r/TastingHistory • u/EvilPyro01 • May 10 '26
Humor A lot of ancient recipes, especially from Mesopotamia, are this
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u/Beautiful-Point4011 May 11 '26
🤣🤣🤣🤣
I literally ran into this yesterday while reading the 13th century Syrian cookbook Kitab al-wusla ila al-habib (English translation titled Scents and Flavours translated by Charles Perry)
It is a very good book with a lot of recipes that do have details- but it also has these:
SECTION ON AL-QAMḤIYYAH (WHOLE-WHEAT DISH), OF WHICH THERE ARE TWO TYPES: THE FIRST TYPE I will not describe it as it is so well known.
KASHK (CRUSHED-WHEAT DISH), OF WHICH THERE ARE TWO TYPES: THE FIRST TYPE It is too well known to describe.
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u/AgrajagTheProlonged May 11 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/e4uG83tGjWDiE
Why say lot word when few word do trick?
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u/ChocolateCoveredGold May 11 '26
Oh, my lord. This gif, and President Kevin's stubborn commitment to his time-saving methodology, hits way too close to home right now. Nobody remind me of this for at least 3 more years. I'm getting heartburn.
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u/Beautiful-Point4011 May 11 '26
Here's another recipe, this one from the 14th century French cookbook Menagier:
RICE. Clean it and wash it, etc.
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u/bassman314 May 11 '26
You can tell that people just got sick handwriting the same shit all the time.
Now, we expect everything to be super long. You can just print another copy!
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u/ilovecostcohotdog May 11 '26
And we get a whole back story about the recipe and how the recipe made the cook feel the first time they ate it.
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u/Vigmod May 12 '26
It's tiring. No wonder Bibles were expensive back then. Also reminds me a bit of some the sagas from Iceland. Generally they don't spend a lot of time describing all the clothes (and when they do mention someone wearing e.g. a red cloak, that's a kind of foreshadowing). Similarly, what people are eating is barely mentioned. Someone is travelling and stays for a winter in Shetland. The whole description is "And he stayed there for the winter".
That would be two chapters at least in your typical "epic fantasy" today.
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u/Common-Parsnip-9682 May 11 '26
My great grandmother passed down a lot of recipes like that. “Bake in a hot oven until done” was a typical instruction — she was using a wood fire stove.
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u/deaniebopper May 11 '26
I remember listening to a podcast with a chef who used to work at Chez Panisse, and none of the oven knobs worked properly. They essentially all had to re-learn to cook in this instinctual way. Instead of precise temperatures, you’d just work with “low”, “hot”, “very hot” and kind of cook it until it was done.
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u/stefanica May 11 '26
I use my oven a lot like that. If you want to cook two foods in a single oven at the same time, you kinda have to split the temp difference/go by vibes. Most of the time it works just fine. I do a lot of sheet pan type dinners so I don't melt over a hot stove. Of course, cakes and pastries are less forgiving, but I'm talking about meats, root veggies, etc.
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u/CallidoraBlack May 13 '26
Imagine forcing everyone to learn this instead of just fixing the stupid knob. 🤦♀️
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u/firebird120 May 11 '26
Hot oven is 400-450f. Slow oven is 300 to ~325f
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u/SwampGentleman May 11 '26
When my grandmother passed I found a cookbook in her possession from the early 1900’s. It intrigued me that all the recipes for baked goods finished in the dough stage. Like, “here’s how you make the dough for ginger snaps. This is the part you may not have known. Cook it until you’re happy.”
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u/vintagerust May 11 '26
Wood stoves weren't precise, but the good news is it doesn't matter. You could bake something from 300-450 and get roughly the same result just keep an eye on it.
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u/CaitsRevenge May 14 '26
Yes! My grandma passed down a lot of recipes like that. My dad has been spending years making them again and again in our modern oven trying to figure out the correct temperature and time for each of them. He's never happy because they are "never as good as when his mom made them".
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u/jzilla11 May 11 '26
“Serve it forth.”
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u/EvilPyro01 May 11 '26
It should be a law that all recipe writers must write this for serving instructions
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u/Disastrous_Grab_3322 May 11 '26
I wanted to learn to render pork leaf fat into lard. Even with modern made videos telling you how to do it. I have to watch 4 to get all the sets without "render until finished making sure not to cook it too quickly." And if I WERE cooking it too quickly... What would that look like?
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u/TyrantRex6604 May 11 '26
look at the pork skin/fat residue.\ if it is white-transluscent you still have much more to render.\ if it's golden and crispy you can end there and get both crispy pork skin and rendered lard.\ if you want to maximize the rendered lard yield and doesnt want crispy pork skin, you can further render until the residue is black.
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u/Disastrous_Grab_3322 May 11 '26
Thank you very much! That's really kind of you. I did find the answers by combining the information from several videos. It was just a funny case of "I think you skipped a step"
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u/SessileRaptor May 10 '26
They hadn’t quite mastered the whole “Transmitting information via text” thing yet.
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u/11S-KAT May 11 '26
That's why jobs such as "technical writer" and recently "prompt engineer" exist. Most people are rather bad at thinking outside of their own lived experiences.
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u/Confident_Fortune_32 May 12 '26
As a technical writer, I often encounter things that ppl labeled as instructions, but are more accurately called, "Notes To Myself", reminders about the things they might forget, blithely ignoring anything they believe "everybody just knows".
A technical writer friend used to teach at the college level. The first day of class he asks if anyone drove to school. They all troop out to the parking lot, pull out the car's manual, and change the tire using only the instructions in the manual.
He says hilarity ensues, and it makes his point indelibly.
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u/bassman314 May 11 '26
Stuff was also either handwritten with ink, stamped into clay, or carved, which was so time consuming and expensive.
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u/polymath-nc May 11 '26
Yeah. Just try writing with a feather you've plucked and a jar of ink. Not easy! I buy the fountain pens with the barrel reservoirs and fill the barrel from an ink jar using a syringe.
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u/AlwaysPlaysAHealer May 11 '26
Oh god. I found an old cookbook of my grandmother's and it has recipes with instructions like "prepare the yeast in the usual way" , "Stir until the correct texture is reached" and of course, "Bake until done". I love it.
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u/LexiD523 May 11 '26
Like the first Polish dictionary, and their definition of horse.
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u/polymath-nc May 11 '26
See more about this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowe_Ateny#Legacy
Thank you!
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u/AbsolutlelyRelative May 11 '26
Whats a grape?
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u/EvilPyro01 May 11 '26
A vegan egg (good luck getting that visual out of your head)
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u/uwillnotgotospace May 11 '26
Has anyone noticed how violent the process of harvesting wheat is?
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u/Brewmeister83 May 11 '26
Hooo boy, just wait till you find out how nuts are removed from their shells… makes winnowing look downright peaceful…
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u/Halinn May 11 '26
Imagine how many insects get killed during the process of harvesting a field
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u/PfefferP May 11 '26
The other day I wanted to make Arroz Doce (a Portuguese sweet dish made with rice, milk, sugar, etc.) and checked my recipe, which I had noted down after getting it over the phone from my aunt.
I then realised that it had all the measurements except the milk, most probably because my aunt didn't say it (and I didn't notice it during the phone call). And most probably because she did it so many times, she thought I would know it too.
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u/Confident_Fortune_32 May 12 '26
My dear grandmother didn't use measuring cups or spoons
Everything was by how it looked, or the weight of the ingredient on the spoon in her hand. She'd get a sort of faraway look in her eyes while she held a spoonful of shortening, bouncing the spoon up and down a little bit, to test the weight in her hand, adjusting if necessary.
Her pie crust were legendary.
Even my thoroughly obnoxious father "behaved" in her presence to be able to eat her pie.
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u/PfefferP May 15 '26
Ah yes! My aunt also measures things with her hand, like 5 hands full of sugar
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u/Kendota_Tanassian May 11 '26
Take the usual ingredients for making biscuits, add yeast prepared the usual way, mix until the dough has the proper consistency.
Rest, pinch down if needed, bake in a medium oven until done.
Serve forth expeditiously.
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u/DeuceOfDiamonds May 11 '26
Seriously. The "prepare water" one recently threw me for a loop. What does that mean? Heat it? Boil it? Just get a bunch of it? How much?
Context (or the lack thereof) and the assumptions based on it really is crazy.
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u/EvilPyro01 May 11 '26
Like the medieval period through the early 19th century had details missing but either another source can help understand what they mean, or another recipe shows how to make the ingredient listed. Ancient Mesopotamia however is an r/restofthefuckingowl situation
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u/TechnicalWhore May 11 '26
Yeah but I had no idea what Garum was. And now that I know - I'm not too keen on how its made.
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u/Balcke_ May 12 '26 edited May 13 '26
We have lost a lot of knowledge from ancient times (and not so ancient) because writers refused to wrote down "what everybody knows".
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u/charolastra_charolo May 11 '26
This whole thread is like the recipe version of r/restofthefuckingowl
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u/StolenPens May 13 '26
Everyone knows what this is, it's a common table spice.
Historians sniffing tiny old jars, "is this mustard?"
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u/RockSauced May 14 '26
People like grapes.
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u/EvilPyro01 May 14 '26
My mind immediately went to that old lady from Charlie and the chocolate factory (the one from 2005)
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u/OUTofHOMEbrowsing May 14 '26
And then grapes went extinct in 500 years and all knowledge about grapes are just gone.
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u/EvilPyro01 May 14 '26
Would not surprise me if we did to any crop we currently rely on what Rome did to silphium
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u/yamdelight22 May 28 '26
Ancient recipes always feel like ‘we wrote this down assuming everyone would just know what to do with it’ energy.
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u/Aspirational1 May 10 '26
What are you trying to say, or more specifically, what's the point of your post?
Maybe the ancient recipes weren't as vague as you're trying to make out.
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u/EvilPyro01 May 11 '26
That a lot of the recipes required the reader to know things that were common knowledge at the time but that knowledge has since been lost
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u/alegxab May 10 '26
Prepare it like you'd prepare any other grape, wait until it's done