I Cooked a 4,000-Year-Old Babylonian Stew. Sort Of.
Ancient clay tablets, questionable ingredients, and a surprisingly delicious dinner.
Last week, I promised we'd travel back nearly 4,000 years to ancient Babylon and cook a stew from one of the world's oldest surviving recipes. Well, I kept my promise. Sort of.
Actual carved recipe on stone tablet:
Around 1750 BCE, Babylonian cooks recorded recipes on clay tablets using cuneiform writing. Four of these tablets survived, and researchers at Yale and Harvard have spent years deciphering the ingredients and figuring out how to cook them.
One recipe, called Tuh'u, caught my attention.
It was a stew made with meat, vegetables, herbs, and beer. But here's the interesting part: Even the experts aren't entirely sure what went into it.
Was the mysterious root vegetable a red beet or a turnip? Some ancient plant names remain uncertain. And while the tablet specifies beer, we don't know exactly what Babylonian beer tasted like.
The instructions weren't much help either. No measuring cups, no precise cooking times. Apparently, you were just supposed to know what you were doing.
My kind of recipe.
So I decided to experiment (it's kind of what I do).
I substituted beef for lamb and olive oil for sheep fat. Since nobody could convince me whether the root was a beet or a turnip, I used both. I replaced the beer with unsweetened pomegranate juice and dark molasses. Pomegranates were known in the ancient Near East, and date syrup would have been a more historically appropriate sweetener, but dark molasses was what I had.
Then I went completely off the ancient script, adding potatoes, carrots, tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce, rosemary, thyme, and oregano.
At this point, I suspect a Babylonian cook would have raised an eyebrow.
I rubbed the beef with garlic and salt, seared it in olive oil, added everything else, and let it simmer for three hours. And the result?
It wasn't exactly a stew. More like a soup, with a deep, rich broth and flavors that blended beautifully. The sweetness, tartness, herbs, meat, and vegetables somehow worked together without any one ingredient overpowering the others.
It was absolutely delicious!
Everyone had at least two bowls. Then we brought out the sourdough and scraped up every last drop.
Would an ancient Babylonian recognize my version of Tuh'u? Probably not.
Potatoes and tomatoes wouldn't reach the Old World until thousands of years later, and Worcestershire sauce certainly wasn't sitting in a Babylonian pantry.
But that's what I love about these ancient recipes. They're not just instructions for dinner. They're little mysteries, waiting for someone to make an educated guess.
And sometimes, a few completely uneducated guesses turn out delicious.
If you make it, please come back and tell me what you think. And if you decide to make your own substitutions, I'd especially love to hear about those. After all, 4,000 years of culinary experimentation ought to count for something.
Curious how close my version came to the original? You can read Yale University's reconstruction of the ancient Babylonian recipes and see how the researchers interpreted Tuh’u. Who knows? You might decide the Babylonians had the better recipe!
Sincerely,
Harper Woods
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