Close to a recipe on Tasting History... https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/babylonianlambstew
Our current favorite dinner watching along with Alton Brown.
Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
21–30 of 149 posts
Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
#22I dislike lamb but the rest sounds great. Maybe I could sub beef.
Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
#23How's the presentation? Just imagining it, it would seem that the meet would have a weird color.
It looks great. When I first saw it, I thought "this color can't be beet"
Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
#24Close to a recipe on Tasting History... https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/babylonianlambstew Our current favorite dinner watching along with Alton Brown.
I've made this Roman recipe probably a dozen times and everyone who's tried it really likes it [1].
The strange ingredients are garum [2] and asafoetida [3]. The former is just a fish sauce, so that's not hard to substitute, but you have to find asafoetida on the Internet or at an Indian food store.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y
Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
#25I think the taste of their beer would have been much different from what we drink today?
Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
#26I think the taste of their beer would have been much different from what we drink today?
They certainly didn't use hops!
Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
#27I'm reading Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones' Babylon - The Biography of a Metropolis which just recently came out, and that's how I ended up hearing about Yale's culinary adventures.
The book, btw, is kind of breezy in style and 'he of many LLs in his name' (Lālu-mullālu in Akkadian as suggested by my friendly AI) uses a lot of contemporary pop (nerdy) references to carry the narrative, yet very engaging and am learning a lot about this fabled city (and civilization).
It sets certain records straight ...
Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
#28I think the taste of their beer would have been much different from what we drink today?
Nutty, aromatic, yeasty, slightly sour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK4DMt8ARyU
Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vast majority of Africans aren't hunter-gatherers living in mud huts. They have actual cities with highways and skyscrapers and everything.
I'm not arguing for what is a majority. I'm talking about the large portions of Africa that still live in a hunter-gatherer situations in mud huts.
Traveling overland across Africa will swiftly disabuse you of the notion that hunter/gatherer lifestyles make up any "large portion" of the continent's population. It would hardly even be feasible in the face of massive deforestation and population boom.
Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
#30Apparently their beets looked the same as ours: > The kind of beets used in such an ancient recipe should not be different from the beets we use today, even in name. We read in Dictionary of Assyrian Botany (by Campbell Thompson, 1948) that in the ancient Mesopotamian region it was called ‘shumundar,’ it was as red as blood, and has a spinning-top shape (pp. 49, 51).
The recipe is also similar to Hamedh [0], a delicacy in Iraqi and Baghdadi Jewish households. The only major difference is the addition of tomatoes thanks to the Columbian Exchange, and rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet. On that note, in Arabic, Farsi, and Hindustani the word for Tomato is essentially shared ( tumatar / tamatimu ) with the English word "tomato". But anyhow, a lot…
Actually, in Persian, tomato is literally translated as “western plum”. This is common in our language as we usually say “western” or “foreign” as a prefix to many things that were introduced to Iran (strawberries, sit-style toilets, etc)