These Are the Oldest Recorded Recipes

Cuneiform tablet

Determining the oldest recipe in history seems like it would be tricky right from the outset — anyone who’s ever asked an older relative for a recipe knows that often, the ingredients and instructions for a favorite meal have never even been written down. Yet historians do have a fairly clear answer for what the oldest known written culinary recipes are, and they date back more than 3,700 years.

In 1911, Yale University purchased four clay tablets that had been unearthed from Mesopotamia, the ancient valley between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates (around modern-day Iraq). The tablets were inscribed in the cuneiform Akkadian language, and scholars estimate that three of them date back to around 1730 BCE. Since Akkadian is an extinct language, the actual content of the cuneiform was a mystery at the time the university acquired the tablets. It wasn’t until 1933 that any conclusions were made as to the contents of the script — and even then, the curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection misinterpreted the texts as recipes for medicinal remedies.

After studying the tablets in the 1940s, Assyriologist Mary Inda Hussey suggested that the scrolls contained culinary recipes, but her theory was mostly met with skepticism. Though Albrecht Goetze (one of Hussey’s contemporaries at Yale) tried deciphering the cuneiform as an introduction to one of Hussey’s works, it was never published, and translation languished until the 1980s. It was then that French Assyriologist (and haute cuisine chef) Jean Bottéro delved into the translation and confirmed what Hussey suspected: The tablets were inscribed with instructions for preparing food.

The cuneiform tablets didn’t contain just one recipe; one of the texts dated to around 1730 BCE had approximately 24 recipes for stews and broths. The other two featured fewer recipes, but written in more specific detail. Though the stones are damaged and truncated in parts, some of the stew recipes are intact in their entirety.

Bottéro determined that the stews were made from pigeon, mutton (or lamb), offal, turnips, and beets. There was also a poultry dish reminiscent of a chicken hand pie. Other dishes included meats such as stag, gazelle, young goat, squab, and tarru (another fowl of an unknown type). Bottéro wrote in the March 1985 issue of Biblical Archaeologist Magazine that the dishes “have revealed a cuisine of striking richness, refinement, sophistication and artistry, which is surprising from such an early period.” Still, he did not particularly enjoy the results when he tried cooking the recipes — though it’s unclear if cultural differences in tastes or a misinterpretation of technique played a role in his perception.

Cooks all over the world have since been working on adaptations of the historic recipes for the modern kitchen. In 2018, Harvard University scholar Gojko Barjamovic assembled an international team of culinary historians, food chemists, and cuneiform experts to refine Bottéro’s interpretations and further adapt the material based on an improved knowledge of the ingredients listed in the cuneiform script.

In 2019, the team published their updated interpretations of four of the tablet recipes in Lapham’s Quarterly: pašrūtum (translated to “unwinding”), a vegetarian stew; mû elamūtum (Elamite broth), a broth thickened with blood; mê puhādi (stew of lamb); and tuh’u (untranslatable), a leg of lamb and beet stew. They included translations from the original script and modern cookbook-style instructions written in more specific detail than the vaguer guidelines on the tablets. For anyone eager to try cooking some of the oldest recorded recipes in history, the full English translations can be found in the online archive of the Yale Babylonian Collection.