Determining what is the world's oldest cookbook depends on how you define cookbook, but a collection of cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia may fill the bill. The four clay tablets are dated to about 4,000 years ago, and contain dozens of recipes. The tablets are part of a collection of 45,000 artifacts stored at Yale University's Babylonian Collection, which has only recently been available to the public. Part of that effort is translating those old recipes. And trying them out.
Recreating those recipes is a challenge, because they contain ingredient lists but no specific instructions for preparing them. The inscribers must have assumed that cooks of the day knew what to do with them. That's not so easy 4,000 years later, but chefs have been working on them. Some of the dishes turned out pretty bland, but others are still tasty to this day. It must be a matter of the missing directions, since cuneiform writing wasn't as easy as typing on a computer, and only the best recipes would have been saved. The collection as a whole gives us a glimpse into the early days of agriculture, when grains and beer favored heavily in the recipes, and a variety of ingredients tell us about Babylonian trade practices. Read about these ancient recipes at Atlas Obscura, where you'll find a recipe for Babylonian Lamb Stew, with cooking. directions.
(Image credit: the Yale Peabody Museum)
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