A recipe that's been in the (human) family for years. Thousands of them, actually
Recipes used to appear on stone tablets. Now we use tablets that need to be charged up
Pretend I am a 1730 BC cavewoman. "Myrtle," my CFF — that's cave friend forever, of course — has a great recipe for a lamb stew.
"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."
Some 4,000 years ago, a person painstakingly carved these words onto a clay tablet. It is one of the world's earliest known recipes.
Was it my CFF, Myrtle?
I am not great at reading Babylonian, so I depend on a team of international scholars, savvy in culinary history and food chemistry, to translate.
These academics borrowed ancient tablets called cuneiform, a system of writing in clay from Yale University's Babylonian Collection. They are deciphering four tablets to bring the oldest recipes back to life.
Wait until the lifestyle channels on TV hear this. "Join us on Saturday for Crazy Cooking with Cuneiform, starring Dash Riprock."
It brings a whole new meaning to "rock recipes" (apologies to Barry C. Parsons.)
The BC recipes — "before Christ" — rolled into the AD period, or anno domini, Latin for, "In the year of our lord."
Speaking of which, cookbook writers of the modern world are lucky there is no copyright on the word "bible." There are a bazillion "bible" cookbooks. There is The Flavour Bible, Paula Dean's Southern Cooking Bible, The Chocolate Bible, The Baking Bible, Suzanne Somers's The Sexy Forever Recipe Bible and even The Sausage Cookbook Bible.
We eat to survive, the Bible tells us, so … "eat, drink and be merry." To be exact, the first book of Ecclesiastes told us, "Man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and be merry."
There are countless mentions of food in the Good Book. There's everything from soup to nuts or anise (Matthew 23:23 KJV) to wheat (Ezra 6:9; Deuteronomy 8:8) and all foods between.
Which makes you wonder … what would Jesus eat?
Have you heard of Scripture, Bible or Old Testament cake? Brush up on your Bible scriptures if you want to make this cake.
The recipe is written using scripture as code for the ingredients. "For example, 2 cups of Jeremiah 6:20 is one way of calling for 2 cups of sugar or in the Second Book of Chronicles, it calls for spices in the general sense. That means nutmeg and cinnamon."
It's a whisk to make, if you don't know your Bible verses.
If you ever need faith, it's when you see a recipe on the Internet. Your salivary glands tell your brain, "You go, girl!"
When cooking while online, though, your leap of faith could leave you cursing and swearing. You open the "easy" recipe and see it takes 33 steps to make it.
You find a recipe that has only four steps and six ingredients. Alleluia! You dance and sing around the kitchen like you're Ginger Rogers as you throw ingredients into the bowl. Who needs Fred Astaire?
What is this? I must let the ingredients boil, freeze, sit, stand, smoke, marinade or hang on the clothesline for how many hours? In teeny tiny print, you see "Optimal Results Achieved if Made During a Full Moon."
In moments like that, let me tell you what I knead, er, need: the app for Skip the Dishes.
You pray to God the ingredients are all listed with their correct amounts.
Then the weird ingredients. Where the Betty Crocker will I find zucchini squash blossoms? I can't even get my lilac to bloom.
Preparation times are understated. A 20-minute prep time rolls into your second hour. You begin to chase your salivary glands around the kitchen you were just cha-cha-chaing in. "If I ever get my hands on you!"
To quote Maxine, the cartoon character who appears on greeting cards, "Recipes are like a dating service. They never end up looking like the picture."
Recipes sure have changed
Ancient recipes, from BC through early AD, were barely recipes. They were a list of ingredients. Today, a recipe is like a six-part miniseries. Yield, list of ingredients and amounts, step-by-step directions for mixing and handling, equipment needed, temperature and time, and nutritional content.
Myrtle, can you imagine thinking about how many carbohydrates there are in a sabre-toothed tiger?
Time moved on and with the advent of the printing press and literacy, recipes were committed to paper with more detail. Still scanty by our standards but at least there was a handful of this, two teacups of molasses, six eggs' weight in sugar, and bake till done.
I have an original copy of The New Galt Cookbook: Practical Recipes by Canadian Housekeepers, from 1898. It's one of the first 10 cookbooks printed in Canada.
On page 46, a recipe for shepherd's pie: chop cold beef fine, moisten well with water, season to taste. Put in a deep dish and cover with nice potatoes. Bake in the oven 20 minutes. If desired a small onion may be added.
That's it.
On the web, the Food Network's shepherd's pie has 21 ingredients. Our recipes have evolved from ancient stone tablets to searching the web on tablets we need to plug in.
A final thought. "People who love to eat are always the best people." Myrtle didn't tell me that one, nor did the Bible. It's the wisdom of Julia Child.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
