Episode 2: Mesopotamia and the Holy Land In the last episode, we considered the cooking techniques of prehistoric humans, or what little is known about them. Today, we’re taking the giant leap from Neolithic culture to the dawn of civilization. And we’re going to start with the very first recorded cuisine in history – that of Mesopotamia, the civilization that arose about 5,000 years ago in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, most of which lies within present-day Iraq. Some of you might question why what is essentially a history of European cooking should begin in Asia. It’s a reasonable question – after all, Mesopotamia is a good 1,000 miles from Europe, and neither their histories, cultures nor languages intersected all that much in the ancient world. Still, there are good reasons to begin here, as most ninth-grade students have learned to their chagrin. The two earliest cultures of Mesopotamia were the Sumerians and the Akkadians. No one knows much about who the Sumerians were or where they originally came from, but the Akkadians are a different story. They were a Semitic people who spoke a language closely related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Phoenician, and even though they were conquered early in the history of the region, their language remained the common tongue of the various local empires for almost 2,000 years. And it was the Phoenicians, a seafaring nation, whose writing was the model for virtually every alphabet in the world, including the Greek, on which our own Latin alphabet is modeled. So the Akkadians did indeed have a direct impact on our own civilization. The same is true, more or less, for their pantheon of gods, handed down to the Hebrews, Greeks and Romans. Most importantly, though, the Mesopotamians were the proud possessors of the world’s very first haute cuisine, which, unlike any of their contemporaries in Egypt or the Holy Lands, they took some trouble to write down for posterity. Now, we ought to keep in mind that Mesopotamia was home to many ancient peoples over its long history. In addition to the Sumerians and Akkadians, there were Babylonians, Arameans, Amorites, Persians, Elamites and Assyrians, among others. The Jewish patriarch Abraham was originally from Mesopotamia, and of course the Israelites spent many centuries in captivity there, so early Jewish history and culture were shaped by Mesopotamian influences, although the Torah has virtually nothing to say about cooking. But since all these cultures lived in the same place, with a consistent ecology and climate, and since this is only a very brief history, for culinary purposes we’re going to treat it all as one culture, beginning with the invention of the sickle by Sumerian farmers around 5,000 years ago, through the first Mesopotamian empire under the Akkadian emperor Sargon the Great circa 2,300 BC, through the rise of Babylon under Hammurabi 500 years later, and subsequent domination by the Assyrians, Persians and Greeks. By the time Rome was becoming the center of power in the West, Mesopotamia had for all intents and purposes become a cultural backwater, and that’s where we’ll leave it. This era saw most of the major milestones in agriculture and cooking: the domestication of the cow, sheep, goat, and pig, as well as barley and early forms of wheat such as emmer and spelt; the dome oven and leavened bread. By 1500 BC, all the major foods that are still used in the 20th century, with the exception of the sugar beet, were being grown somewhere in the world. Geographically, Mesopotamia’s most important asset was its two great rivers. The Egyptians had the Nile, of course, but agriculture there was essentially limited to the river’s flood plain. The Mesopotamians’ solved that problem by building a vast, intricate network of irrigation canals that allowed them to turn the entire country into productive farmland. The Greek historian Herodotus claims that Mesopotamia’s canals gave its farmers a 300-fold return in grain. And it was in building those canals that they learned how to organize themselves socially, and thus create the world’s first great cities: Ur, Babylon, and Nineveh, among others. Not to mention one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens, about which more later. According to Herodotus, the Mesopotamians wore long linen tunics down to their feet, covered by another tunic of wool and a short white cloak, and sandals on their feet. They wore their long hair under turbans and perfumed their entire bodies. With their water and technology, the Mesopotamians were able to grow just about everything they needed or wanted to eat. Except for wine, they imported hardly any foodstuffs. They had plenty of domesticated meat, except for chicken, and, contrary to speculation, did not eat dog or horse. They raised pigs, but their consumption was considered dirty. They grew barley as their principle grain, and some wheat, but no rye or oats. The river banks were lined with date palms, from which they harvested not only fruit, but sap for wine. They pressed sesame seeds for oil, as they did not yet have the olive. Mushrooms and truffles were plentiful, as they still are today. They cherished their honeybees and were highly-skilled beekeepers. Most of all, they loved their orchards and cultivated fruit trees from all across the ancient world: apples, cherries, apricots, peaches, plums, quince, pomegranate, medlar, figs, pistachios and citron, a citrus fruit that is still used ritually by the Jews during the Feast of Tabernacles. When all else failed, they were perfectly happy, like most of their contemporaries in the Near East, to devour the locusts that plagued their fields. Locusts were savored by all, including royals; in fact, while the many creatures listed as forbidden eating in the Book of Leviticus include pigs, camels, shellfish, vultures, eels, lizards and bats, four species of locust are explicitly singled out as perfectly kosher. Obviously, bread, mostly made of barley, was a central part of every meal, and critical to the diet of the poor, supplemented by onions, chickpeas and leeks. The great Sumerian epic poem Gilgamesh mentions bread seasoned with sesame seeds and onion. Leviticus describes three kinds of unleavened bread that would have been equally common in Mesopotamia: unleavened cakes or wafers baked in the oven, bread cooked on the griddle, and bread fried in the pan. Barley was also eaten in a simple gruel. The biblical Book of Ecclesiastes further names salt, milk, bread and oil as essentials of life, and presumably even the poorest were able to get their hands on most of these basics. With easy access to the rivers, as well as an early form of fish farming practiced by the Assyrians, fish was probably cheap and available to the poor as well. Fried fish vendors were known to have plied the streets of Ur, and Herodotus mentions three tribes who ate nothing but fish, drying them in the sun, grinding them down with a pestle, squeezing the paste through a linen cloth and baking the fish meal into cakes. The Sumerian fable of the poor man of Nippur is instructive. He dreams of being invited to dine with the mayor, but can only afford an old nanny goat as his share, and is sent home. The point of the story is to stress his poverty, but it also demonstrates that even the poor got to eat meat on occasion. The Mesopotamians also made broad use of butter, sour milk, and cheese, mostly from goats. Because of preservation problems, this cheese was most likely in the form of curds and eaten fresh, not aged. They had a variety of sweeteners at their disposal, and made liberal use of them all. Honey was popular, but expensive. Date and fig syrup were more common. They also used a white secretion harvested from the tamarisk tree, which many historians identify as the heavenly manna that sustained the Jews wandering in the desert. It’s still in use today; a diligent worker can harvest as much as four pounds of the stuff in one morning, and it keeps indefinitely. The Mesopotamians were also very sophisticated in their use of herbs and other seasonings. A rare Babylonian document lists 72 trees, shrubs and plants cultivated by King Merodach-Baladan of Babylon in his gardens – not the famous Hanging Gardens, which were built later by Nebuchadnezzar, but probably very similar in size and ambition. In addition to the usual lentils, chickpeas, onions, garlic, and leeks, they include chives, radishes, lettuce, carrots, fennel, beets, chard, asparagus, cucumber, melon and almonds. The spices – coriander, cumin, black cumin, mint, anise, thyme, asafetida, bay, saffron and sage – give us a pretty good sense of what Mesopotamian cooking at its best must have tasted like, though as we’ll see, we should probably be cautious about imagining some delectable ancient equivalent to a modern Arab or Persian feast. The Mesopotamians were also very fond of a condiment they called shiqqu, a very salty brine made of fermented fish, shellfish or grasshoppers that they added to many of their meat dishes. It may sound unappetizing, but it probably tasted a lot like the Vietnamese sauce nuoc mam, and as we’ll see in later episodes, it had its almost exact counterparts in ancient Greek and Roman cooking. In Neolithic times, reliable methods of preserving excess food had been important to a community’s survival; in the new urban civilizations, with their larger populations and extreme divisions of labor, they were absolutely essential. The Mesopotamians soon mastered every technique available in the ancient world. They dehydrated their food, including meat, fruit, cereals, pulses, herbs and fish, either in the sun or in a cooling oven. They salted their meat and fish, candied fruit by drenching it in honey, and soured milk and curdled cheese with salt. They also malted their grain for later use in bread and beer. And speaking of beer, they were one ancient civilization that really enjoyed a good drink. The rich had a healthy appreciation for good wine, which they imported from Phoenicia and Canaan on the Mediterranean coast, and understood the concept of vintages. Like all ancient peoples, they drank it diluted or adulterated with water or honey. The super wealthy also drank it cooled with ice carried down in blocks from the northern mountains. Herodotus claims that Phoenician wine was commonly shipped down the Euphrates from Armenia on circular boats that also carried donkeys. When the boats arrived in Babylon, they were dismantled and the watertight skins of their hulls were carried back to Armenia by the passenger donkeys. Liquor was also manufactured from date-palm sap and from fruit, including amurdinnum from blackberries and shikar siluppi from dates. But by far the most popular and ubiquitous drink was beer. One of the very earliest pictographs in the Mesopotamian lexicon is a long-necked jar – the symbol for beer. And one of the most ancient homilies ever set down on paper is a Sumerian cure for a hang-over – “He who drinks too much beer must drink water” – which is kind of hard to argue with. In Egypt and in Mesopotamia, mead was made from fermented honey, but that was too pricy for most people and by far the most common varieties were produced from sprouted grain or bread soaked in water. The Sumerians recorded at least eight distinct kinds of barley beer, eight more of emmer and three mixed. The varieties included “white”, “russet,” “light,” “dark,” “cloudy,” “sweetened with honey,” and flavored with herbs and fruit of all kinds. It was drunk straight or diluted, direct from the jug or in clay jars with built-in straws and filters to strain out the husks. Some jars had two straws for couples who enjoyed their intimacy over a brew. Drinking beer was so much the national pastime that contemporary accounts of Mesopotamian festivals begin to sound like a German Oktoberfest, replete with the world’s very first drinking song. It goes: “I will summon brewers and cupbearers To serve us floods of beer and keep it passing round! What pleasure! What delight! Blissfully to take it in, To sing jubilantly of this noble liquor, Our hearts enchanted and our souls radiant!” Unfortunately, the melody has been lost, but you get the picture. Communal eating and drinking was a normal part of sealing the deal in legal contracts, such as marriage, land sales, and the summoning of warriors by the king. It was also an intrinsic element in kispu, a ritual meal to share food with the dead and thus keep them in the family. The Mesopotamians had several ways of cooking. They didn’t much care for direct roasting or grilling over an open fire, which some historians have suggested might have smacked of the archaic and primitive. Like the Greeks, Egyptians and Israelites, they used it mostly in religious ceremonies when offering sacrifices to the gods, including Yahweh himself, who was said to enjoy the smell of wood-scorched flesh. As Leviticus puts it, “All the fat belongs to Yahweh.” But grilled meats never appear in their written recipes. Grains were sometimes roasted before being made into porridge, and were then mixed with water to form cakes, known as bappiru, that would be malted, dried and stored, later to be crumbled into broth for thickening or fermented for beer. They also baked directly in their domed ovens – usually bread, because, as we’ll see, they did not often cook their animals whole. But their greatest innovation was the vertical clay cylinder oven known as tinuru. The tinuru was such a perfectly adapted piece of technology that it is still in common use today, known as tannur in modern Arabic, tanura in Farsi and tandoor in India. One meter high, one meter in diameter, and anchored to the ground, the tinuru could be used to cook anything. Flat bread was cooked by simply plastering it to the side of the cylinder. For “pie crusts”, bread dough was flattened onto a clay dish, which was often designed with animal and human figures or geometric patterns that would imprint on the crust; the dish was then placed in or on top of the tinuru. Food could also be steamed by putting it in the tinuru with a pitcher of water. I would venture to say that it must have been the invention of the tinuru that gave the Mesopotamians their first inkling of what fine dining could really be. And for us, the first clue that they had stumbled onto a world of haute cuisine is the fact that, along with these differentiated cooking technologies, they developed new and differentiated terminology for food preparation. The Mesopotamians were the first civilization to use distinct names for baker, pastry chef, saucier, and so on. The head chef of an establishment, usually a royal house, was known as the mubannu, or embellisher. The Yale Babylonian Collection has three recently discovered 4,000-year old clay tablets in Akkadian cuneiform that clearly show recipes – the oldest in the world. Unfortunately, none of these recipes is intact or complete, and many terms, such as the names of herbs and birds, remain untranslatable to this day. The tablets also include a Sumerian-Akkadian dictionary with some 800 entries on food. They list 20 varieties of cheese, 100 soups or stews, and 300 types of bread, varied by type of flour, leavened or not, milk or beer, sweet, flavoured, with fruit, etc. Since most people were illiterate, including cooks, we ought to assume that this was some sort of administrative list, handed down from generation to generation of chefs in the royal kitchen. The instructions are far from thorough, assuming a basic professional knowledge in the user. The French Assyriologist Jean Bottéro has made a thorough study of these tablets, and most of what I know comes from his work. The very earliest of the recipes – and thus the oldest recipe in the world – dates to the early second millennium BC and describes the preparation of mersu, a kind of sweet bread or tart with filling. Much of the recipe cannot be translated or is missing, but mersu starts with a dough made of flour; water, milk or beer; and oil. It’s stuffed with dried fruit – grapes, figs, apples or pine nuts – and seasoned with nigella (a species of ranunculus also known as black cumin), as well as regular cumin, coriander and garlic. While perhaps a strange conjunction of flavors to our palate, the recipe for mersu reveals a perfectly evolved, refined and distinctive style of cooking. For the first time, we see deliberation and taste as intrinsic elements of food preparation, elevating it above mere cooking to cuisine. Mersu must have been an important component of the sophisticated diet, as it’s listed as a dish prepared for the king and has its own specialist, the episat mersi, or maker of mersu. A second, later recipe, circa 4th century BC, is a kind of reduction sauce for braised meat. Water is infused with mustard and cucumber, then boiled with fennel, watercress, cumin and dodder (a climbing vine of the morning glory family). The sauce is reduced by five fifths, then used as a braise for meat. Braising and reduction, as a way of combining and intensifying flavors, represented a dramatic leap forward in the evolution of cooking. Again, it’s clear evidence of an evolved cuisine with its own signature flavors. Several other recipes for preparing small birds seem perfectly, almost freakishly modern. In what appears to be a recipe for pigeon, the bird is washed and browned in oil and the pan is deglazed with water and vinegar. The deglazing liquid is seasoned with mint and salt, and the bird is returned to the pot and braised. Another recipe, possibly for francolin (a kind of pheasant), has the braised bird served over a polenta of coarsely-ground white flour or lentils cooked with buttermilk or beer in which a piece of aromatic wood has been steeped. One puzzling anomaly of Mesopotamian recipes is their insistence that meat be washed thoroughly in the course of preparation, often more than once. No one is quite certain what purpose this served, but it was surely more than a case of unusual fastidiousness. Perhaps there was a step in the cooking process, such as charring, that was so taken for granted that it was not mentioned in the recipes. It may simply have been a way of cleaning freshly butchered meat of blood, viscera or the remnants of fur or feathers, but that doesn’t explain why it had to be done repeatedly. It may even have been some sort of rudimentary purification ritual. Or maybe it was just neurotic. We may never know. Yet another recipe is for pigeon pie. The bird and its gizzards are seared. The instructions then specify that the meat must be boiled in a new, clean pot with milk and fat, and seasoned with rue, garlic, leek and onion. In the meantime, a crust is prepared with wheat, milk, shiqqu, leek and garlic, and allowed to rise. A large plate is lined with half the dough and cooked, presumably on top of the tinuru. It is then loaded with minced vegetables, the cooked birds and their gizzards, and sauce. The pie is then covered with the pre-cooked pastry top and served. It’s worth reminding ourselves that these recipes are over 3,000 years old. But before we start sharpening our carving blades and preparing ourselves for a delicious Mesopotamian feast à l’ancienne, we need to take a look at one of the other tablets. This one offers some 25 recipes for broth, which, along with bread and onions, seems to have been the mainstay of the Mesopotamian kitchen. These broths were used both as cooking mediums for meat and as soup in their own right; in any case, they were not served with the meat that was cooked in them, which was usually was rubbed with garlic, sprinkled with vinegar or siqqu, and served with greens. The broth was reserved for another time. Virtually all the recipes call for mutton fat, onion, leek and garlic. Herodotus describes the fat-tailed sheep of Arabia, with tails so heavy that shepherds tethered them to little carts on which to rest their burden. These sheep were long thought to be a myth, but are quite common in the Near East. It was probably these beasts or their ancestors that provided the grease that went into almost everything the Mesopotamians ate with gusto. Cooked in a bronze pot over the tinuru, most broths were made with meat: venison, gazelle, kid, lamb, mutton, pigeon and other birds, offal, especially fresh or salted spleen, and other salted meat. The flesh was sometimes cooked whole, sometimes cut up into chunks; milk was sometimes added, sometimes not. The broth could be thickened with blood or with grain, usually malted barley that had been baked into a hard cake then broken up into crumbs. The most common seasonings were cumin, mustard, coriander, mint and dodder. The 25 recipes include four for vegetable-based broths, but even these are thickened with fat and blood. This is where it’s a little easier to remember just how ancient and alien to us was the civilization that relished such food and devised these recipes. The Mesopotamian cultures created a remarkable, inventive, sophisticated and resourceful civilization, enthusiastically taking full and creative advantage of the wealth of natural resources at their disposal. That doesn’t mean that we moderns could stomach their cooking for a minute. I remember my grandparents’ building in the Bronx, and how the smell of fried onions and boiled cabbage emanated from every apartment, permeating the halls and elevators. Imagine now a whole city, an entire nation, reeking of fatty broth, every portion of meat, every garden vegetable draped in a shroud of grease. In all honesty, I have often tried to create palatable meals from ancient recipes, and sometimes I’ve succeeded, but it’s very hard to get around all that mutton fat. Now let’s picture ourselves as guests of the ninth century BC emperor Ashurnasirpal as he celebrated the inauguration of his new palace in the capital city of Calah. As was only fitting for a monarch who viewed himself as overlord of the entire world, Ashurnasirpal threw a banquet the scale and lavishness of which still resonate 3,000 years later. The palace itself was a marvel: built atop a terrace 120 bricks high, it boasted seven halls roofed with imported boxwood, ash, cedar, cypress and juniper. The doors were of bronze and the blue walls were covered in murals depicting the host’s foreign campaigns and conquests. The glazed bricks above the gates were the color of lapis lazuli. The vast gardens, ingeniously irrigated, were fragrant with trees brought back from the emperor’s wars: pomegranate, myrrh, tamarind, terebinth, and many others whose beautiful, evocative names – simmesallu, kamesseru, titip – will forever mask the mystery of their identity. The guests came from every corner of the empire – some 70,000 of them, including 16,000 locals. In accordance with the honored custom, before the feast the king’s guests first washed their hands and perfumed themselves with oil of cedar, ginger and myrtle. Then they sat down to eat for 10 days. We do not have a menu for the banquet, but since the recipes we’ve looked at all come from royal archives, it’s safe to assume that the guests were offered dishes very similar if not identical to the ones we know. What we do have is an inventory of the raw ingredients brought in to feed the hungry hordes. They include, but are not limited to, 1,000 fattened head of cattle, 1,000 calves, 10,000 stable sheep, 15,000 lambs, 1,000 spring lambs, 500 stags, 500 gazelles, 1,000 ducks, 1,500 geese, 1,000 mesuku-birds, 1,000 qaríbu-birds, 20,000 doves, another 10,000 assorted small birds, 10,000 assorted fish, 10,000 jerboa, 10,000 assorted eggs, 10,000 jars of beer, 10,000 skins of wine, and 1,000 wood crates filled with vegetables. Most of these fine, varied and delicate ingredients would have ended up boiled in fatty mutton broth. It’s an awe-inspiring and somewhat nauseating spectacle, not unlike a British soccer stadium after a local victory: 70,000 Mesopotamians, plastered on strong beer and date-palm wine, raising an unholy ruckus with their rowdy drinking songs, their beards speckled with barley husks, their hands dripping with pungent grease, their lovely linen tunics soaked and stinking of mutton broth, their turbans disheveled beyond redemption. This is not quite the picture of the muscular, dignified, meticulously braided lion-killers conveyed by Mesopotamian artists and sculptors, but it’s certainly an interesting counterpoint. The account of Ashurnarsipal’s banquet doesn’t tell us if the guests were offered the opportunity to wash up at the end of the feast, but whether they did nor not, it’s no wonder the Mesopotamians were in the habit of drenching their entire bodies in perfume.

Episode 2: Mesopotamia and the Holy Land In the last episode, we considered the cooking techniques of prehistoric humans, or what little is known about them. Today, we’re taking the giant leap from Neolithic culture to the dawn of civilization. And we’re going to start with the very first recorded cuisine in history – that of Mesopotamia, the civilization that arose about 5,000 years ago in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, most of which lies within present-day Iraq. Some of you might question why what is essentially a history of European cooking should begin in Asia. It’s a reasonable question – after all, Mesopotamia is a good 1,000 miles from Europe, and neither their histories, cultures nor languages intersected all that much in the ancient world. Still, there are good reasons to begin here, as most ninth-grade students have learned to their chagrin. The two earliest cultures of Mesopotamia were the Sumerians and the Akkadians. No one knows much about who the Sumerians were or where they originally came from, but the Akkadians are a different story. They were a Semitic people who spoke a language closely related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Phoenician, and even though they were conquered early in the history of the region, their language remained the common tongue of the various local empires for almost 2,000 years. And it was the Phoenicians, a seafaring nation, whose writing was the model for virtually every alphabet in the world, including the Greek, on which our own Latin alphabet is modeled. So the Akkadians did indeed have a direct impact on our own civilization. The same is true, more or less, for their pantheon of gods, handed down to the Hebrews, Greeks and Romans. Most importantly, though, the Mesopotamians were the proud possessors of the world’s very first haute cuisine, which, unlike any of their contemporaries in Egypt or the Holy Lands, they took some trouble to write down for posterity. Now, we ought to keep in mind that Mesopotamia was home to many ancient peoples over its long history. In addition to the Sumerians and Akkadians, there were Babylonians, Arameans, Amorites, Persians, Elamites and Assyrians, among others. The Jewish patriarch Abraham was originally from Mesopotamia, and of course the Israelites spent many centuries in captivity there, so early Jewish history and culture were shaped by Mesopotamian influences, although the Torah has virtually nothing to say about cooking. But since all these cultures lived in the same place, with a consistent ecology and climate, and since this is only a very brief history, for culinary purposes we’re going to treat it all as one culture, beginning with the invention of the sickle by Sumerian farmers around 5,000 years ago, through the first Mesopotamian empire under the Akkadian emperor Sargon the Great circa 2,300 BC, through the rise of Babylon under Hammurabi 500 years later, and subsequent domination by the Assyrians, Persians and Greeks. By the time Rome was becoming the center of power in the West, Mesopotamia had for all intents and purposes become a cultural backwater, and that’s where we’ll leave it. This era saw most of the major milestones in agriculture and cooking: the domestication of the cow, sheep, goat, and pig, as well as barley and early forms of wheat such as emmer and spelt; the dome oven and leavened bread. By 1500 BC, all the major foods that are still used in the 20th century, with the exception of the sugar beet, were being grown somewhere in the world. Geographically, Mesopotamia’s most important asset was its two great rivers. The Egyptians had the Nile, of course, but agriculture there was essentially limited to the river’s flood plain. The Mesopotamians’ solved that problem by building a vast, intricate network of irrigation canals that allowed them to turn the entire country into productive farmland. The Greek historian Herodotus claims that Mesopotamia’s canals gave its farmers a 300-fold return in grain. And it was in building those canals that they learned how to organize themselves socially, and thus create the world’s first great cities: Ur, Babylon, and Nineveh, among others. Not to mention one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens, about which more later. According to Herodotus, the Mesopotamians wore long linen tunics down to their feet, covered by another tunic of wool and a short white cloak, and sandals on their feet. They wore their long hair under turbans and perfumed their entire bodies. With their water and technology, the Mesopotamians were able to grow just about everything they needed or wanted to eat. Except for wine, they imported hardly any foodstuffs. They had plenty of domesticated meat, except for chicken, and, contrary to speculation, did not eat dog or horse. They raised pigs, but their consumption was considered dirty. They grew barley as their principle grain, and some wheat, but no rye or oats. The river banks were lined with date palms, from which they harvested not only fruit, but sap for wine. They pressed sesame seeds for oil, as they did not yet have the olive. Mushrooms and truffles were plentiful, as they still are today. They cherished their honeybees and were highly-skilled beekeepers. Most of all, they loved their orchards and cultivated fruit trees from all across the ancient world: apples, cherries, apricots, peaches, plums, quince, pomegranate, medlar, figs, pistachios and citron, a citrus fruit that is still used ritually by the Jews during the Feast of Tabernacles. When all else failed, they were perfectly happy, like most of their contemporaries in the Near East, to devour the locusts that plagued their fields. Locusts were savored by all, including royals; in fact, while the many creatures listed as forbidden eating in the Book of Leviticus include pigs, camels, shellfish, vultures, eels, lizards and bats, four species of locust are explicitly singled out as perfectly kosher. Obviously, bread, mostly made of barley, was a central part of every meal, and critical to the diet of the poor, supplemented by onions, chickpeas and leeks. The great Sumerian epic poem Gilgamesh mentions bread seasoned with sesame seeds and onion. Leviticus describes three kinds of unleavened bread that would have been equally common in Mesopotamia: unleavened cakes or wafers baked in the oven, bread cooked on the griddle, and bread fried in the pan. Barley was also eaten in a simple gruel. The biblical Book of Ecclesiastes further names salt, milk, bread and oil as essentials of life, and presumably even the poorest were able to get their hands on most of these basics. With easy access to the rivers, as well as an early form of fish farming practiced by the Assyrians, fish was probably cheap and available to the poor as well. Fried fish vendors were known to have plied the streets of Ur, and Herodotus mentions three tribes who ate nothing but fish, drying them in the sun, grinding them down with a pestle, squeezing the paste through a linen cloth and baking the fish meal into cakes. The Sumerian fable of the poor man of Nippur is instructive. He dreams of being invited to dine with the mayor, but can only afford an old nanny goat as his share, and is sent home. The point of the story is to stress his poverty, but it also demonstrates that even the poor got to eat meat on occasion. The Mesopotamians also made broad use of butter, sour milk, and cheese, mostly from goats. Because of preservation problems, this cheese was most likely in the form of curds and eaten fresh, not aged. They had a variety of sweeteners at their disposal, and made liberal use of them all. Honey was popular, but expensive. Date and fig syrup were more common. They also used a white secretion harvested from the tamarisk tree, which many historians identify as the heavenly manna that sustained the Jews wandering in the desert. It’s still in use today; a diligent worker can harvest as much as four pounds of the stuff in one morning, and it keeps indefinitely. The Mesopotamians were also very sophisticated in their use of herbs and other seasonings. A rare Babylonian document lists 72 trees, shrubs and plants cultivated by King Merodach-Baladan of Babylon in his gardens – not the famous Hanging Gardens, which were built later by Nebuchadnezzar, but probably very similar in size and ambition. In addition to the usual lentils, chickpeas, onions, garlic, and leeks, they include chives, radishes, lettuce, carrots, fennel, beets, chard, asparagus, cucumber, melon and almonds. The spices – coriander, cumin, black cumin, mint, anise, thyme, asafetida, bay, saffron and sage – give us a pretty good sense of what Mesopotamian cooking at its best must have tasted like, though as we’ll see, we should probably be cautious about imagining some delectable ancient equivalent to a modern Arab or Persian feast. The Mesopotamians were also very fond of a condiment they called shiqqu, a very salty brine made of fermented fish, shellfish or grasshoppers that they added to many of their meat dishes. It may sound unappetizing, but it probably tasted a lot like the Vietnamese sauce nuoc mam, and as we’ll see in later episodes, it had its almost exact counterparts in ancient Greek and Roman cooking. In Neolithic times, reliable methods of preserving excess food had been important to a community’s survival; in the new urban civilizations, with their larger populations and extreme divisions of labor, they were absolutely essential. The Mesopotamians soon mastered every technique available in the ancient world. They dehydrated their food, including meat, fruit, cereals, pulses, herbs and fish, either in the sun or in a cooling oven. They salted their meat and fish, candied fruit by drenching it in honey, and soured milk and curdled cheese with salt. They also malted their grain for later use in bread and beer. And speaking of beer, they were one ancient civilization that really enjoyed a good drink. The rich had a healthy appreciation for good wine, which they imported from Phoenicia and Canaan on the Mediterranean coast, and understood the concept of vintages. Like all ancient peoples, they drank it diluted or adulterated with water or honey. The super wealthy also drank it cooled with ice carried down in blocks from the northern mountains. Herodotus claims that Phoenician wine was commonly shipped down the Euphrates from Armenia on circular boats that also carried donkeys. When the boats arrived in Babylon, they were dismantled and the watertight skins of their hulls were carried back to Armenia by the passenger donkeys. Liquor was also manufactured from date-palm sap and from fruit, including amurdinnum from blackberries and shikar siluppi from dates. But by far the most popular and ubiquitous drink was beer. One of the very earliest pictographs in the Mesopotamian lexicon is a long-necked jar – the symbol for beer. And one of the most ancient homilies ever set down on paper is a Sumerian cure for a hang-over – “He who drinks too much beer must drink water” – which is kind of hard to argue with. In Egypt and in Mesopotamia, mead was made from fermented honey, but that was too pricy for most people and by far the most common varieties were produced from sprouted grain or bread soaked in water. The Sumerians recorded at least eight distinct kinds of barley beer, eight more of emmer and three mixed. The varieties included “white”, “russet,” “light,” “dark,” “cloudy,” “sweetened with honey,” and flavored with herbs and fruit of all kinds. It was drunk straight or diluted, direct from the jug or in clay jars with built-in straws and filters to strain out the husks. Some jars had two straws for couples who enjoyed their intimacy over a brew. Drinking beer was so much the national pastime that contemporary accounts of Mesopotamian festivals begin to sound like a German Oktoberfest, replete with the world’s very first drinking song. It goes: “I will summon brewers and cupbearers To serve us floods of beer and keep it passing round! What pleasure! What delight! Blissfully to take it in, To sing jubilantly of this noble liquor, Our hearts enchanted and our souls radiant!” Unfortunately, the melody has been lost, but you get the picture. Communal eating and drinking was a normal part of sealing the deal in legal contracts, such as marriage, land sales, and the summoning of warriors by the king. It was also an intrinsic element in kispu, a ritual meal to share food with the dead and thus keep them in the family. The Mesopotamians had several ways of cooking. They didn’t much care for direct roasting or grilling over an open fire, which some historians have suggested might have smacked of the archaic and primitive. Like the Greeks, Egyptians and Israelites, they used it mostly in religious ceremonies when offering sacrifices to the gods, including Yahweh himself, who was said to enjoy the smell of wood-scorched flesh. As Leviticus puts it, “All the fat belongs to Yahweh.” But grilled meats never appear in their written recipes. Grains were sometimes roasted before being made into porridge, and were then mixed with water to form cakes, known as bappiru, that would be malted, dried and stored, later to be crumbled into broth for thickening or fermented for beer. They also baked directly in their domed ovens – usually bread, because, as we’ll see, they did not often cook their animals whole. But their greatest innovation was the vertical clay cylinder oven known as tinuru. The tinuru was such a perfectly adapted piece of technology that it is still in common use today, known as tannur in modern Arabic, tanura in Farsi and tandoor in India. One meter high, one meter in diameter, and anchored to the ground, the tinuru could be used to cook anything. Flat bread was cooked by simply plastering it to the side of the cylinder. For “pie crusts”, bread dough was flattened onto a clay dish, which was often designed with animal and human figures or geometric patterns that would imprint on the crust; the dish was then placed in or on top of the tinuru. Food could also be steamed by putting it in the tinuru with a pitcher of water. I would venture to say that it must have been the invention of the tinuru that gave the Mesopotamians their first inkling of what fine dining could really be. And for us, the first clue that they had stumbled onto a world of haute cuisine is the fact that, along with these differentiated cooking technologies, they developed new and differentiated terminology for food preparation. The Mesopotamians were the first civilization to use distinct names for baker, pastry chef, saucier, and so on. The head chef of an establishment, usually a royal house, was known as the mubannu, or embellisher. The Yale Babylonian Collection has three recently discovered 4,000-year old clay tablets in Akkadian cuneiform that clearly show recipes – the oldest in the world. Unfortunately, none of these recipes is intact or complete, and many terms, such as the names of herbs and birds, remain untranslatable to this day. The tablets also include a Sumerian-Akkadian dictionary with some 800 entries on food. They list 20 varieties of cheese, 100 soups or stews, and 300 types of bread, varied by type of flour, leavened or not, milk or beer, sweet, flavoured, with fruit, etc. Since most people were illiterate, including cooks, we ought to assume that this was some sort of administrative list, handed down from generation to generation of chefs in the royal kitchen. The instructions are far from thorough, assuming a basic professional knowledge in the user. The French Assyriologist Jean Bottéro has made a thorough study of these tablets, and most of what I know comes from his work. The very earliest of the recipes – and thus the oldest recipe in the world – dates to the early second millennium BC and describes the preparation of mersu, a kind of sweet bread or tart with filling. Much of the recipe cannot be translated or is missing, but mersu starts with a dough made of flour; water, milk or beer; and oil. It’s stuffed with dried fruit – grapes, figs, apples or pine nuts – and seasoned with nigella (a species of ranunculus also known as black cumin), as well as regular cumin, coriander and garlic. While perhaps a strange conjunction of flavors to our palate, the recipe for mersu reveals a perfectly evolved, refined and distinctive style of cooking. For the first time, we see deliberation and taste as intrinsic elements of food preparation, elevating it above mere cooking to cuisine. Mersu must have been an important component of the sophisticated diet, as it’s listed as a dish prepared for the king and has its own specialist, the episat mersi, or maker of mersu. A second, later recipe, circa 4th century BC, is a kind of reduction sauce for braised meat. Water is infused with mustard and cucumber, then boiled with fennel, watercress, cumin and dodder (a climbing vine of the morning glory family). The sauce is reduced by five fifths, then used as a braise for meat. Braising and reduction, as a way of combining and intensifying flavors, represented a dramatic leap forward in the evolution of cooking. Again, it’s clear evidence of an evolved cuisine with its own signature flavors. Several other recipes for preparing small birds seem perfectly, almost freakishly modern. In what appears to be a recipe for pigeon, the bird is washed and browned in oil and the pan is deglazed with water and vinegar. The deglazing liquid is seasoned with mint and salt, and the bird is returned to the pot and braised. Another recipe, possibly for francolin (a kind of pheasant), has the braised bird served over a polenta of coarsely-ground white flour or lentils cooked with buttermilk or beer in which a piece of aromatic wood has been steeped. One puzzling anomaly of Mesopotamian recipes is their insistence that meat be washed thoroughly in the course of preparation, often more than once. No one is quite certain what purpose this served, but it was surely more than a case of unusual fastidiousness. Perhaps there was a step in the cooking process, such as charring, that was so taken for granted that it was not mentioned in the recipes. It may simply have been a way of cleaning freshly butchered meat of blood, viscera or the remnants of fur or feathers, but that doesn’t explain why it had to be done repeatedly. It may even have been some sort of rudimentary purification ritual. Or maybe it was just neurotic. We may never know. Yet another recipe is for pigeon pie. The bird and its gizzards are seared. The instructions then specify that the meat must be boiled in a new, clean pot with milk and fat, and seasoned with rue, garlic, leek and onion. In the meantime, a crust is prepared with wheat, milk, shiqqu, leek and garlic, and allowed to rise. A large plate is lined with half the dough and cooked, presumably on top of the tinuru. It is then loaded with minced vegetables, the cooked birds and their gizzards, and sauce. The pie is then covered with the pre-cooked pastry top and served. It’s worth reminding ourselves that these recipes are over 3,000 years old. But before we start sharpening our carving blades and preparing ourselves for a delicious Mesopotamian feast à l’ancienne, we need to take a look at one of the other tablets. This one offers some 25 recipes for broth, which, along with bread and onions, seems to have been the mainstay of the Mesopotamian kitchen. These broths were used both as cooking mediums for meat and as soup in their own right; in any case, they were not served with the meat that was cooked in them, which was usually was rubbed with garlic, sprinkled with vinegar or siqqu, and served with greens. The broth was reserved for another time. Virtually all the recipes call for mutton fat, onion, leek and garlic. Herodotus describes the fat-tailed sheep of Arabia, with tails so heavy that shepherds tethered them to little carts on which to rest their burden. These sheep were long thought to be a myth, but are quite common in the Near East. It was probably these beasts or their ancestors that provided the grease that went into almost everything the Mesopotamians ate with gusto. Cooked in a bronze pot over the tinuru, most broths were made with meat: venison, gazelle, kid, lamb, mutton, pigeon and other birds, offal, especially fresh or salted spleen, and other salted meat. The flesh was sometimes cooked whole, sometimes cut up into chunks; milk was sometimes added, sometimes not. The broth could be thickened with blood or with grain, usually malted barley that had been baked into a hard cake then broken up into crumbs. The most common seasonings were cumin, mustard, coriander, mint and dodder. The 25 recipes include four for vegetable-based broths, but even these are thickened with fat and blood. This is where it’s a little easier to remember just how ancient and alien to us was the civilization that relished such food and devised these recipes. The Mesopotamian cultures created a remarkable, inventive, sophisticated and resourceful civilization, enthusiastically taking full and creative advantage of the wealth of natural resources at their disposal. That doesn’t mean that we moderns could stomach their cooking for a minute. I remember my grandparents’ building in the Bronx, and how the smell of fried onions and boiled cabbage emanated from every apartment, permeating the halls and elevators. Imagine now a whole city, an entire nation, reeking of fatty broth, every portion of meat, every garden vegetable draped in a shroud of grease. In all honesty, I have often tried to create palatable meals from ancient recipes, and sometimes I’ve succeeded, but it’s very hard to get around all that mutton fat. Now let’s picture ourselves as guests of the ninth century BC emperor Ashurnasirpal as he celebrated the inauguration of his new palace in the capital city of Calah. As was only fitting for a monarch who viewed himself as overlord of the entire world, Ashurnasirpal threw a banquet the scale and lavishness of which still resonate 3,000 years later. The palace itself was a marvel: built atop a terrace 120 bricks high, it boasted seven halls roofed with imported boxwood, ash, cedar, cypress and juniper. The doors were of bronze and the blue walls were covered in murals depicting the host’s foreign campaigns and conquests. The glazed bricks above the gates were the color of lapis lazuli. The vast gardens, ingeniously irrigated, were fragrant with trees brought back from the emperor’s wars: pomegranate, myrrh, tamarind, terebinth, and many others whose beautiful, evocative names – simmesallu, kamesseru, titip – will forever mask the mystery of their identity. The guests came from every corner of the empire – some 70,000 of them, including 16,000 locals. In accordance with the honored custom, before the feast the king’s guests first washed their hands and perfumed themselves with oil of cedar, ginger and myrtle. Then they sat down to eat for 10 days. We do not have a menu for the banquet, but since the recipes we’ve looked at all come from royal archives, it’s safe to assume that the guests were offered dishes very similar if not identical to the ones we know. What we do have is an inventory of the raw ingredients brought in to feed the hungry hordes. They include, but are not limited to, 1,000 fattened head of cattle, 1,000 calves, 10,000 stable sheep, 15,000 lambs, 1,000 spring lambs, 500 stags, 500 gazelles, 1,000 ducks, 1,500 geese, 1,000 mesuku-birds, 1,000 qaríbu-birds, 20,000 doves, another 10,000 assorted small birds, 10,000 assorted fish, 10,000 jerboa, 10,000 assorted eggs, 10,000 jars of beer, 10,000 skins of wine, and 1,000 wood crates filled with vegetables. Most of these fine, varied and delicate ingredients would have ended up boiled in fatty mutton broth. It’s an awe-inspiring and somewhat nauseating spectacle, not unlike a British soccer stadium after a local victory: 70,000 Mesopotamians, plastered on strong beer and date-palm wine, raising an unholy ruckus with their rowdy drinking songs, their beards speckled with barley husks, their hands dripping with pungent grease, their lovely linen tunics soaked and stinking of mutton broth, their turbans disheveled beyond redemption. This is not quite the picture of the muscular, dignified, meticulously braided lion-killers conveyed by Mesopotamian artists and sculptors, but it’s certainly an interesting counterpoint. The account of Ashurnarsipal’s banquet doesn’t tell us if the guests were offered the opportunity to wash up at the end of the feast, but whether they did nor not, it’s no wonder the Mesopotamians were in the habit of drenching their entire bodies in perfume.

http://media.podcastingmanager.com/1/2/6/0/2/129098-120621/Media/Prehistory.mp3
    Not long ago, an English archeologist named Jacqui Wood wrote a book called Prehistoric Cooking, which features recipes for smoked fish stew, barley bread with beer, nettle pudding and birds and hedgehogs baked in clay. Wood is a perfectly respectable and respected scientist, and the recipes are fairly plausible – except maybe for the fish stew, which contains bacon, cream and milk, like something you might find on the menu at an upscale Scottish golfing resort – and yet it’s based 100 per cent on conjecture.     
    How do I know that? First of all, the very thing that makes prehistory prehistory is its lack of writing and written records, so not a single prehistoric recipe survives intact. Sadly, all those cave-dwelling Craig Claibornes took their secrets with them to the grave. Secondly, with the exception of salt, all the seasoning we use on our food is of vegetable origin. Vegetable matter decays and leaves no trace record, so even in archeological digs that show us what our ancient ancestors ate, we have no idea how they seasoned it. So when it comes to Prehistoric Cooking, Jacqui Wood’s recipes may be based on nothing but a good imagination and a strong stomach, but they’re the best we have. It’s true that modern isotope spectrometry can tell us the proportion of meat to vegetables in the neolithic diet, but that’s science. 
    Recipes, however, are not science but culture, and the fact is, no matter how much the paleontologists protest, we know next to nothing about prehistoric culture. Anything meaningful that can be said about it must, by definition, be invention. But just because something’s based on guesswork doesn’t necessarily make it boring, ill-informed or even wrong. After all, most of the really important gaps in scientific knowledge can be bridged only by informed speculation and intuition. So let’s just say that there’s a little we do know and a lot more that we can infer, while the rest… well, let’s try to determine what we know first. 
    To start with, let’s figure out what we mean when talk about “prehistory.” It’s a tricky, slippery subject. A lot of us have a tendency to flatten or telescope our idea of prehistory – there’s history, which has lasted something like 6,000 years, and there’s everything before it, in one undifferentiated lump of time. History is furnished with cities, armies, scribes, temples, irrigation canals, ships; prehistory is peopled by grunting savages living in caves, vandalizing the walls and burning their fingers. But in fact, the Stone Age lasted a million years, and it was anything but static. It encompasses everything from hairy ape-men to the construction of the earliest cities. If history begins with writing, then everything up to the very day before writing was invented is prehistory. That’s a lot of change. The fact is, prehistory was dynamic. Pretty much every truly significant milestone in the evolution of civilization – the use of fire, the development of tools and language, the invention of the wheel and agriculture, music and the arts, the rise of the city – happened not in the historical era, but in the prehistorical. 
    Some four to ten million years ago, the earth’s climate began to shift from tropical to temperate. One result of this was that fruit that had once been available year round became seasonal, and our pre-human ancestors were forced out of the trees in search of something to eat. The very first step in human evolution was directly related to food history. Prancing around in the grasslands, these monkey-men – humans, pre-humans and non-humans – found that it was easier to hunt with weapons, especially sticks and stones, so they learned to free their hands by walking upright. Then, about 75,000 years ago, when cold descended and the ice sheets advanced, those hominid species that had survived were forced to adapt by learning to cooperate in the hunt for mammoth and other big, cold-resistant animals. But none of this is what made them human; in fact, at this point, there were at least two separate species of the genus Homo running around – modern humans and Neanderthals – which raises intriguing if somewhat distracting questions: Did humans and Neanderthals interact? Could they communicate with one another? Did they have different recipes for the same ingredients? We will probably never know, and that may be a good thing. 
    Most of what we imagine to be unique about ourselves is not. Other animals walk upright, talk to each other, make and use tools, build their own shelters. Many appear to enjoy a degree of self-consciousness. There is nothing we eat in the natural world that is not eaten by other animals. No, the evolutionary adaptation that first distinguished human beings from all other creatures was their use and control of fire. The incomparable historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto puts it beautifully in his book Near a Thousand Tables. He writes: 

    “One of history’s longest and most luckless quests has been the search for the essence of humanity, the defining characteristic which makes human beings human and distinguishes them collectively from other animals… Cooking is at least as good as all the other candidates as an index of the humanity of humankind…”

    That may have happened as long ago as a million years; evidence has been found in Israel of a campfire lit in a hearth 750,000 years ago. Certainly, in any case, humans and their ancestors, including the decidedly non-human homo erectus, have been building fires and cooking their food for well over a quarter of a million years. But since we have a hard enough time understanding ourselves as a species, let alone other hominids, let’s go back to the moment when our nearest living relatives, the Neanderthals, finally died out about 25,000 years ago, during what’s known as the Upper Paleolithic period, leaving us as the sole and undisputed fire-using species on Earth. It’s only a small fraction of the Stone Age, but it still gives us a good 20,000 years of prehistory to chew on. And, as Fernández-Armesto tells us, “Culture begins when the raw gets cooked.” 
    And what, exactly, was getting cooked? Well, I hesitate to say so because it may sound controversial, shocking or just plain ignorant, but I believe that our prehistoric ancestors ate pretty much the same things we do, and more. Plain and simple. To put it in perspective, let’s first think about what we eat today, in a general sort of way. Meat: beef, pork, lamb and mutton, chicken. Grain: wheat, barley, rice, rye, oats, millet. Pulses: beans, peas, lentils, chickpeas. Fish: seafood, sea fish, fresh-water fish. Fruit from trees and berries. Root vegetables, green vegetables, leafy vegetables. That covers about 90 per cent of our diet, and every item on that list was available to our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago in its wild, pre-domesticated variety. 
    If you’ve ever walked a dog on a crowded city street, you’ll know that it keeps its nose close to the ground and sniffs at everything, quickly deciding what’s edible and what’s not. No one taught it how to do this; it’s instinctual, right? Now, picture our Late Stone Age ancestors – a clan of them, say – on their traditional hunting and gathering territory in southern Europe, Africa or the Near East. They know every inch of their territory, because they spend all day foraging or hunting, and unlike your dog, they’re able to pass that knowledge down through the generations through speech and story-telling. They know just where the herds of deer, antelope, boar, sheep and aurochs graze. They know just where those animals go to find salt. They know exactly where the wild onions, radishes and turnips grow, the garlic and edible flower bulbs; the cabbages, nettles, ferns, mushrooms; the beans, lentils, chickpeas. They know just where to find the herbs – the wild thyme, oregano, rosemary, and so on – that they use in their spiritual or proto-religious practices. And they know exactly what is edible and what is not. And we, from our perspective, having observed our dog and ourselves in the face of abundance, cannot possibly imagine that they would not eat everything that came to hand that wouldn’t kill them. They ate it all, just as we do. 
    We should really drop once and for all our preconceptions about how life in the Stone Age was one great brutal scramble to find enough to eat. True, they were hunters and gatherers, which probably meant that, as most animals do, they spent most of their waking hours looking for food. But those who were nomadic followed vast roaming herds, and were continually improving on the tools they used to kill and butcher them. Those who chose to settle down presumably did so because their territory provided enough for them to survive on in relative comfort. These people were not stupid, and they did not starve. 
    And remember, too, that there were far fewer of them, the Earth was generous and unpolluted, and all the great shaggy hold-overs from the last Ice Age were still alive: mammoths, mastodons, the auroch – the direct ancestor of our modern cow. In the Americas, they could hunt the giant bison, the giant sloth and the native horse and camel. Through over-hunting and climate change these creatures all eventually died out – the last auroch survived into seventeenth-century Poland – but until they did, they could be and were successfully hunted with little more than stone-tipped spears and fiber nets. 
    So, then, let’s assume that, even before the Neolithic revolution that brought farming, private property, political organization and the first permanent settlements, our prehistoric ancestors ate an adequate and varied diet of wild plants and animals. The question that matters to us, now, is: How did they eat it? Again, the answer to that question is clouded by all sorts of stereotypes and misconceptions about life in the Stone Age. Every day, newspapers all over the world run cartoons showing hairy guys dragging their wives by the hair in one hand, and a huge haunch of meat in the other. Many of us grew up watching the Flintstones, and still believe that prehistoric eating was limited to gnawing on racks of barbecued ribs big enough to overturn a car. 
    If all we knew about the distant past was what we learned on television, we could be forgiven for trusting in such nonsense. But even scientists and academics, who really ought to know better, often end up perpetuating these stereotypes and revealing an almost shocking lack of imagination. Just consider the very distinguished French ethnologist Catherine Perlès, who writes, and I quote: “…there is little evidence of culinary sophistication or elaborate cookery in hunter-gatherer societies: preparations were simple, and the use of direct cooking (either by grilling meat or heating it on coals) made it difficult to mix ingredients to achieve new flavors. Menus were quite monotonous.” 
    I strongly disagree. Maybe there’s no evidence, but plant evidence is notoriously rare, and as we’ve seen, all seasoning would have been from plants. Also, you can’t extrapolate evidence from contemporary hunting-gathering societies, such as those still living in the Amazon or South-East Asia, because they live in the last places that others want to live in and are therefore naturally restricted in diet and available cooking techniques. A hunter-gatherer in a temperate, abundant land – say, ancient Greece, Spain or Mesopotamia 20,000 years ago – would have had vastly more choices. Thirdly, as we’ll see, grilling and direct cooking are very inefficient uses of fire, and were probably the least preferred methods of cooking in Neolithic societies, where fuel for cooking would have been used as sparingly as possible. 
    You don’t have to have to an advanced degree in paleontology to understand why this must be so. All you have to assume is that these people – who, after all, invented the wheel, the alphabet, the plow and a few other useful technologies – were very smart, resourceful and inventive. Let’s invite ourselves on a mammoth hunt, circa 20,000 B.C., and see how they managed. 
    The hunting party has had to travel a long way from home territory to track its quarry down and kill it, but it’s dead now and there are a lot of hungry mouths back at the settlement waiting to be fed. What to do? The animal is far too large to be dragged back whole, so it has to be butchered on site and the portions allotted to every hunter. Nothing goes to waste. The viscera, which will soon begin to rot, are eaten on the spot in a great, orgiastic glut of protein and fat. Do they just throw the heart, lungs and other offal on the fire to be charred, then scrape off the ashes before eating them? Do they stand around like boy scouts making smores, with bits of innards stuck on makeshift skewers? Unlikely. These guys understand the physical characteristics of every body part, because they use each one in their everyday lives, so they know that the stomach can be used as a boiling bag and that the intestinal lining can be stuffed and eaten, and that is just what they do. And since they brought dried foodstuffs, including wild grain and salt, to keep them going until the kill, they throw that into the mix, too. Hey presto: instant haggis. Instant sausage. 
    Now comes the problem of getting the food home. Horses haven’t been domesticated yet, so every man has to carry his share on his back. Each portion, hundreds of pounds of red meat and bone, is too heavy to take back in one trip, but nothing can go to waste. So each hunter has to cut up part of his share and preserve it, so he can come back for it later. If the weather’s cold and dry, he can hang the strips on frames to dry in the wind, along with his sausage. He can also smoke it over the fire, bury it in the ground to freeze it, or pack it in salt if he’s brought enough with him. Whatever he does, each method creates an entirely different spectrum of tastes in the preserved meat, which will be appreciated by his family when it’s brought home and rehydrated in a stew. That stew, whether it’s prepared in a stomach, a leather boiling bag, in a clay-sealed fire pit or, later, in a ceramic pot, will be augmented with grain and seasoned with any of the local herbs known so well to the foraging parties. And that is true whether the clan has been out hunting mammoth in Russia, bison in North America, elephant in Africa or Asia, reindeer in northern Europe, or antelope and wild goat in Mesopotamia. 
    The evidence for all this variety in prehistoric cooking won’t and can’t be found sifting through archeological digs, or in the charts produced by sophisticated spectrometers. The evidence is in human nature. If the raw materials and the technology were available – and they most definitely were – people must have used them, and used them to their fullest extent, because that is what people have always done. And remember, all this happened before the Neolithic revolution, which began some 12,000 years ago and ushered in pretty much every innovation that has accompanied human societies ever since: agriculture, the domestication of animals, pottery, furniture-making, architecture, religion, organized armies, social hierarchy, private property and slavery. The only thing that was missing was writing, which would mark the end of prehistory and the beginning of history. 
    There’s a reason why the vast changes to come are known as the Neolithic revolution – it was fast, violent and apparently irreversible. The new age was sparked by a warming of the Earth’s climate some 20,000 years and the retreat of the glaciers that covered most of what is now the planet’s temperate zone. Paradoxically, as the ice sheets shrank, they dumped zillions of gallons of fresh, icy water into the world’s oceans, lowering temperatures worldwide. Previously well-fed, sedentary Neolithic communities experienced a sudden drop in the availability of wild grain and meat as the big game moved further north with the grasslands. Worldwide, humans were forced to adapt to reduced food resources. Luckily, adapting is what humans do best. 
    Agriculture began almost immediately, circa 10,000. Surely, the earliest farmers had noticed that loose grain, disposed of in some dung heap rich in natural fertilizers, came up strong and produced manifold. In times of abundance, there had been no need to increase yields, but now they started to take deliberate steps to perpetuate the phenomenon. In Mesopotamia, which will be the focus of our earliest investigation into historical cooking, barley was the primary grain, though primitive forms of wheat such as spelt and einkorn were also grown. Most probably, the first use of grain was in gruel and porridge. These societies were already familiar with the process of fermentation, also observed from nature, and were making bread and beer long before the historic era. As the selective breeding of grasses picked up, the issue of what to do with the first surpluses arose, and baking and brewing were the first answers. In the millennia leading up to the Neolithic period, cooking technologies had evolved from the open flame, spit-roasting and leaf-wrapping; through rocks heated over a flame; then cooking in natural containers, like stomachs and leather bags, filled with water and either hung over a flame or with a heated rock inside. Later came fire-pits, either dry, heated with stones, or below the water line, which became a boiler when lined with hardened clay. It was only a short step from there to the invention of the oven, and then pottery. Pottery, in turn, was discovered to be the perfect medium for long-term storage of surplus grain and other products. Someone at some point found that it was helpful to mark the sealed pots with a symbol to indicate what was inside, especially if the contents were being traded elsewhere. As the symbols for these early trade goods proliferated, it became necessary for the traders to learn them by heart, and to codify and simplify them. And there you have it – writing! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. 
    It might be important at this point to note that farming was far from being a preferable way of life to hunting and gathering. They only did it because it had become necessary. It launches the concept of work as we know it today – that is, doing one specialized, monotonous task in return for being provided by others with the necessities of life – and how can that have appeared to anyone to be an improvement? Sedentary communities have a much less varied diet than mobile ones, which are not tied to the land but can follow the food. A farmer who is tied to his land will suffer in a drought or a bad harvest, along with his entire family. He has to dig ditches and break his back with sickle and hoe. Worse, he has to watch as the birds and wild ruminants devour the fruits of his labor. 
    And that brings us to the next step in the rise of civilization: the domestication of animals. Why sit around watching the wild beasts consume your produce when you can teach them to stay where you want them and eat what and when you decide they can eat? The dog was almost certainly the first domesticated animal, but it was soon followed by the goat, the sheep and the auroch. Milk, cheese, butter, and the ox-drawn plough all became part of the Neolithic culture. Those who could afford it also had a ready supply of docile meat at hand, but the wealthy – because by now humankind had begun to divide itself between newly haves and newly have-nots – continued to hunt. The wild animals retreated to the edges of civilization, because they found that human beings had become even more ferocious now that they had something to protect. So now the natural world itself, which until recently had belonged to every species equally, found itself segregated on either side of the fault-lines of civilization. 
    So here we’ve finally arrived, after a journey of half a million years or so, to that very special day some time in the mid-fourth millennium BC – the day before writing was invented. We’re still in prehistory, mind you, but everything’s in place for the show to begin. The world’s population is about 85 million. Bronze has been invented; animals have been harnessed to plows for the first time; cows, sheep, goats, pigs, camels, dogs and horses have been domesticated. The glaciers have fully retreated, the desert has come to the Near East, northern Europe is covered in forests; emmer wheat and barley are being cultivated in Turkey and Greece; the wheel is in use, as are pottery, fishing boats and irrigation canals. Sumeria, the world’s first literate civilization, is ready for its close up. 
    It’s pretty safe to assume that the meals being served up in Mesopotamia on the last day of prehistory were pretty much the same as those served the next – the first day of history. That is almost certainly true, but without documentary evidence it’s just as speculative as Jacqui Wood’s prehistoric fish stew. We know that asparagus grew wild all over the Mediterranean, as did mustard, melons and squash. Our pre-literate Mesopotamians must have dined on lentils, chickpeas, lupins, peas and beans; their orchards were planted with apple, pear, quince, pomegranate, plum, cherry, apricot and peach trees. They ate mutton and goat, mostly, which they seasoned with cumin, poppy seed, caraway, mint, basil, coriander, sage, thyme, rosemary and other local herbs. They sweetened their food with wild honey, date honey and tamarisk honey; if they had honey, they must also have had mead, and we know how they loved their beer. They surely ate locusts, which were plentiful, and fried them in sesame, rather than in olive oil. They were already mining salt. 
    But that’s about all we can know. The stage is still dark – but the curtains are about to rise.
 

Download | Duration: 00:25:09

http://media.podcastingmanager.com/1/2/6/0/2/129098-120621/Media/introduction.mp3    Imagine that you’ve been invited to participate in a strange new culinary quiz show. You’re blindfolded, a clothes peg is placed on your nose, and then you’re led into a restaurant that you’ve never been to before. You don’t know its name, its location, how it’s decorated. You are given no clue about what kind of food it serves. You’re seated at a table and a typical dish offered at this particular restaurant is placed before you. The clothes peg is removed and you’re allowed to smell the food in front of you, but not to see or touch it. Chances are pretty good that you’ll be able to identify the ethnicity of the cooking with some degree of accuracy just by its aroma. If not, once the blindfold is removed, you’ll almost certainly – and instantaneously – be able to name the country, or at the very least the region, that the dish comes from. And that will be true even if, like me, you’ve never been to China, Vietnam, India, Algeria, Peru, Norway, Ethiopia, Hawaii or any of the many places who’s traditional cooking can be found in the ethnic restaurants that jostle for attention on our city streets. 
    You and I somehow take it for granted that we know exactly how dozens of distinct national cuisines are supposed to look, smell, taste and feel. Considering that the vast majority of the six billion human beings on Earth eat pretty much the same basic things, with only a few distinctive variations of flavor, grain, meat and technique to differentiate between us, that’s an incredible state of affairs. In relation to the full span of civilized history, it is also a very, very recent phenomenon. 
    How did we get to the point where cooking traditions that were developed in isolation over thousands of years, half-way around the world, by people who had no idea of or interest in our existence, are as familiar to us as the contents of our own refrigerator? How is it that, of all the countless varieties of cultural and ethnic identity, we can most readily identify a nation by its cooking? Somehow, while the world’s peoples are more connected to each other than they’ve ever been, the way our cooking tastes has come to define us even more clearly – and perhaps more rigidly – than our politics, our literature and even our very language. Think of all the many robust dialects of Spain, France, Italy or China. Unless you’re a professional linguist, chances are you won’t recognize most if not all of them. But their regional dishes are familiar to any of us who pay attention to what and where we eat. They act as reliable cultural ID cards even when they’re only indifferently executed. 
    It wasn’t always that way, any more than it was always the case that people identified themselves primarily by their national identity. Five hundred years ago, for instance, you’d have had a very difficult time determining what Western European country you were in from the meal that was set before you, and that holds true for most of human history prior to the Renaissance. Sure, you could identify your host’s social estate and status. If your host was poor, you might expect bread, cheese, salted meat or fish; if he was wealthy, endless game meats bathed in sauces rich with Asian spices imported through the Near East. Maybe you could tell if you were in northern or southern Europe by the use of olive oil over butter. If you were very clever, you might recognize the local variety of cheese. But that was it: rich people all over Europe ate essentially the same way, as did the poor. In the winter, rich and poor alike were reduced to eating preserved flesh. The country and culture of origin hardly entered it into the equation. Several centuries after Dante, after the construction of the leaning tower of Pisa and the Duomo of Florence, Italians had yet to start eating pasta. Ask yourself this: Could it really be said to be Italy at all if there was no pasta on the menu? 
    Cooking evolves and changes with history, of course. But more than that, because changes in trade routes, wars, alliances, technological and scientific progress, agricultural policies, fashion and the arts all affect the way we shop and cook, the kitchen may often be the very first place where important historical developments are felt. After Atlantic and Pacific trade routes were opened up in the sixteenth century, for instance, one of the very first casualties was the Venetian monopoly on spices. As the prices for such exotic seasonings as cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cloves fell, they ceased to be indicators of status and fell out of fashion. Long before most people came to see that their universe had been changed forever by the discovery of the New World, chefs all over Europe had felt the seismic shift and responded to it with far more creativity and agility than the politicians and diplomats. 
    We’ve experienced such a sea change in our own lifetimes. Just think of the difference between what the phrase “American food” meant thirty or forty years ago and what it means today. At best, when people spoke of American cooking back then, they were referring to regional idioms that rarely strayed beyond the pages of the church ladies’ community cookbook; at worst, and more likely, they meant frozen tv dinners, processed cheese, canned ravioli and Coca Cola. Today, the rediscovery of quintessential American ingredients; the reborn emphasis on freshness, seasonality and locality; and a certain Puritan insistence on simplicity of presentation are all hallmarks of our proud new national cuisine. 
    These changes are not insignificant and they are most certainly not about the finicky eating habits of some ill-defined cultural elite. On the contrary, they reflect the deepest shifts in geopolitics, demographics, economic globalization and communications technologies; they reflect the United States’ shifting perception of itself in the world, our fear of urban sprawl, the relationships between our native-born and immigrant communities, our disgust with our polluted natural resources; they reflect the falling value of the dollar and the rising cost of keeping the baby boom generation healthy; they reflect the end of the Cold War and the continued subsidization of American corn and soy farmers; they reflect the Internet’s atomization of society into distinct, identifiable sub-niches and sub-markets, each of which can now be catered to with laser precision. And while our elected officials continued to mouth the clichés of obsolete political alignments, our chefs felt the changes coming decades ago, almost at the very moment they arose, and painted for us a lovely, irresistible picture of the future as it could be. That is why culinary history is so important, and that is the historical drama that we’re going to explore in the Podcast History of Cooking. 
    When we think of the history of Western Civilization, we tend to picture a straight line that somehow links our contemporary world directly to a cultural genesis somewhere in the Fertile Crescent or the Eastern Mediterranean. That is essentially true from Norway to Spain, Poland to Greece, and equally true for Christians, Muslims and Jews. We know the Romans were cruel and ate dormice, yet we feel a kinship with their early Republican virtues. We know that the Greeks’ democracy was not exactly universal, yet we continue to use the same word they used for our form of government, as if it were a baton that had been handed down to us. As far back as Hammurabi the law-giver, we find inspiration in the antecedents we claim for ourselves and infer longevity for our so-called immutable inner nature. 
    It’s a useful fiction shot through with glimmers of truth, and historians have latched onto it to give a kind of narrative impetus to the history of the Western World. This is where we began; this is where we are; this is how we got here. It’s all one story. It’s not a very nuanced story, true, but it’s extremely helpful when we want to step back and see the big picture. And for better or for worse, it’s the story you’ll be hearing in this Podcast History. It’s the story of the evolution of cooking in the Western World, from Babylon to Alice Waters, passing through Mesopotamia, the Persian empire and the ancient Middle East, Greece and its colonies, Italy, the Roman Empire, the barbarian invasions, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the voyages of discovery, the contributions of the New World, the emergence of national cuisines in France, Italy, England and others, the industrial revolution, the apotheosis of French cuisine, colonialism, and the rise of the United States. 
    The first thing you’ll need to decide in a history of cooking is what, exactly, you mean by “cooking.” Is cooking the application of heat to raw food, or is it the effectuation of any chemical change in food by any means? The ancients preserved meat and eggs by burying them underground to dry. Is that cooking? We still use salt, dry wind, smoke and canning to preserve our foods – is that cooking? What about pouring cold milk on breakfast cereal, brewing beer and making wine? 
    For the sake of coherence and narrative, we’re going to have to define cooking quite narrowly. For our purposes, it will be an action requiring the conjunction of four elements: ingredients, a heat source, a medium and a technique. In other words, food, fire, frying pan and a minimal understanding of how to combine them usefully. When those four elements are brought together in a thoughtful, predetermined manner, they create a recipe, and that is cooking. By this definition, boiling an egg or making a cup of tea is cooking, but salting a herring is not; baking bread and boiling fruit for jam is cooking, but making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich isn’t. Some people will find cause to argue with this definition, and that’s fine, but the point is to focus on cooking as a cultural activity, as distinct from the scientific, economic, and logistical activities that make it possible. 
    There’s one more point I’d like to bring home before we launch into the substance of our historical investigation. We have to understand history not just as the story of how our differences have separated us in the past or brought us together in cooperation or dispute; history is just as equally the story of our shared ideals, aspirations and delusions, the common thread of human nature and folly that unites us vertically with our ancestors and descendants, and horizontally with our contemporaries. That holds just as true for the history of cooking as it does for political history. We have so much more in common with our ancestors – even our most distant ancestors at the dawn of civilization – than we can grasp or care to acknowledge. That is especially true when it comes to what we eat. As we’ll see in the very first episode of the Podcast History, the differences between what we eat today and what our hunting and gathering forebears ate 20,000 years ago are much less significant than the similarities. It’s the smallest of leaps from your iPod to their campfire, and I hope you’ll take it with me. Because if we can understand something about them as they engage in one of the very first activities that distinguished humans from the rest of the animal world – that is, cooking our food – then maybe we can understand a little something about ourselves.

Download | Duration: 00:12:28