The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia Paperback – April 30, 2011

This is a fascinating read if you are interested in historical cookery.

Recipes older than we can even imagine. And brought to us through a French chef. The more we know of history the more we know that we're all amazingly alike, no matter how far apart we are on the globe or the timeline. The author adds the details of life that come with preparing food--context, associations, higher powers, dreams, and the sheer pleasure of it. I am enjoying this book immensely.

This is an amazing book. Given the difficulty of researching the subject when there is so little reference material, this author obviously knows cooking! This is translated from the French. Many thanks to the translator as well: I don't read French and I needed to read this.I'm going to have to try that "recipe" for bread baked right in the ashes of the campfire. My mouth just doesn't understand why that would taste Better than bread baked in an oven! These chefs had names for breads not only made with different grains, or combinations of grains, but also for those breads with different other added ingredients: just as we do today.That is just one subject. There are many others: meats, pickled foods ......How varied and surprisingly sophisticated the techniques and recipes of these ancient cooks and chefs were.

A scholarly research paper by a well known scientist on Assyrian history. Very curious and enlightining to find out what an ancient civilization ate and drank. Don't go looking for yummy treats however. Taste buds evolved hugely in 4,500 years.

The Oldest Cuisine in the World is a fascinating book, presenting the interconnections between food and history in an amazing and clear style.The book is beautifully printed, but unfortunately it appears that certain information have been omitted, and it is not clear if by mistake or for some other reasons.For example at page 90 the ideogram for beer is supposed to be indicated on the second line; in fact the text states "highly evocative of the brewery!" and then leaves a space before the next sentence which I suppose should show the ideogram.Again at page 129 in note 80 the ideograms for mouth and water are shown, but the sentence states "which through progressive stylization became.... (empty space).I am now researching the original French edition of the book to find out the answer to this puzzle, as the U.S. printer (University of Chicago Press) did not reply to my question.

This is an excellent overview of Ancient Mesopotamian food culture. The author is working with limited source material and still produces a highly readable and informative work.DO NOT BUY A KINDLE COPY. Entire pages are garbled and illegible, see attached photo. A lot of text is obviously transcribed wrong, with missing letters or bizarre line breaks and spacing.

great gift for a cook

I enjoy this book because it is about the oldest known recorded recipes in the world. It gives some small glimpse into how people were cooking their food back when agriculture was first practiced. The author translated completely only what he personally considered accurately known, and left the rest un-translated. This is responsible scholarly practice. However, I would have liked to have seen the original words, transliterated into our alphabet, for the ingredients he considered accurately known. Perhaps some day someone will publish such a book. Until then, this is the only one that I know of which covers cooking techniques in Ancient Mesopotamia.