Drop a tiger into a court-bouillon

Bee Wilson

• The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia by Jean Bottéro, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan
  Chicago, 134 pp, £16.00, May 2004, ISBN 0 226 06735 1

Who was it who invented the first black cakes
Or the uncounted poppy-seed? Who mix’d
The yellow compounds of delicious sweetmeats?

This was one of many questions asked by the poet Athenaeus in the Deipnosophists, a long series of dialogues on food and dining. If Athenaeus, who lived 1800 years ago, couldn’t, how much less equipped are we to answer questions about the way the first cooks cooked? How can we know what people ate in the past? It is hard enough to re-create a meal we had last Tuesday: ingredients are never the same, and we forget how much pepper we added; we can go back to the recipe book, if we used one, but it won’t tell us that we substituted garlic for onions, or that our children picked out all the courgettes before they ate it. At least we have a sense of what kinds of meal we are likely to eat; what our tastes are, how these compare with other tastes, and whether our budget can satisfy them. Accessing the meals of the earliest civilisations hardly seems possible.