Customer Reviews

The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia

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This is a wonderful piece of scholarship, with a practical purpose. To my knowledge, this is a group of some of the earliest recipes ever translated. I have Apicius, and have done some of the recipes in it, but this takes culinary history back at least 1000 years earlier, and shows some fascinating parallels with both Middle Eastern/Persian cooking and Chinese. My only regrets or complaints are that we still do not know the translation behind some of the ingredients, which makes it difficult to actually try them, and that the clay tablets were damaged in places, which makes the list of ingredients incomplete in places. But the avenue of research is fascinating, and holds some real interesting keys to later cooking styles.

A must-have if culinary history interests you!

The Oldest Cuisine in the World is a fascinating book, presenting the interconnections between food and history in an amazing and clear style.

The book is beautifully printed, but unfortunately it appears that certain information have been omitted, and it is not clear if by mistake or for some other reasons.

For example at page 90 the ideogram for beer is supposed to be indicated on the second line; in fact the text states "highly evocative of the brewery!" and then leaves a space before the next sentence which I suppose should show the ideogram.

Again at page 129 in note 80 the ideograms for mouth and water are shown, but the sentence states "which through progressive stylization became.... (empty space).

I am now researching the original French edition of the book to find out the answer to this puzzle, as the U.S. printer (University of Chicago Press) did not reply to my question.

A scholarly research paper by a well known scientist on Assyrian history. Very curious and enlightining to find out what an ancient civilization ate and drank. Don't go looking for yummy treats however. Taste buds evolved hugely in 4,500 years.