Meanwhile, another woman can be seen kneading a much larger piece of dough. She leans over a table, pressing and stretching it out. The finished dough is presumably destined for the bakery in an adjacent picture. Here a foreman stands holding a threateningly pointy-ended staff while he encourages his workers. Below him a man on his knees kneads dough and meekly says: ‘I do as you wish, I am hard at work.’ His co-worker carries some dough in a reddish-brown mould towards a hearth where another pokes at the flames. While others are kneading dough by both treading or mixing it by hand, a final character can be seen turning a partially cooked piece of bread, which has turned brown in the hot ashes.
Werner Forman Archive
Egyptian bread-making depicted in a painting on the wall of Senet’s tomb in Luxor.
Bread made in this way was a staple food of ancient Egypt. The world’s earliest loaves show how people had progressed in agriculture and in the techniques of milling, leavening and baking, although we can’t be sure when they learnt to use yeast to help the dough rise and produce a lighter loaf.
It’s likely that the products of this early baking were a little like modern-day pitta bread. A set of beer-making scenes that exist in the same passageway suggests ancient Egyptians were using yeast. It’s needed to turn the sugar to alcohol and even if it was incorporated in its natural state, from yeast spores in the air, it was used at some point in ancient Egypt. Other hieroglyphs in tombs near Luxor show bread being left to rise near ovens, although the detailed scenes of grain being turned to dough in Senet’s tomb do not include this part of the process. Perhaps some dough that had been left for a day rose a little due to the presence of air-borne yeast and the baker enjoyed the resulting, fluffier loaf. (Although it is safe to assume that at that time he would not have understood the science behind the process – fermentation expanding the gluten proteins in the flour and causing the dough to expand.)
As bread- and beer-making often occurred in tandem, it could be, whether by accident or experiment, that some fermented brewing liquor was added to the dough. However, it did occur and using starter doughs (a soft lump from the previous day added to the next morning’s batch) became common practice. The regular use of yeast to make leavened bread is evident, at least, from the Bible – Exodus 12: 34 and 39, to be precise. As the Israelites fled from captivity in Egypt, ‘the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading troughs being bound up in their clothes upon their shoulders’. The bread they made subsequently, as Exodus goes on to recount, was not a nice, airy country-style loaf: ‘And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough which they brought forth out of Egypt, for it was not leavened; because they were thrust out of Egypt, and could not tarry, neither had they prepared for themselves any victual.’
Records show that in addition to bread, the ancient Egyptians enjoyed a diet rich in fruit, vegetables and poultry. They used herbs, from cumin to fenugreek, and that scenes of domestic cooking were considered important for the afterlife confirms that it was as vital a part of everyday life then as it is now.
circa 1700 BC
AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: The Babylonian Collection
Recipe 23, tablet A, 21 kinds of meat broth and four kinds of vegetable broth. Kanasu Broth. Leg of mutton is used. Prepare water add fat. Samidu; coriander; cumin; and kanasu. Assemble all the ingredients in the cooking vessel, and sprinkle with crushed garlic. Then blend into the pot suhutinnu and mint.
Does the average Iraqi wandering the banks of the Tigris, munching on a minced meat kubbah, realise that he or she is treading a patch of land that 4,000 years ago saw the birth of haute cuisine?
While the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt developed some of the rudiments of cooking, Mesopotamia, which occupied the patch between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, became a gastronomically advanced civilisation. The land was fertile, more fertile than today. Indeed, the people had an extraordinarily diverse diet that featured many kinds of vegetable, including leeks, shallots, garlic, rocket, chickpeas, lentils, lettuce, peas, figs, pomegranates and much more. They ate a huge diversity of cheese, up to 300 different kinds of bread and an amazing variety of soup. A Mesopotamian’s supper of bread, soup and cheese might be rather more sophisticated than our own.
Yale Babylonian Collection
Recipe for Kanasu broth carved on a clay tablet.
We know all this from detailed records. But while today you might sketch out a recipe on a notepad, publish it in a book, put it online or on an iPhone app, in those days it was a rather more laborious process. Firstly, assuming you were a member of the rarefied and literate professional classes, you made a clay tablet, then, presumably while it was still wet, with a blunt reed stylus you slowly carved out your recipe in Akkadian cuneiform, an ancient pictorial precursor of alphabetic writing.
Many such stone tablets have lasted and survived more in less intact. At the New England University of Yale, a large number of tablets are stored as part of its Babylonian Collection, among some 40,000 artefacts acquired by the university in 1933. In an effort to preserve the tablets further, the curators had them baked and then had them copied. For many years it was assumed that the inscriptions were obscure pharmaceutical formulas but then French Assyriologist Jean Bottéro took a closer look, reporting his findings in 2004.
Focusing initially on three cracked, caramel-coloured tablets, he managed to decipher the code and on reading them discovered that they weren’t complicated equations, just recipes. The tablets revealed a rich variety of cuisine, moreover, a sophisticated mix of skill and artistry and a wonderful breadth of ingredients. Among the tablets, on a piece of clay measuring just 12 by 16 centimetres, is the recipe for kanasu broth.
Kanasu, ancient wheat – not dissimilar to durum – was mixed into a lamb stew as a thickener. Think of it as lamb casserole cooked with pearl barley. The recipe itself is brief, partly due to the time it would have taken to scratch it onto the clay and partly, as Bottéro believes, the recording of the dish constituted a kind of ritual. This wasn’t a recipe for the beginner, either: with no quantities or cooking times, it assumes a fair degree of culinary know-how.
The lamb stew is just one of twenty-one meat- and vegetable-based dishes, but it sounds a little tastier than some of the other recipes, such as one for braised turnips that begins: ‘Meat is not needed. Boil water. Throw fat in.’. Because many of the ingredients need some deciphering – samidu, for instance, was either semolina or fine white flour used for thickening, while suhutinnu was probably a root vegetable like a carrot or a parsnip – they can be hard to replicate in the modern kitchen. Indeed, having spent years deciphering the recipes, Bottéro – himself an accomplished cook – declared: ‘I would not wish such meals on any save my worst enemies.’ He may have been thinking of grasshoppers in a fermented sauce, which turns up in one of the tablets. By constrast, an editorial in the New Haven Register gave the thumbs up to Bottéro’s decoded recipe for kanasu broth, stating: ‘You can almost smell the 4,000-year-old leg of lamb bubbling in a sauce thick with mysterious Mesopotamian herbs.’.
While the dishes may not all be to the modern taste, the ingredients listed in the tablets are impressively varied, as are the various cooking techniques, suggesting that – given the number of tools required – these were dishes cooked in temples or palaces, rather than in the average home, in a mud hut, or cave, where equipment would have been rudimentary, to say the least. Recipes variously call for slicing, squeezing, pounding, steeping, shredding, marinating and straining. So even way back