The Oldest Bread in the World – Was Fermented!

Oldest bread ever found from Çatalhöyük - Dates to 6600 BCE

A team of researchers from Anadolu University were excavating a bakery at the ancient city of Çatalhöyük, uncovered an artifact that has been identified as an unbaked loaf of bread from around 6600 BCE. Collaborating scientists detected a combination of wheat, barley, and pea seeds in the small, round loaf.  They also found that the loaf had been fermented, which preserved the starches, and made … Read more

Omani Kofta with Zucchini Sauce

Pucchini Sauce

After last month’s post about the Harappan jewelry found in a Bronze-age tomb in Oman, I wanted to share a delicious, modern Omani recipe from my collection with you. With summer’s abundance of zucchini and other squash, this is a great recipe for the grill, that will become one of your new favorites. Don’t be wary of the amount of herbs and spices in the … Read more

Harappan Jewelry Found in a Bronze-Age Omani Tomb

Harappan-style medallion with 8-pointed star

A bronze-age group tomb in the Dahwa region of Oman has yielded several pieces of silver jewelry with Harappan designs – indicating period trade between the Indus Valley people and the Umm al-Na culture which flourished in Oman from 2600-2000 BCE. The star medallion pictured above is one of the pieces recovered.  The site, which was excavated from 2013 – 2021, also produced remains of … Read more

Cod with Hannah Glasse’s 20-Year Catsup

Hannah Glasse's Catsup

Following up on a previous post on the Catchup to Keep 20 Years from Hannah Glasse’s 1770 edition of the Art of Cookery cookbook, is the meal we cooked a few days ago. I cracked the jars of catsup made with Glasse’s recipe and extensively filtered the liquid results. The result was a dark brown thin liquid with a strong, spicy odor. A couple of … Read more

A Taste of Pompeii

Fresco from Villa of Mysteries

Have ever wondered what sort of wine was served in an ancient Roman banquet?  You know, the kind made famous by TV dramas like I Claudius, where guests lounged for hours, picking at sumptuous delicacies and were entertained by musicians and artists from around the world?  Well now you can savor at least one wine reconstructed from ancient varietals in the area near Pompeii. The … Read more

What to do with Leftovers – Roman Style

Roman Pork with Apricots

I love dishes that blend meat and fruit. From Kyrgyz Beef with Apples to Bhutanese Fish with Mandarin Oranges, and Iranian Fish with Sour Cherries. As some ancient Mesopotamian archaeological assemblages of fish bones in proximity to crab apple cores suggest, humans have been pairing meat and fish with fruit for millennia. This is a Roman dish from the book credited to Apicius that blends … Read more

Catchup to Keep Twenty-Years

Over the weekend we made an interesting colonial American recipe. Its from a chapter for sea captains in Hannah Glasse’s 1770 edition of the Art of Cookery. Called Catchup to last Twenty Years, I suspect it is a proto-Worcestershire sauce, used to enhance the flavor of a wide variety of foods. Its made from anchovies, lots of ginger and shallots, mushrooms, mace, cloves and pepper, … Read more

Walnut: The King of Nuts

Walnuts with leaves

The common walnut is anything but common.  As stories tell us, its recent spread in Europe – through the ancient Grecian empire – happened in the early centuries BCE, when saplings were sent as gifts from a Persian or more probably an Achaemenid king. Hence the plant’s botanical name Juglans regia, the king’s nut, and its modern secondary name of Persian walnut. Later, the Romans … Read more

Silk Road Sites in Ancient Myanmar

French archaeologists have recently uncovered some assemblages on Myanmar’s lower Kra isthmus that shed light onto maritime Silk Road trading communities beginning in 400 BCE.  Given the geographic position of the isthmus between the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand, the Myanmar sites served as a stopover for Chinese and other east Asian traders headed west, and for Saudi, Persian, and Indian traders headed … Read more

Turkish Cevizli ARE Mesopotamian Mersu

Cevizli Incir

Sometimes, perception can be like a flash of lightning that changes the world forever. Once something is seen and understood, there is no unseeing or unknowing. A few years back, I had such a food-related epiphany. I was in Istanbul and went into one of the many great food and spice shops that line the streets for some Iranian saffron to take back to the … Read more

Great Szechuan in NYC’s Theatre District

We visit New York City a lot, usually to catch a Broadway play or two, or an exhibit at one of the city’s great museums. However much we love doing this, dining in the theatre district can be challenging. There are a lot of tourist traps – pricey places with truly awful food, a canteen or two (like Shake Shack or Pret a Manger), and … Read more

An International Diplomatic Row Over Mango Mousse

The world is waiting with baited breath to see the outcome of the inter-Korean Summit this Friday. Some are predicting an announcement that will end the 1950s Korean War, others are hoping for baby-steps towards peninsular reunification. Japan is angry about the dessert. Japan is angry about the dessert, because on top of a mango mousse decorated with fresh spring flowers sits a plaque depicting … Read more

Olympics, 이해, and More Delicious North Korean Food

Like Christmas Truce in World War I, the recent Olympics allowed for a temporary warming of relations between north and south Korea, between people still locked in a conflict that is decades old. To incorporate these events into the blog, I decided to cook up some more North Korean food, and headed off to the North Korean food website to peruse recipes. What the site … Read more

A New Yuan Shipwreck

A shipwreck dating from the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (1271-1368 ACE), has recently been analyzed by a team of archaeologists from the Shandong Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in China. The ship was found at a construction site in Heze City in 2010, and has been under study since that time. The ship itself was of wooden construction and measured over 21 meters long (over … Read more

Back in Black

I’ve been away. A long time as a wandering, mendicant scholar – or something like that. But now I’m back, and trying to get back to the blog and to the next volume of The Silk Road Gourmet. But good plans always get foiled by real life, so bear with me. While I’ve been away, I’ve found scholarly papers that have new Ancient Mesopotamian recipes … Read more

Miranda’s Lemon Pickle

We packed our first born off to college this past weekend. Even though we are still here with our son, the house is eerily quiet. My daughter was noisy enough to be twins or even triplets. No more loud music and singing her lungs out – she has practice rooms at college for that now. Despite her devil-may-care attitude and generally gregarious nature, she was … Read more