Hold the soapwort

February 25, 2020 2:51 PM

A team of international scholars versed in culinary history, food chemistry and cuneiform studies has been recreating dishes from the world’s oldest-known recipes.
posted by bq (26 comments total)

Tell Ea-nisr: Nanni sends the following comment:
I have tried this recipe, but I replaced the Persian shallots with additional onions as my messenger was unable to obtain Persian shallots.
The resulting meal was far too onion-heavy. Why has your recipe treated me with such contempt? It is now up to your recipe writers to restore my taste to me in full.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 3:00 PM on February 25, 2020 [60 favorites]

Interesting that there was already the idea of 'ethnic' food. I wonder if there were food stalls that specialized in Elamite cooking in Babylon?
posted by tavella at 3:07 PM on February 25, 2020 [4 favorites]

Soapwort is cilantro, isn't it?
posted by Horkus at 3:19 PM on February 25, 2020 [4 favorites]

No, the soapwort is a lie.
posted by Kattullus at 3:35 PM on February 25, 2020

Soapwort is a fascinating plant that used to be used to make soap!
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 3:40 PM on February 25, 2020 [6 favorites]

Soapwort is a weed in my garden. I did finally get some suds by chopping it finely and shaking in a jar of water, very vigorously. I will try it to wash wool socks when it emerges this spring.
posted by Botanizer at 3:48 PM on February 25, 2020 [5 favorites]

Soapwort is real and named that, but I bet anything mistranslated as "soapwort" from cuneiform is probably cilantro. I was not clear in my previous comment.

(ETA: Also, cilantro is icky.)
posted by Horkus at 3:55 PM on February 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

Shut your mouth!
(Sorry you have the bad gene)
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 3:59 PM on February 25, 2020 [5 favorites]

Cool post.
My hbghest worry so far tonight in the kitchen is running out of pepperoni.

Boars head substitute!
posted by clavdivs at 4:19 PM on February 25, 2020

The instructions for lamb stew read more like a list of ingredients than a bona fide recipe: “Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. You crush and add leek and garlic.” But it’s impossible to ask the chef to reveal the missing pieces: This recipe’s writer has been dead for some 4,000 years.


This is also as descriptive as a recipe as you'll get from most Asian parents. (We end up learning how to fill in the blanks, and eventually, pass on the cycle by teaching people hand-wavy recipes they have to watch you cook to figure out.)
posted by Hollywood Upstairs Medical College at 4:19 PM on February 25, 2020 [9 favorites]

Also, cilantro is icky.

More cilantro for me!

Once when I was out to eat with a friend, he got an entree that had been garnished with a sprig of cilantro. He hated the stuff so much he could barely bring himself to touch it to move it off the food - like he was trying to shoo away a scorpion wasp or something. The look of disgusted incredulity on his face when I grabbed it, bit off a few leaves, and munched away happily made it taste even more heavenly.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:21 PM on February 25, 2020 [5 favorites]

There's another article about the project here, which has the extra entertaining detail that jokes about excessively fancy presentation of food date back 4,000 years.

"Month of Tebētu, what is your food?
—You shall eat the egg of a goose from the poultry house resting on a bed of sand and a decoction of Euphratean seaweed."
posted by tavella at 4:21 PM on February 25, 2020 [4 favorites]

Great post! I wish I'd know this Sunday, when I had a mountain of leftover lamb. I could have made a version of that stew.
posted by mumimor at 4:58 PM on February 25, 2020

How about a nice adult beverage to go with that?
posted by jim in austin at 5:48 PM on February 25, 2020

Here is a copy of the Hymn to Ninkasi referenced on the Anchor Steam site. Their link seems to be broken...
posted by jim in austin at 5:59 PM on February 25, 2020

I wonder who were the intended users of these recipes without measurements or detailed instructions. Surely they weren't just aides–mémoire for the cooks, who may not even have been literate; but who else could have found them useful?

And what genius first thought of including measurements in recipes? It's obviously not intuitive, especially since most recipes work with some level of improvisation. I wonder if it was a glassblower or metallurgist, or someone from an allied field where elements only come together in specific ratios.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:10 PM on February 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

(Sorry you have the bad gene)

In case some people haven't heard of it, our utter loathing of cilantro is indeed genetic.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 6:15 PM on February 25, 2020 [4 favorites]

And what genius first thought of including measurements in recipes? It's obviously not intuitive, especially since most recipes work with some level of improvisation. I wonder if it was a glassblower or metallurgist, or someone from an allied field where elements only come together in specific ratios.

It’s generally credited to Fannie Farmer, with the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in 1896. She was a domestic scientist — which includes food science.

Approximate measures were in use earlier, but she was the first to really standardize.
posted by snowmentality at 7:01 PM on February 25, 2020 [9 favorites]

Also, for English recipes, comparing these medieval recipes (up to 16th century) with these 17th century recipes suggests that some measurements started being used around the 17th century — in terms of “a pound of this” or “three spoonfuls of that,” but not every ingredient is assigned a quantity, and they are often very approximate.

In English, it seems like measurements in recipes came along pretty late. Would love to learn more about recipes in other languages and cultures.
posted by snowmentality at 7:14 PM on February 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

I've tasted a Menorcan culinary historian's recreation of an ancient dish based on lamb and the types of grains recovered from amphoras at archeological sites, served together with garum. It was maybe authentic and well-documented, but truly inedible. Honestly, if the guy who invented that recipe wasn't already dead for thousands of years, I would have to go back in time just to kill him.
posted by fuzz at 8:45 PM on February 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

I suspect the fault more likely lay with the recreation than the ancient cook. While tastes may have changed to some degree, humans don't usually make inedible food.
posted by tavella at 8:56 PM on February 25, 2020 [4 favorites]

According to Wikipedia soapwort does have culinary uses. As an emulsifier it stabilises some emulsions, e.g. in tahini and halva, and apparently it helps with the head on beer. I think it's possible that people consequently developed a taste for it and used it as a flavouring, much as how some people develop a taste for bitters.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:53 PM on February 25, 2020

I just looked. My oldest cookbooks are from my great-great grandmother who was a journalist who also wrote about food, the oldest of the books is from the 1880's. Four of the ones I have here have measurements for baking, but almost all the other recipes are just method, as in "how to poach a turkey" (you have to wrap it in waxed paper, apparently). I think the assumption was that the person cooking would already have a lot of experience in the kitchen. This type of cookbook was written for ladies who had cooks, so they didn't need detailed directions. I'm not sure my great-great grandmother ever cooked, even though she published recipes. The purpose of the books was not so much to teach how to cook as to extend the repetoire of the household. Something similar was probably going on with these Babylonian tablets.
The last of my cookbooks is from 1909, written for the middle class, and it has measurements and detailed directions, albeit still far from the level of detail we know today.
I also have a reprint of a book from 1868, and from that is this recipe for ragout: Cut up cooked meat or steak, boil a boullion on the bones and thicken it with browned flour, pickled shallots and cucumber. Then pour this sauce over the meat.
That is the entire recipe. If someone with no cooking experience were to do this, it would be terrible. But I can also see how it could be quite interesting.
posted by mumimor at 11:57 PM on February 25, 2020 [4 favorites]

I think it's possible that people consequently developed a taste for it and used it as a flavouring, much as how some people develop a taste for bitters

What! Could soapwort possibly be bitterleaf, which foams when you wash it as you have to get at least half the bitterness out to be edible, and which makes one of the most delicious stews ever? I believe it's full of quinine (certainly tastes that way) and people do drink the water as a tonic. After eating bitterleaf a drink of plain water tastes sweet.

Ok a minute on the googles informs soapwort and bitterleaf are not the same thing. I think. I've never seen a plant that looks like the one on the wiki page though.
posted by glasseyes at 2:01 AM on February 26, 2020

After having spent some time procrastinating by diving into old and new recipes, I think I disagree with the researcher's version of the lamb stew. I think it was more like what we today would call a fricassee, with the barley cakes beaten up and used as a thickener. It would be bland, but in a delicious, creamy way.
Look at this very similar recipe from Jordan, not exactly a fricassee, it's called mansaf, but in the family.
posted by mumimor at 4:46 AM on February 26, 2020

The earliest cookbooks with (somewhat) consistent measurements are usually from the middle east, see An Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook of the 13th Century for an example. As an interested amateur in historical cooking, my feeling is that the German language cookbooks have (somewhat) consistent measurements earlier than the English or Italian, but none of them use a lot of measurements until well after the cookbooks became a commercial, rather than personal, enterprise.
posted by The Devil's Grandmother at 10:55 AM on February 26, 2020 [2 favorites]