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Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)

babylonian-collection.yale.edu

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Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)

#111

Post by bwv848 »

dotancohen wrote: post #57
thrdbndndn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese does the same thing, using prefixes like 西 (western), 番 (foreign), and 洋 (foreign) for introduced items. For tomatoes, interestingly, it has two common names that follow this pattern: 西紅柿, literally translated as "Western Red Persimmon", and 番茄, literally translated as "Foreign Eggplant". Other produce examples include 番薯 (Foreign Yam) for sweet potato, 西瓜 (Western Melon) for watermelon, 洋蔥 (Foreign Onion) fo…

The recorded English-language etymology for "ketchup" suggests that the word comes from one of the Chinese dialect's word for tomato. Do you have any idea which Chinese word sounds like ketchup?

茄ke2 汁zap1, but if I remember it correctly, Dan Jurafsky believes it is from 喼git1 汁zap1, worcestershire sauce

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iYwUh1Hdho

Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)

#112

Post by rsynnott »

dyauspitr wrote: post #95
hulitu wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should visit Europe.

I was there for two months a month ago. Is it a lot of beef? I couldn’t really tell I remember a lot of pork and fish and chicken.

I’m not sure that it’s dominant anywhere other than Greece and the Balkans, but lamb would be quite popular in a lot of European countries. Pretty much anywhere on the Mediterranean, plus Ireland and Britain, at least.

I’m not sure there’s anywhere in Europe where it would be as unusual as it is in the US (where it definitely does seem to be seen as kinda vaguely exotic.)

Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)

#113

Post by avadodin »

dotancohen wrote: post #104
taneliv wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly a Chinese dialect, but Vietnamese calls tomatoes "cà chua": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/c%C3%A0_chua .

Are the Vietnamese and Chinese languages related? Or perhaps one of the two cultures was introduced to that fruit by the other, and thus preserved the name?

Not related at all in recent history and I have no insight on the etymology links but Vietnamese used to be written in a mix of original Vietnamese Chinese-style characters before they changed to a Latin alphabet with Colonialism and Communism so there was definitely contact.

Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)

#115

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #107
thaumasiotes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the sheep were harvested for wool, but not by shearing. When they shed, we picked the shed wool from them. Modern sheep grow their wool continuously, but that took a while to breed in.

> Modern sheep grow their wool continuously, but that took a while to breed in. No they don't. In the summer their wool starts to grow out much thinner, like maybe a quarter as thick - it's really noticeable. This gives what's called a "rise", a gap between the sheep's skin and the thicker coarser wool. Once that's high enough to get shears (or these days, machine clippers which are like a big beard trimmer) into you…

I thought animal farming in general is an arcane science.

My friends have goats but they aren't farmers and they haven't got a clue how to care for them. The females sometimes are left with milk in their breasts after their young are weaned and one of my friends will get anxious about that and ask us to help her milk them. It's impossible. You can't milk a goat that doesn't want to be milked. If you push them too hard they lie down so you can't reach their teats and that's that unless you want to have three people lifting the goat up and another one trying to milk her while she squirms and kicks. I don't trust the milk either. Once in a while they succeed in milking a goat and when I tried the milk (after boiling it) it was sort of gritty, like it was mixed with sand. It was not impurities from the environment because I filtered it through a muslin so I think the animal may have had some infection like a mastitis or something that affected the milk's texture.

I bet farmers know exactly what to do about all that or probably they know how to get the animals used to milking when they're still young so that the won't resist it that much. I've watched videos of goats being milked and it looks almost effortless when a pump is used. The goats just line up in their feeding trays and then someone walks up to them from behind, pumps out their tits and moves to the next one, bish bash bosh. My friends don't even have a dedicated structure to feed the goats, we just throw hay for them on the ground so they end up fighting.

My friends really have no idea how to care for the goats, it's rather sad. The owner of the farm has even said he wants to get "wild" goats that don't need to be cared for. By that he means a herd of goats that have gone feral and roam the hills in a village nearby. He thinks because nobody actively cares for them and the herd persists that must mean the goats are somehow self-sufficient. I think that's a big misunderstanding. Domesticated animals need a lot of care one way or another.

I think I'd prefer to have sheep though, if I had animals. Sheep look much nicer than goats.

Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)

#116

Post by rsynnott »

jfjdkdkdkd wrote: post #15
krapp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Africa comprises an entire continent. There are not large portions of it (or "large swaths") where people still live as hunter-gatherers living in mud huts, for any reasonable definition of "large portion."

its sad that your ideology allows you to tell lies without an oz of shame.

… Eh? Even by the most generous possible definitions (including people who are primarily hunter gatherer but interact with the local economy to some extent), there are only on the order of tens of thousands of hunter gatherers today, worldwide.

As for mud huts, still commonly used in some places; there’s nothing particularly wrong with mud/earth construction if it works in your local climate.

Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)

#117

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

xattt wrote: post #47
amir_karbasi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

As an aside, tomatoes are golden apples (pomodoro), and oranges are Chinese apples (Apfelsin) in some languages. A lot of cultures appear to name botanicals using apples or, in GP’s context, stone fruit as “reference” points.

Wait 'till you hear about melon - "μήλον" i.e. "apple" in Greek.

Melon, watermelon, pomelo, etc. The ancient Greeks themselves started that with the "golden apples of the Hesperides" a.k.a. oranges.

I guess any fruit people didn't know how to call was ... some kind of apple.

Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)

#118

Post by harel »

ragazzina wrote: post #109
harel wrote: post #44

Coincidentally this book which has been a labour of love of his creator is going into print this week: https://www.tableofgods.com It's quite expensive though, but it does look amazing.

The fact that they promote the preorder of a 200$ book without showing even a single page is crazy.

They were sending pages to the people on the kickstarter list, effectively crowd sourcing recipe testing. That was quite clever I thought. And their socials keep showing videos of the actual recipies etc. This is a legit book. It's just a shame that it carries that price tag. I could do with a less "beautiful" version if it was reasonably priced. Maybe a future edition.

Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)

#119

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

rsynnott wrote: post #112
dyauspitr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there for two months a month ago. Is it a lot of beef? I couldn’t really tell I remember a lot of pork and fish and chicken.

I’m not sure that it’s dominant anywhere other than Greece and the Balkans, but lamb would be quite popular in a lot of European countries. Pretty much anywhere on the Mediterranean, plus Ireland and Britain, at least. I’m not sure there’s anywhere in Europe where it would be as unusual as it is in the US (where it definitely does seem to be seen as kinda vaguely exotic.)

I'd say that in Greece the dominant meats are pork and chicken. That's the main meat in all the grill houses and the meat in gyros and souvlaki. Lamb is beloved but eaten more rarely, particularly in religious feasts, especially Easter Sunday where the tradition is to put a lamb on a spit and eat everything off it down to the bones (except the entrails that are made in a special soup to end Lent, or various sweet meat skewers like kokoretsi, gardoumba, splinandero, etc). It's also more expensive than pork and chicken so it tends to be left for special dinners at home.

But, honestly, nothing beats a nice pilafi with lamb, with garlic wedges and slowly cooked until the meat falls off the bone.

Re: Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)

#120

Post by Agentlien »

xattt wrote: post #47
amir_karbasi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

As an aside, tomatoes are golden apples (pomodoro), and oranges are Chinese apples (Apfelsin) in some languages. A lot of cultures appear to name botanicals using apples or, in GP’s context, stone fruit as “reference” points.

Everything is an apple, it seems. You also have earth apples (pomme de terre in French, aardappel in Dutch) for potatoes, grenade apples (pomegranate in English, granatäpple in Swedish, ...), pineapple, ...
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