[LifesStyle] He cooked recipes from 1700 and the photos of the dishes surprised on the networks

[Inkriql]

Just as thousands of people got excited about making their own sourdough bread early in the quarantine, a professor of conservation biology at the University of Cambridge, UK, chose to travel to humanity's remote past and cook some of the oldest recipes in the history of civilization dating back to 1750 BC.

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Bill Sutherland prepared four dishes from a Babylonian menu carved from a stone tablet that was discovered in the Middle East, in the Mesopotamian zone located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where today Iraq and parts of Kuwait, Iran, Turkey and Syria are located. The professor took the recipes from the book Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights of the Yale Babylonian Collection, edited by Angele Lassen, Eckart Frahm and Klaus Wagensonner.

To turn the task into a more interesting challenge, Sutherland published the dishes on Twitter through a thread that went viral and that so far has almost sixty thousand likes and almost twenty thousand other retweets.

"I blame the quarantine. For some reason, I decided to prepare Babylonian food with some of the oldest recipes that exist. It seems that they turned out well. I would say that it is the best Mesopotamian gastronomy that I tried in my life," he wrote in his account to start a thread of six tweets.

Like a good cook, the teacher not only uploaded photos of the ready food but also left comments about the taste and his own performance. One of the dishes was a lamb stew: "This was simple and delicious. We mixed the minced lamb with barley and made little cakes (which was made by my daughter Tessa). The mashed leek and the garlic topping gave it the spicy touch," wrote.

Following the directions in the book, Sutherland then prepared a dish called Tuh'u, which is structured on lamb shank meat with coriander, garlic, cumin, beets, onions, beer, leek, and sheep fat. About the result he wrote that "while it looked impressive and full of flavor, I think I should have cooked it longer so that the meat would disintegrate more."

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The third dish felt too simple and somewhat tasteless: "Sauté the leek and onion, and then put everything in the oven with sourdough breadcrumbs. It looks good but boring," explained the conservation biology expert.

"Elamite broth. I cheated and replaced the sheep's blood in the recipe with tomato sauce. Quirky but thick and tasty," he clarified in the publication of the fourth and last recipe.