Green Cheese from an Egyptian Bronze Age grave

An Egyptian recipe.

I do love cheese, every kind of cheese. When I lived in Paris some years ago, I loved to have just some cheese and baguette for dinner – my flatmate and me actually had bread and cheese most of the evenings! Now I will be able to study cheese production for some years at university, which makes me really happy since I can combine my obsession with cheese and my obsession to try every recipe I can find – that’s going to be a lot of cheese! When I told my mother about it, she laughed and said: „Did you know our ancestors moved from Switzerland to Germany as cheesemakers?“ I did not know before, but that explains a lot! Unlike my ancestors, I am no expert on cheese making but I am working to become one, especially on creating prehistorical cheese. Which brings me to the following recipe:

Some years ago, remnants of cheese were found at Saqqara in the grave of a 13th-century BC ancient Egyptian official called Ptahmes. Chemical analysis showed that the cheese was made from a mixture of cow’s milk and ewe’s or goat’s milk.

There are some depictions of how the ancient Egyptians made cheese. I read that the cheese found at Saqqara must have been more sour than what we are used to. Another scientist wrote that

„milk was churned through a goat skin to separate butter from the milk, then the residue of the churning was placed on a reed mat or in a basket and strained. The remaining product was non-fat cheese.“

From: Magda Mehdawy & Amr Hussein, The paharo’s kitchen. Recipes from ancient Egypt’s enduring food traditions, p. 41.

Therefore, I use buttermilk in my recreation of this cheese.

To make cheese, one needs rennet or an acid liquid like fruit juice or vinegar. I do not have information on what people used in ancient Egypt, but they knew wine which easily turns into vinegar when left open. So for simplicity’s sake I used vinegar. In the Bronze Age, most adults were still lactose intolerant, but by turning indigestible milk into cottage cheese, which contains less lactose, most people were able to use this nutrient-rich food.

Ingredients:

  • ½ l ewe‘s milk
  • ½ l buttermilk
  • 1 tbsp vinegar
  • fresh cress
  • fresh dill
  • black cumin
  • hempseed
  • salt

Of course, you can use any herbs you like and as much as you like. In this recipe, I make a cheese with herbs that were actually detected in Bronze Age Egypt by the ERC research project FoodTransforms.

Preparation:

Slowly heat the milk and buttermilk. When the mixture is hot but not boiling, add the vinegar. The whey and curd should now separate. Sieve the curd through a strainer or a tea towel. Let the curd screen out for some 30 to 60 minutes. Do not try to hasten that process by wringing the whey out! I made this mistake first because I did not listen to people, who knew better, and my cheese was grainy and not smooth at all! Now add the herbs and bring the cheese in shape by pressing it into a small glass or bowl.

I did this many times before, but not with buttermilk or ewe’s milk, and it turned out, that these react differently from cow‘s milk. The buttermilk started to coagulate even before I added the vinegar, and the ewe’s milk seemed not to clot at all. I do not know why buttermilk and ewe’s milk behave differently but I am about to find out. One clearly needs expert knowledge for producing milk products, and that explains why some of my ancestors moved to show other people how to cook cheese. Unluckily they cannot teach me anymore but I am sure I will learn more about how to fabricate cheese! If you want to be sure the recipe works, just use cow‘s milk.

The scientists that worked on the original cheese from Saqqara said the cheese must have been sour. Mine was not, but maybe it will become sour when aging? The cheese that I made was still tasty – it reminded me of a really grainy cream cheese!

So if you want to feast like Ptahmes – or if you just want to create your own cheese – try it out! (But maybe use cow’s milk…)

Note: I’m currently researching more about cheese making in prehistory, and that recipe is absolutely not how to imagine early cheeses! But my failure is a good example of how complicated the manufacturing of milk can be and how to imagine people during the beginning of cheese making trying to figure out how to process milk to a durable and appetising food with a low lactose percentage (What I also didn’t know while developing the recipe: Most people in prehistory weren’t able to digest milk or rather the lactose within the milk!)

Mousse au miel with rose water and a blackberry sauce

A Levantine recipe.

When I am searching for ideas for my blog, salty dishes are most often coming to my mind. This is a pity, as I particularly love sweets and I love baking! Consequently I have been thinking about a fancy dessert for a while until I got inspired: Some weeks ago, just when small social gatherings were possible again, I was invited to a birthday party. We went to a Libanese restaurant and tasted all of the appetizers like Falafel and Baba Ganoush. I left the table for some minutes and when I returned, somebody had ordered dessert for everybody. At first glance the dessert looked like some scoops of ice cream with a fruity decoration. But it really was not ice cream, and we immediately started a discussion about what ingredients could be in there: Some milk crème thickened with eggyolk? Something like panna cotta maybe? There was rose water in it for sure! We asked the waiter, and he told us that the dessert was called Ashtar and is made from milk and cheese.

The moment I returned home, I knew that I had to find a recipe! Ashta is neither made with eggyolk as I had first thought nor with creme cheese – and it was not creme cheese, as the waiter told us. Instead one cooks milk with vinegar to separate whey and cheese. I knew that technique mostly from making the Indian Paneer cheese.So why not trying it out for creating a deliciouslate summer Bronze Age dessert, sweetened with honey, a blackberry sauce and of course with rose water!

Ingredients:

  • 1l milk
  • 1tbsp honey
  • 125g blackberrys
  • 4 tsp rose water
  • 4 tbsp flour
  • 40ml cider vinegar
  • sesame
  • pistachios

Preparation:

Cook 750ml milk in a pot and add the vinegar while stirring until the whey separates from the cheese. Pour the cooked milk into a sieve and let the cheese drain. Cook the remaining 250ml milk and stir in the flour until the milk thinckens like a pudding. To get rid of clumps, press the pudding through a sieve. Now mix the cheese and the pudding with honey and rose water and let the mousse cool down.

Cook the blackberrys and squash them a little so that a sauce-like consistency develops. Finally serve the mousse with the blackberry sauce, some sesame and minced pistachios.

I was surprised, how much the mousse tasted like honey – I thought it would taste a lot more of roses than honey. In the end, it came out quite different than I had thought in the beginning – but I found out a really nice dessert for summertimes!

Bon appétit!

Uluburun Stew

A Levantine recipe.

Many years ago – during the 14th century BC – a merchant ship sunk near the Turkish coast. The shipwreck contained various trade assets – gold, copper, tin, glass – but also such as foodstuffs. There were spices, pulses and even parts of different fruits -probably for amking some food for the crew on board. I have always found this shipwreck and its rich finds amazing – and now it also inspired me to create a Bronze Age stew.

Ingredients:

  • 70g edamame (soy was actually attested in the Levante during this time! Check out the ERC FoodTransforms research of Stockhammer and his team)
  • 70g red lentils (dried)
  • 70g chickpeas
  • olive oil
  • 200ml water
  • 1,5 tsp sumac
  • 1,5 tsp black cumin
  • 1,5 tsp coriander seeds
  • coriander leaves
  • 1 tbsp pine nuts
  • 1 tbsp olives
  • pomegranate seeds
  • salt

Preparation:

Roast coriander seeds and black cumin and mash with a mortar, then roast pine nuts. Put olive oil into the pan with the pine nuts, add the lentils and roasted herbs and roast the lentils for 3 minutes. Cook them with the water for about 30 minutes until the lentils are done. Add sumac, salt, olives, pomegranate seeds and fresh coriander leaves to serve.

Of all Bronze Age recipes this one is my favorite! The sour sumac and the sweet pomegranate work very well with the fresh coriander!

I hope you will also enjoy it as much as I do!

Ancient Egyptian Halva

An Egyptian recipe.

A while ago Philipp Stockhammer told me about a Medieval Egyptian cookbook, called „The sultan’s feast – a fifteenth-century Egyptian cookbook“. Of course, recipes from the 15th century AD are not directly comparable with those of the Bronze Age, but I thought I might find some inspiration. And indeed, I did! To be honest, I didn’t know where to start. So again, I thought I might begin with something simple: a recipe that somehow sounds like modern halva.

I just changed some spices. The original recipe uses musk – however I wasn’t sure if musk was already available for cooking in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. Instead I used cinnamon and saffron. Cinnamon was recently traced in Bronze Age vessels at the coast of Israel. We know saffron from Bronze Age frescos from the aegean world and it was harvested there too.

Ingredients:

  • 160g flour
  • 130g honey
  • 50 ml sesame oil
  • 3 tsp rose water
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • some saffron

Preparation:

„Recipe for a type of Persian confection. [Take] finely milled sieved flour, bee honey, sesame oil, saffron, musk and rose water. Toast the flour until it turns brown, but not burnt. Put the honey in an earthenware pan and bring to a boil, [gradually] adding the flour to it. Stir and pour in the sesame oil, musk and rose water. Sprinkle in the sesame oil little by little until everything is done. Transfer to platters and add a bit of musk and rose water.“

From: Ibn Mubārak Shāh, The sultan’s feast. A fiftheen-century egyptian cookbook (London 2020), p.68.

What I did, is a little bit different, but the dessert that turned out is really quite similar to halva.

Roast the flour until it turns brown and cook the honey. Mix flour, honey and sesame oil while stirring. Add cinnamon, rose water and saffron. Now place the hot sweet into small cake pans and let it cool down. Sprinkle with sesame seeds before serving the Ancient Egyptian Halva.

The texture of the dessert isn’t quite like halva, it’s much more solid. It tastes like a kind of honey candy, and I can’t decide if I like it or not. Somebody (who decided she liked the dessert) told me, the consistency was more like a cookie than halva, so maybe the Ancient Egyptian Halva is more of a cookie with the taste of halva!

But if you like, decide for yourself and try the recipe!

Leek soup from the Babylonian Yale Tablets

A Mesopotamian recipe.

The first time I heard about the Yale Culinary Tablets was when some scientist from Yale University had recooked three of those recipes. The newspapers understandably wrote a lot about this experiment! Naturally, I tried to get these Old Babylonian recipes! And I did – and practically I could also join a class at university about those recipes.

The recipe I tried out first was a kind of green soup with leek and coriander. I thought I should start with something simple. I never had used leek before – it had seemed boring to me. Now I am a huge fan of it: Leek is very aromatic and can change a dish completely – for example as replacement for onions. That’s why I want to share this recipe and maybe convince you of leek, too!

Ingredients:

  • 1 leek cut up in rings
  • 1 garlic clove
  • ½ bunch coriander leaves
  • 1 tsp coriander seeds
  • 1 onion (the original recipe uses wild leek, Allium ampeloprasum, German “Ackerlauch”. I couldn’t find this, but one usually uses the bulb of “Ackerlauch” like one uses onions, so I replaced it with onion)
  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tbsp of dried sourdough
  • 0,5l water
  • salt

Preparation:

„Garden turnips broth. Meat is not used. Prepare water; add fat [ ]; onion; arugula; coriander and cake crumbs (?), bound with blood; add mashed leeks and garlic.“

From: Jean Bottéro, The oldest cuisine in the world. Cooking in Mesopotamia (Chicago/ London 2004), p. 29.

That is what the Babylonian cookbook says albeit not completely preserved and not everything can be clearly translated. I was not able to get blood (admittedly, I also didn´t really want to, nor did I have any idea, where to get animal blood). I assume that the blood was used to thicken the soup and add a salty taste to the dish. Therefore I decided, not to thicken the broth, but add some extra salt to it.

Cut up the garlic, coriander leaves and onion. Together with the coriander seeds, mash the vegetables in a mortar to make a pesto. Heat the oil in a pot and add the pesto to roast it for some 5 minutes. Add leek rings and 0.5l water. Now cook the soup for half an hour. Add salt as desired. Finally, sprinkle with coriander leaves and sourdough before serving the broth.

I really like the soup, it makes a delicious appetizer! But it is important to note, that my interpretation of the recipe just gives an idea of what the original soup might have tasted like. As you can see, the text isn´t fully preserved. We don´t know, what culinary knowledge the author of the recipe presupposed for cooking it. Maybe there were some steps of preparation one would automatically do as a Babylonian cook, but we don´t know them.

Anyway, if you want, enjoy trying this Babylonian soup!