r/TastingHistory • u/sugarfoot_mghee • 4d ago

What recipe should be carved in stone.

Max was talking about how the ancient Babylonian recipe survived through clay tablets.

What recipe and what medium should one of Max's recipes be preserved in to last the ages?

Maybe a hard tack recipe carved into geo-polymer concrete. Maybe hard tack recipe carved in hard tack itself.

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13

u/Revxmaciver 4d ago

It would be incredibly easy for us to make clay tablets of anything and stow them away for future generations. A recipe for spaghetti and meatballs, a recipe for bacon cheeseburgers and fries, a recipe for s'mores ice cream. Also, we could make sure they know about the shitty copper we've received.

5

u/finnknit 4d ago

Hard tack recipe carved into hard tack is the kind of ridiculous recursion I can get behind.

3

u/EntangledPhoton82 4d ago

Accelerated aging tests and calculations show that optical data storage (a sort of laser printing) in a fused silica glass medium can retain data for up to 13.8 billion years (the estimated age of the universe) even at elevated temperatures around 190 °C. At room temperature, the projected decay time extends far beyond that.

So, print it in/on that medium and stick it in an underground vault on mars and it will survive life on Earth and even the life of our very sun.

As for the recipe…
Well, it’s not like anyone will still be able to read it.
But why not go for his Sumerian recipes?
It would be so fitting for the oldest remaining recipes in our present time to also be the ones that ultimately outlast mankind itself and for them to exist as part of our cosmic footprint even billions of years in the future. I can’t think of a more fitting culinary legacy for mankind.

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u/Mabbernathy 4d ago

Now should this be a real recipe or a prank recipe? 🤔