So was thinking of what to make for New Year's this year
and I decided to look back at New Year's 1740 BC.
Yes something that might have been eaten at the New Year's
or Akitu festival of ancient Babylon.
Tuh'u, a Babylonian lamb and beet stew.
It is one of the oldest recipes known to us.
And what's cool is that this episode came about because one of my Patreon patrons Carlos Mendoza
who suggested it, and actually helped me all along the way putting it together including
making the recipe a few times for himself.
So thank you Carlos for helping me stir up Tuh'u
as we discuss the ancient Babylonian Akitu festival.
This time on Tasting History.
So sometimes I run into a dish that ends in a roadblock and and usually I end up abandoning it.
Either I can't find any good history about it or a good recipe, or the translation I don't have
a translation. All sorts of reasons and this one was actually about to go the same way because
the translations of it are in conflict with each other and I found it really, really frustrating.
I almost gave up but then I had the unbelievably good fortune to get to speak with
Gojko Barjamovic who is a leading Assyriologist and linguist at Harvard University.
Oh one second I just dropped a name.
Honestly the experience was surreal because rare is it that you find someone
who is not only so generous with their time but also with their knowledge.
He walked me through everything about this dish and the translation,
and a lot of things about Babylonian culture that were
just fantastic that I can't wait to share with you.
What is interesting is that I came out of the conversation still thinking
oh well there is A LOT of ambiguity to this translation.
That's because there are some words that have multiple meanings,
and some words we just don't know what they meant.
Luckily there are some wonderful educated guesses (his education, not mine) that will allow us to make
an excellent stew BUT just a caveat this is not the definitive Tuh'u recipe.
There are several other versions out there,
and they're all perfectly valid.
Mine is no more right, or wrong than any of theirs.
In fact mine may be slightly more wrong than some of those, uh but we'll discuss
that later, and I think it'll actually make for another good episode in the future.
Anyway thank you to Gojko Barjamovic and his colleagues
for all the work that they have done on this most ancient of recipes.
Tuh'u: Lamb leg meat is used. Prepare water. Add fat. Sear.
Add in salt, beer, onion, arugula, cilantro, samidu, cumin and beets.
Put the ingredients in the cooking vessel and add crushed leek and garlic.
Sprinkle the cooked mixture with coriander on top.
Add suhutinnu and fresh cilantro.
So there are two words samidu and suhutinnu that we do not have definite translations for,
but in the ingredient list that i'll give you later we have the the possible variants but if you want to choose
something different kind of akin to them or leave them out altogether that's perfectly acceptable.
Another really interesting note about the translation is that there are words in it that are
not unlike their modern counterpart.
So our word cumin in Acadian is kamunum.
Pretty close for basically being a 4,000 year old game of telephone.
So for this recipe you will need:
one pound leg of lamb chopped into bite-sized pieces.
Now if you are making this stew for a hundred people and you're
using an entire leg of lamb I would go ahead and throw in the bone as well. Carlos actually used the
bone and said it added some nice flavors but if you don't have a lamb bone just go ahead and use
lamb leg pieces.
Three to four tablespoons of oil or rendered fat.
So you could use the rendered fat from the lamb
or any other kind of rendered fat is fine,
or oil. They would have used sesame (untoasted) sesame oil,
or olive oil. They didn't grow olives in the region but very nearby they would have
had olive oil so it could have been imported.
One and a half teaspoons sea salt.
Two cups of water.
You might need more, you might need less, we'll get to it later.
12 ounces of beer.
So here's where the recipe isn't as close historically as I might like,
and that's because I'm using modern beers.
I don't have any Babylonian beer but I could and so for a future episode I want to make that .
In the "Hymn to Ninkasi" there is a description of how to make beer from that time period, and Gojko
has tried that beer, and some people say it's sour, some people say there's a little sweetness into it,
but if you don't have it he says to use German weiss beer, and a sour beer combination.
So that is what I am doing.
One large onion, chopped.
Two cups of arugula, chopped.
Three-fourths cup cilantro, chopped.
Two teaspoons of cumin seeds, crushed.
Two large beets, or about four, cups chopped.
Now they're not entirely sure but the word Tuh'u, the name of the recipe, possibly means
red beets or refers to red beets. So I'm using red beets but they would have had red and gold
so go with whichever one you want. Some people like one over the other and both are actually
used in the region even to this day.
One large leek, minced.
Three cloves of garlic.
One tablespoon dry coriander seeds,
and additional chopped cilantro for garnish.
And that brings us to the last two ingredients that we don't exactly know what they are.
The samidu and the suhutinnu.
So Gojko and his colleagues kind of narrowed it down though to a few different possibilities,
and for the samidu they used Persian shallot, and Egyptian leek or kurrat for suhutinnu.
Now if you have trouble finding those exact ingredients go ahead and use a regular shallot
and regular leek, or anything else that you really want that's kind of in that family
that's perfectly fine.
So the first thing to do is to heat your fat over a high heat
and then add your lamb and sear.
Then toss in the onion and cook it for about 5 minutes just to soften it up.
Then add your beets and cook for another few minutes,
and then add in the salt the beer,
the arugula, the cilantro, the samidu or shallot,
and the cumin and bring it to a boil.
So here's where we talk about the water.
So in the recipe it says prepare water and then never mentions it again
Hm, not very helpful. It's probably because during the boiling process liquid evaporates,
and so you might need to add some water just to keep things cooking,
and also it's up to you how thick this is going to be.
isit a thick stew, or is it more of a broth?
It's really up to you. Recipe's not specific, so
do whatever you want.
So while it boils take your garlic and grind it in a mortar and add the leek
and mash them together.
Then add that to the stew.
Lower the heat and let it simmer for about an hour.
Now the nice thing about stew is you're not gonna really overcook this.
It's really up to you how you like it.
If you want your beets nice and soft you may have to go over an hour,
but if you like a little bit more bite than 45 minutes,
maybe an hour, it's totally up to you. Have fun with it.
So one question I had for Gojko was when would this dish have been eaten,
and there's no definite answer but it's likely that it wasn't an everyday dish for every one.
See a lamb at the time cost about one shekel of silver.
That's a hundred loaves of bread or about the equivalent.
So while it's not you know only for the royalty it's also not an everyday dish it is kind of expensive.
There is a thought that it was served at festivals specifically spring festivals because
in another of the recipes on the Yale tablets where this is from they use an ingredient that is
part of the saffron plant that was only taken during the spring and eaten fresh. of
So kind of narrows it down it's not that far of a leap to then think that maybe this was served at the
Akitu festival which was the Babylonian new year which they celebrated in spring, end of march - early April.
Was a movable feast as you will.
But since our new year is now I decided to make the correlation
uh because I don't think that there are any Babylonians around to get mad at me,
I hope. :/
Now most of what we know about the Akitu festival actually comes from about a thousand years
after these recipes were written, or stamped, wedged, cuneiformed.
Whatever the verb is for making cuneiform onto clay tablets,
but we can see over the next thousand years after that
that the festival didn't change all that much, so we can infer that
many of the things would have been the same even when our tablets were written.
Essentially it celebrated the spring equinox, reaffirmed kingship and was dedicated to the
prime god Marduk's victory over the goddess of the primordial sea,
and the mother of dragons,
Tiamat.
It lasted over a week and while the king and the high priest were the main players during it,
it was really open to everyone from the bottom of the barrel to the top of the rung.
It kicked off with the Šešgallu, or the high priest of Marduk's temple, called Esagil
imploring Marduk and praying to him for protection over the city of Babylon for another year.
And seeing as Marduk lived in Babylon I'm guessing he was likely to comply with the request.
Now I am simplifying, way oversimplifying mythology from Babylon with this but for the purposes of today
each major god had a hometown and then they had a temple in that town and then they had a statue
that was for all intents and purposes them.
So when I say Marduk went here, and Marduk did this
I'm talking about the statue okay?
Anyway, after a few days of prayer, things really ramped up on day four
when the high priest gave the scepter of royalness, the royal scepter, to the king and then the both of
them would head downstream to Babylon's sister city, Borsippa which the ziggurat there actually
is still standing to this day.
So Borsippa was the hometown of Nabu, not to be confused with
the home planet of Jar Jar Binks.
"No! No!"
No, Nabu was the son and heir to the god Marduk.
So the king and the priest would spend the night at Nabu's temple,
and the priest would recite or even reenact the
Enūma Eliš, which was the Babylonian creation myth,
and it has a wicked battle scene in it where Marduk
triumphs over the evil Tiamat.
He shot an arrow which pierced her belly,
split her down the middle and slit her heart.
Vanquished her and extinguished her life.
He threw down her corpse and stood on top of her.
When he had slain Tiamat, the leader, he broke up her regiments;
her assembly was scattered...
The gang of demons who all marched on her right,
He fixed them with nose ropes and tied their arms,
He trampled their battle-filth beneath him...
the Lord trampled the lower part of Tiamat,
with his unsparing mace smashed her skull,
severed the arteries of her blood,
and made the North Wind carry it off as good news.
Then he uses her body parts to create the world around us
including her rib cage to hold up the heavens,
and her weeping eyes to water the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Brutal.
The next morning with the statue of Nabu in tow they would schlep back up to Babylon,
and leave Nabu at the Uraš Gate.
Now we don't exactly know what the Uraš Gate looked like,
but I can only imagine it's somewhat like the reat Ishtar Gate,
which is now at the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin,
and if you ever get a chance to go to Berlin go see the Ishtar gate.
It is absolutely amazing.
So while the statue of Nabu had a slumber party at the Uraš Gate,
the king headed back to the Esagil where Marduk was waiting for him, and this is my favorite part
of the ceremony. The great king of Babylon would humble himself, laying down his weapons and all
of his kingly regalia namely that scepter and his crown, and then the high priest would take
him by the ear and yank him to his knees and then give him one hard accusatory slap across the face.
Now this couldn't be a little namby pamby slap. It had to be hard because the king had to tear up.
If he didn't actually cry from this slap then it was a bad sign, and the sign that Marduk was unhappy,
and you don't want to make Marduk unhappy.
You see what he did to the last person he defeated,
or god that he defeated.
So if you as king know that your high priest doesn't deliver a very good slap
you better hope that you can turn on the water works better than Meryl Streep in 'Sophie's Choice.'
Either way post slap, the king would plead his innocence and swear that he had not wronged Marduk,
or Babylon or Babylon's temples, and then Marduk would give him an oracle.
Which I'm guessing Marduk sounded a lot like that priest
who's standing over in the corner.
"Fear not!... Marduk has heard your prayer...
He has enlarged your rule... He will exalt your kingship...!
On the day of the Akitu festival... you whose city Babylon is...
whose temple Esagil is...
whose the people of Babylon, the privileged citizens, are;
Marduk will bless you forever!
He will destroy your enemy, he will annihilate your adversary!"
Quite the affirmation. So I'm guessing that the king had a little more pep in his step
as he received back his royal regalia, the crown and the scepter,
and was confirmed as king for yet another year.
Now the next day was all about Nabu who had spent the night at the Uraš Gate.
He would be taken to the temple of the warrior god, Ninurta, where he would defeat two enemies
who were gold-plated statues, and cut off their heads and then take their decapitated bodies up
to his old pa, Marduk. Over the next couple days gods from all the cities near Babylon would come
being carried by people to pledge their loyalty to Marduk, as King of the Gods, and I'm guessing to
the king of Babylon as well, how convenient.
Then Marduk would escort everyone to the Akitu house
or house of the new year where unfortunately we don't know what happened, but likely the booty
from the previous year would have been given to all the gods from the other cities.
Then the gods would return to Esagil,
and announce all of the decisions that had been made at the Akitu house.
These could be things like changes to the royal succession or a list of new laws. or
the announcement of the pardons of political prisoners from just before the new year, and
we actually have the story in the Old Testament of the last king of Judah held in captivity in
Babylon being pardoned just before the festival.
"And it came to pass in the seventh and thirtieth year of the captivity of Jehoiachin king of Judah,
in the twelfth month, on the seventh and twentieth day of the month,
that Evil-merodach king of Babylon, in the year that he began to reign,
did lift up the head of Jehoiachin king of Judah out of prison."
Now if I'm a Babylonian king I'm going to be rather peeved
that I am being remembered as Evil-merodach
when they call me Amel-Marduk.
See there was a typo at some point in the old testament and it just got handed down
for the last few thousand years. Doesn't that suck, but I guess better to be remembered by
the wrong name than not remembered at all.
So that was basically the end of the governmental portion
of the festival but before everyone including the god statues goes back to their respective cities
everyone sings songs to the gods and they eat feasts
including perhaps something like our Tuh'u which should be about ready to try.
So once your stew has cooked for about an hour or until the meat
and vegetables are done to your liking serve up a bowl and garnish with dry coriander seeds
minced cilantro and chuhutinnu, or leek.
And here we are Tuh'u from ancient Babylon.
So now just like we have salt and pepper on the table today,
according to Gojko in ancient Babylon they would have had
date vinegar, sesame oil,
and garum.
I had no idea. I thought that was really, really interesting.
So if you have a little garum, and you want to put it onto your Tuh'u you would not be wrong,
in fact maybe i'll try that later but first I'm trying sans garum.
Let's give it a shot.
It's so red, it's just so red. The beets really - I mean even the lamb is so red but looks good.
Cooked to perfection.
So the beets are actually fairly soft I thought they would be more firm but they
do have a little bite to them but they're fairly soft as is the the lamb but there's this wonderful
crunch from the added coriander seeds it adds a really interesting, and wonderful texture and then
the flavor of course of the coriander really pops out and every once in a while the cumin as well.
It really just kind of shoots through all the other flavors, it's really complex. It's kind of
awesome to think that after 4,000 years or rather 4,000 years ago they were making cuisine that was
this complex. I need a thesaurus but it's really fantastic, and something that I could see
being served on any table today.
So thank you to Gojko Barjamovic and my patron Carlos Mendoza for making this episode happen,
and I will see you all in the new year on Tasting History.
Happy New Years friendlings, don't forget to Subscribe and hit notification bell <3 - José