emperor’s wars: pomegranate, myrrh, tamarind, terebinth, and many others whose beautiful, evocative names – simmesallu, kamesseru, titip – will forever mask the mystery of their identity.

The guests came from every corner of the empire – some 70,000 of them, including 16,000 locals. In accordance with the honored custom, before the feast the king’s guests first washed their hands and perfumed themselves with oil of cedar, ginger and myrtle. Then they sat down to eat for 10 days. We do not have a menu for the banquet, but since the recipes we’ve looked at all come from royal archives, it’s safe to assume that the guests were offered dishes very similar if not identical to the ones we know.

What we do have is an inventory of the raw ingredients brought in to feed the hungry hordes. They include, but are not limited to, 1,000 fattened head of cattle, 1,000 calves, 10,000 stable sheep, 15,000 lambs, 1,000 spring lambs, 500 stags, 500 gazelles, 1,000 ducks, 1,500 geese, 1,000 mesuku-birds, 1,000 qaríbu-birds, 20,000 doves, another 10,000 assorted small birds, 10,000 assorted fish, 10,000 jerboa, 10,000 assorted eggs, 10,000 jars of beer, 10,000 skins of wine, and 1,000 wood crates filled with vegetables.

Most of these fine, varied and delicate ingredients would have ended up boiled in fatty mutton broth. It’s an awe-inspiring and somewhat nauseating spectacle, not unlike a British soccer stadium after a local victory: 70,000 Mesopotamians, plastered on strong beer and date-palm wine, raising an unholy ruckus with their rowdy drinking songs, their beards speckled with barley husks, their hands dripping with pungent grease, their lovely linen tunics soaked and stinking of mutton broth, their turbans disheveled beyond redemption. This is not quite the picture of the muscular, dignified, meticulously braided lion-killers conveyed by Mesopotamian artists and sculptors, but it’s certainly an interesting counterpoint. The account of Ashurnarsipal’s banquet doesn’t tell us if the guests were offered the opportunity to wash up at the end of the feast, but whether they did nor not, it’s no wonder the Mesopotamians were in the habit of drenching their entire bodies in perfume.