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Intresting. In Hindi/urdu it’s called “chukandar”

If it's any consolation, their lambs were nothing like ours.

This period is early enough that sheep weren't yet sheared.

The recipe is also similar to Hamedh [0], a delicacy in Iraqi and Baghdadi Jewish households. The only major difference is the addition of tomatoes thanks to the Columbian Exchange, and rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet.

On that note, in Arabic, Farsi, and Hindustani the word for Tomato is essentially shared (tumatar/tamatimu) with the English word "tomato".

But anyhow, a lot of home cooking and traditional meals actually have a pretty long history.

[0] - https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2000/12/12/hamad-iraqi-b...

Came here to mention Max Miller as well. Amazing work putting together historical context and recipes. Always fun, fascinating, and the recipes are generally very approachable.

I've also made the Babylonian stew from this recipe, and it's rich and hearty. It's easy to see how this would knock the...sandals off of ancient people.

Other ancient recipes...let's just say that humans have very much not held the same tastes over the eons. Some recipes were incongruent or sweet and savory in a strange way, or simply a flex about how many spices you had access to and cold throw in a dish, not about what it really tasted like. YMMV.

I've made this Roman recipe probably a dozen times and everyone who's tried it really likes it [1].

The strange ingredients are garum [2] and asafoetida [3]. The former is just a fish sauce, so that's not hard to substitute, but you have to find asafoetida on the Internet or at an Indian food store.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asafoetida

https://blog.crystalking.com/ancient-roman-food-parthian-chi...

the parthian chicken was stupid easy and tasty

Yep, this is a great shoutout and I'm also a big TH fan. If you haven't yet, check it out!

Yes! Came here to recommend Max. His cookbook is also educational and interesting and some of the recipes are even good! :-)

It looks great. When I first saw it, I thought "this color can't be beet"

In Australia where lamb is more common than in the US, it'd be pretty easy to keep the fat after roasting a lamb shoulder, or to freeze the fatty offcuts from forequarter chops and render them after I had enough.

Lamb is quite popular down here in Australia. I usually keep some rendered fat from my roasts etc. Sometimes I cook other meats with it and it adds heaps of flavour. I do that with pork fat as well.

I was able to get some tail fat from a halal butcher. But never seen lamb fat anywhere else

Easy... Just go to a Trader's Joe, and get a lamb leg and roast it....

if you have a good butcher they might be able to get you some that you can render, but its a hassle. I've done this for beef fat to make some british pie things.

Lamb is usually the red meat of choice, other than pork, almost everywhere besides the US.

I cant see why.

Nutty, aromatic, yeasty, slightly sour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK4DMt8ARyU

They certainly didn't use hops!

The ingredient ratios are the Yale researchers' interpretation—they're not from the source text,

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ancient-mesopota...

> "Like most premodern cooking manuals, the Babylonian recipes rarely list the quantities of each ingredient, and so basic experimentation is needed to determine viable proportions for the assembly of a dough or the salting of a stew. The “experimental” approach likewise offers answers to questions that can only be addressed through trial and error. For example, many of the identifications of herbs proposed by modern scholars are based mainly on medical compendia, and some of the plants thus identified can produce an extremely bitter or perhaps pungent taste when used in food."

Here's the recipes as literally translated (I used tesseract to OCR):

> "Unwinding. Meat is not used. You prepare water. You add fat. (You add) kurrat, cilantro, salt as desired, leek, garlic. You pound up dried sourdough, you sift (it) and you scatter (it) over the pot before removing it."

> "Stew of lamb. Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. [You crush] (and add) leek and garlic."

> "Elamite broth. Meat is not used. You prepare water. You add fat. Dill, kurrat, cilantro, leek, and garlic bound with blood, a corresponding amount of sour milk, and (more) garlic. The (original) name (of this dish) is Zukanda."

> "Tuh’u. Leg meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You sear. You fold in salt, beer, onion, arugula, cilantro, Persian shallot, cumin, and red’ beet, and [you crush] leek and garlic. You sprinkle coriander on top. [You add] kurrat and fresh cilantro."

Babylon Galactica

No, it's common. People today have no idea how truly poor they eat. Modern fast food is essentially fake food paste.

2/3rds of those herbs grow in the garden of my home as just weed (this in Albania), including mint, cilantro, origano and more.

While some have to be cultivated, a lot these herbs just grow as weeds in the Mediterranean area.

Most of them seem like a pretty common kitchen garden to me.

And all of the plants are native to that area, or close enough that people who had been farming for a few thousand years at that point would have brought them from neighboring lands to use.

Curious indeed that the Yale Babylonian Collection should, out of all the possible options, choose the cooking of Ancient Babylon. I wonder what we should read into this. I have some theories, but it might be dangerous for me even to mention that I have them.

Cradle of civilization is not an odd culture. Babylon, meaning Gate of God, is one of the more profoundly influential urban civilizational clusters in human history.