I know that food is an expresion of cultural values. I was just wondering if food recipes where a thing in the past, and which plate can be recreated today to know what these people ate.
So, this is more of a drink recipe than a food recipe which may not entirely satisfy this question but it's still an interesting tidbit. There are three copies of a Sumerian text dating to 1800 BC which contains the brewing process for beer. It features as part of a hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing, which you can read here.
One candidate is mersu, it was a small nut and dough cake used in Middle Bronze Age Syria. The actual tablet describing it comes from the site of Mari, and several attempts at reconstructing the exact recipe have been made; here is one example
There is actually a entire series of Babylonian cooking tablets, called the Yale Culinary Tablets. Here is a JSTOR link
Here is one example recipe(from the society of Biblical Literature):
me-e shirim shi-rum iz-za-az me-e tu-ka-an li-pi-a-am ta-na-ad-di [break in tablet] karsum ha-za-nu-um te-te-er-ri me-eh-rum shuhut innu i-sha-ru-tum ash-shu-ri-a-tum shi-rum iz-za-az me-e tu-ka-an li-pi-a-am ta-na-di [break in tablet] ha-za-nu-um zu-ru-mu da-ma sha du-qa-tim tu-ma-la kar-shum ha-za-nu-um te-te-er-ri me-he-er na-ag-la-bi
Meat (cooked in) Water. Meat is used. Prepare water; add fat, [break in tablet], mashed leek and garlic, and a corresponding amount of raw shuhutinnû. Assyrian style. Meat is used. Prepare water; add fat [break in tablet], garlic and zurumu with [break in tablet], blood, and mashed leek and garlic. Carve and serve.
Here are some more photos of other reconstructed Syrian and Mesopotamian dishes:
In Denmark the contents of the stomach of the Grauballe man gives a good idea of what people ate at the time (in the early iron age). The link is in the Danish but basically his stomach contained 20% seeds and 80% herbs. Of those the seeds were rye, wheat, barley, oats, spelled wheat and one I'm not really sure what it translates to. The herbs were mostly field herbs with some weeds, the most prominent ones being smartweed and spurrey. There was probably also some meat in his last meal, there have been found small pieces of bone from probably a pig.
It wasn't really a nice meal and probably even at the time it was a poor mans dinner. But it was nutritious.
Might be worth it to go to r/askculinary or even r/cooking. There's some nice insightful people there too. Paging /u/giveitaway1239
