Tuh'u Beet Broth

Dish: Tuh'u Beet Broth

Country of Origin: Babylon, Mesopotmia (modern day Iraq)

Year: Approximately 1600 BCE

Source: Yale Culinary Tablets, Tablet A; translation through The Oldest Cuisine in the World by Jean Bottero.

This is it: the oldest recipe I could find. It was written down on a cuneiform tablet more than 3600 years ago in southern Mesopotamia. The tablet is the first in a series of three, currently being held at Yale University: the first two together contain about thirty-two recipes; the third is mostly illegible.

I thought the gruel and the squid recipes were vague, but they're nothing compared to the ones on these tablets. Once again, the quantities of the ingredients are not listed. On top of that, some of the words have been worn off of the tablet (marked by brackets in translation). Others are untranslatable (transcribed phonetically in translation). Take, for example, this recipe for "Meat Broth":

Meat broth. Meat is used. Prepare water; add fat [ ], mashed leek and garlic, and a corresponding amount of raw suhutinnu.

Really? Meat is used in the meat broth? What kind of meat? What kind of fat? What is missing in the eroded section? What the hell is suhutinnu? How do you cook it? And on, and on, and on. The tablets have no asnwers. Some of the recipes have more descriptive directions, such as "To Prepare a Bird Slaughtered for a timru Ceremony," but the previously mentioned vagaries remain. Also, I think we can all agree that this is hardly the time of year for a timru ceremony.

Ultimately, I settled on a recipe that seemed mostly intact, that also uses a wide variety of ingredients. The translation follows:

Tuh'u Beet Broth. Lamb meat is used (?). Prepare water; add fat. Peel the vegetables. Add salt; beer; onion; arugula; coriander; samidu; cumin, and the beets. Assemble all the ingrediets in the cooking vessel and add mashed leeks and garlic. Sprinkle the cooked mixture with coriander, and suhutinnu.

SUBSTITUTIONS AND NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

1) Lamb meat is used (?): Lamb meat is used (!). No time to second guess the translator here; I'm using lamb and I'm going to be excited about it.

2) Fat: Fat appears in just about every recipe, and is likely some kind of animal fat. I don't have lard on hand, so I used butter instead, and didn't trim the fat off of the lamb meat.

3) Beer: Beer was extremely important to the ancient world. More than just a source of alcohol, beer was a method of keeping grain from spoiling for long periods of time. I was not sure what beer to use to approximate best the beer of yesteryear. Hops was not used in beer at this time, so I tried to steer clear of pale ales and other distinctly hoppy beers. I also avoided lagers, since these emerged from a strain of yeast sometime around the Holy Roman Empire. Beers in ancient Mesopotamia were often made by fermenting bread, so I imagined them to be pretty thick (though in retrospect, I think this is faulty logic). Porter, being a dark ale, seemed like a good choice. It may not be the best substitute, but it was my best guess when I was shopping.

4) Samidu and Suhutinnu: Scholars don't know what these words are. They know it was some kind of spice or seasoning. Here my substitutes are wild guesses based on spices that a frequently used in middle-eastern cooking today, but not already found in this particular recipe. I used allspice for samidu and turmeric for suhutinnu.

5) Ambiguous beets, cumin, and coriander: Beets could refer to beet root or beet stalk, cumin to seeds or ground cumin, and coriander could mean coriander seeds, or cilantro. I used all of them to cover my bases.

6) A note about onions: Ancient Mesopotamians loved onions. You'll notice this recipe alone contains onions, leeks, and garlic. I had a feeling that this was going to be a stinky dish (but was pleased to find that it wasn't).

COOKING

I had a lot of decisions to make about how to go about preparing this dish. First, I had to decide how much of each ingredient to use. I made some more arbitrary choices, starting with the amount of lamb to use. DECISION: a pound and a half because that's how much was in the package I bought. I built my other ingredients around the lamb, basing it on a a very unscientific "does this look right" system. DECISIONS! Two leeks, one onions, six cloves of garlic, spices to taste. I settled on three beets, which was maybe one beet more than I needed, but I figured it's BEET broth, and if there's any place to splurge, it's beets. All this, basically, because I felt like it.

Once that was settled I had to figure out just how I wanted to cook it. The directions are a little confusing in that they require I start "adding" ingredients to my "prepared water" before "combining" everything in my "cooking vessel." If that's the case what was I adding them to before putting them in the cooking vessel? And wait a minute, how do I prepare the water? And I hope these peeled vegetables just refer to the beet root, because I didn't get anything else. The directions, which first seemed so clear, became more confusing, the more I looked at them, so I developed a strategy.

I broke down my ingredients and saw that I had meat, tough vegetables that take a long time to cook (beets, beet stalks, onions, leeks), and soft leafy vegetables (arugula, beet leaves) that take only a few minutes. With this in mind, I stewed, adding my ingredients little by little.

I browned my lamb with my "fat" (butter) for about 5 minutes.

If this looks weird, it's because these are the bony pieces. The other pieces

are on the plate in the background.

Then I softened my tough veggies (sans leeks) in the drippings for another 5 minutes,

Added beer, water, and spices and let it all stew together.

Despite its appearance, this is not a handful of twigs in a pot of blood.

At this point I began to get a sinking feeling that this was all going to end horribly. I was relying too much on random guesses and uncertainties, and not enough on what I knew would work. Every stir in the pot clanged around tough bones and stiff stalks. After a while, though, a great smell began wafting out of the pot. Really, just an awesome, spicy, roast meat and vegetable smell. I took a peek inside, and -- hey! -- it looked like soup. Granted, it was a blood-red soup full of bones and weird looking stalks, but it was soup.

After about a half hour, I added the leeks and garlic (because the recipe specified to add these later). Twenty minutes after that, I added the leafy vegetables. Ten minutes later, dinner was served.

Garnished with cilantro, coriander, and turmeric.

THE TASTING

Disappointing. The broth didn't taste as good as it smelled. The biggest problem was a strange bitterness to the whole thing. I kept trying to place it, and kept settling on different culprits. It's the beet stalk, it's the beer, it's the gaminess of the lamb, it's the cumin seeds. Ultimately I decided that it was probably a combination. All these ingredients have a little bit of bitterness to them, and in this dish they melded together to make some kind of franken-bitter.

It was also VERY rich. A thick layer of oil pooled at the top as I ate. I'm not one to shy away from fatty foods; more often than not I'm the Paula Dean put-more-butter-in-it camp, but the fat didn't really incorporate into the dish, and it was a bit much to handle.

Adding more salt and spices to my individual bowl cut down on the bitterness, and made it much more palatable, but that couldn't get rid of the rich oiliness. I intend to skim off as much from left-overs as I can.

You don't have to look too closely to see the oil on top.

I don't want to create the impression that this was really bad -- it wasn't. The beet flavor paired with the lamb was a new and delicious combination for me, and though the aforementioned richness has its downsides, it feels very hearty, and would be great for keeping your energy up while toiling in the fields, or ruling an empire, or, y'know, building civilization. There's just a too-large gulf between the way it smelled and the way it tasted, and disappointment was inevitable.

Overall Consensus: Not bad, but not great either. Many of the bad parts of this dish were likely my fault and problems of proportion. I will probably eat most of leftovers, and experiment with different seasonings to highlight to good parts and downplay the bad.

Some things I might have done differently: use a lighter ale for the beer, and probably less beet stalk, or at least cut it into smaller pieces. Less cumin seeds and more salt. I probably wouldn't have cooked the bones in the soup either. I had hoped this would thicken it up, give it more flavor, and let me strip the last of the meat off, but more than anything else it just made the soup difficult to eat.

Final Grade: C