What is the world’s oldest surviving recipe?
If we take this to mean the oldest surviving written recipe, most historians would agree with Guinness World Records, which confers this accolade on a set of recipes inscribed on three clay slabs dating from around 1700 BC. These tablets were made by people of the Sumerian culture of Mesopotamia, a region spanning what is now part of Iraq and surrounding countries.
In the mid-1980s, French historian Jean Bottéro translated the texts, inscribed in a cuneiform script – one of the world’s oldest forms of writing – and discovered that they describe meals. The best-preserved tablet contains lists of ingredients for 25 dishes, and the two other slabs feature more-detailed instructions (though still only a few lines each) for about 10 recipes.
Dishes described on the slabs include a lamb-and-beet stew similar to borscht, a vegetarian stew of leeks and onions, and a lamb and milk broth. Another recipe layers dough and fowl meat in a milky sauce to make a kind of pie.
Based on archaeological evidence and later written records, researchers in Wales claim to have reconstructed an even earlier recipe dating back some 6,000 years. To make ‘nettle pudding’, a mixture of stinging nettles, ground barley and water was shaped into a ball and placed into an animal’s intestine so that it could be boiled in a broth. Today, nettles are widely viewed as irksome weeds, but they lose their sting when cooked and are actually nutritious greens that were commonly consumed well into the 20th century in some parts of the UK. The newly deciphered recipe produces a Stone-Age version of dumplings or something similar to haggis.
Eleanor Barnett, food historian at Cardiff University. Her new book, Leftovers: A History of Food Waste and Preservation, will be published by Head of Zeus on 14 March