Oldest written recipes

The oldest known culinary recipes to have been recorded appear on three clay tablets held in the Babylonian Collection at Yale University in Connecticut, USA. They are written in cuneiform, in the now-extinct Akkadian language developed by the Sumerian culture of Mesopotamia, which was centred in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the area occupied today by Iraq and Kuwait, and flourished between c. 4100 BCE and 1750 BCE; the recipe tablets are estimated to date from the end of their reign.

The tablets came into Yale’s collections in 1911 as part of a purchase of therapeutic texts. They were revealed to be cooking recipes, rather than pharmaceutical ones, only in the mid-1980s, when the French historian Jean Bottéro began studying them. Together the three tablets contain roughly 40 recipes, many for stews and broths using red meat and birds, as well as breads. The ingredient lists call for expensive ingredients, which suggests that the dishes were intended for elite diners. The cooking instructions themselves are vague, reflecting the fact that early written recipes served as an aide-mémoire for experienced cooks.