The oldest known recipes in the world are preserved on clay tablets dating to around 1730 BCE, housed in the Yale Babylonian Collection. These nearly 4,000-year-old tablets contain detailed instructions for stews, broths, and meat dishes from ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now modern-day Iraq. But the story of ancient cooking stretches back much further if you count less formal records, including a Sumerian beer poem from around 1800 BCE and archaeological evidence of bread-making that predates agriculture itself.
The Yale Babylonian Culinary Tablets
Three clay tablets, dated to 1730 BCE and written in Akkadian cuneiform, hold what scholars consider the world’s oldest known culinary recipes. They describe around 35 dishes, mostly stews and broths, with instructions that read more like ingredient lists than the step-by-step guides we’re used to today. A lamb stew recipe, for example, simply reads: “Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. You crush and add leek and garlic.”
The recipes are surprisingly varied. One dish called Tuh’u is a lamb and beetroot stew seasoned with cumin, coriander, rocket, and beer. Another resembles a chicken pot pie, with layers of dough and chunks of bird smothered in what food historians describe as a Babylonian version of béchamel sauce. That dish was served under a crusty lid, which diners broke open to reveal the meat inside. Culinary historian Nawal Nasrallah has traced this food-within-a-food technique through a 10th-century Baghdadi cookbook and into modern Iraqi cooking, a thread of culinary tradition spanning over 3,000 years.
The tablets also include medicinal dishes. Pashrutum, a bland broth accented with leek, coriander, and onion, translates as “unwinding” and was likely served to someone with a cold. At least two dishes are labeled as foreign, including an Elamite broth, suggesting that ancient Mesopotamians were already borrowing flavors from neighboring cultures.
What the Recipes Taste Like
A Yale-Harvard research team actually cooked several of these recipes in 2018, preparing two lamb stews and a vegetarian dish enriched with beer bread. The flavors were heavy on aromatics: garlic, leek, onion, cumin, and fresh coriander appeared repeatedly. The researchers found that the ancient Babylonians favored savory meats paired with herbaceous herbs and earthy vegetables, not unlike what you’d find in a modern Middle Eastern kitchen. One researcher noted that a dish seemed unremarkable at first, but “when it had boiled for a while it suddenly transformed itself into something delicious.”
The Tuh’u recipe, for instance, calls for diced leg of mutton browned in rendered sheep fat, then simmered with beetroot, Persian shallot, garlic, cumin, and a mix of sour beer and German-style wheat beer (standing in for Babylonian grain beer). It’s garnished with crushed coriander seeds and a paste made from pounded leek and fresh coriander, then served alongside bulgur, chickpeas, and bread. It reads like something that could appear on a modern restaurant menu.
A Sumerian Beer Recipe From 1800 BCE
Slightly older than the Yale tablets is the Hymn to Ninkasi, a Sumerian poem from around 1800 BCE that doubles as a complete beer recipe. Dedicated to the goddess of beer, the poem walks through every stage of brewing in verse form. The process started with bappir, a twice-baked barley bread, mixed with honey and dates. Once the bread cooled on reed mats, it was combined with water and wine, then left to ferment. After fermentation, the brew went through a filtering vat and into collection jars for serving.
The poem is remarkably specific: it describes handling dough with a big shovel, baking bappir in a large oven, soaking malt in jars, spreading cooked mash on reed mats to cool, and brewing the sweet liquid with honey and wine. The final step, pouring the filtered beer from the collector vat, is compared to “the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates.” Whether you consider this a recipe depends on how strictly you define the term. It’s not a set of instructions written for a cook, but it contains every detail you’d need to reproduce the drink.
Ancient Egyptian Medicinal Beer Recipes
The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian text from around 1550 BCE, contains hundreds of medicinal recipes. Roughly 75 of them reference beer as an ingredient, used as a base for remedies treating everything from baldness to crocodile bites. These aren’t cooking recipes in the traditional sense, but they describe specific combinations of ingredients and preparation methods, making them some of the earliest written formulas for consumable products outside Mesopotamia.
Evidence That Predates Written Recipes
If you broaden the question beyond written recipes to physical evidence of food preparation, the timeline jumps back dramatically. At the Shubayqa 1 archaeological site in northeastern Jordan, researchers found charred remains of flat bread dating to 14,400 years ago. That’s roughly 4,000 years before the emergence of agriculture. The bread was made from wild ancestors of domesticated cereals, including wild einkorn wheat, barley, and oat, along with ground tubers from club-rush plants. The remains were found inside fireplaces used during the early Natufian period, a hunter-gatherer culture. This is the oldest direct evidence of bread-making, though no written recipe accompanies it.
In northwestern China, archaeologists at the Lajia site discovered a sealed earthenware bowl containing 4,000-year-old noodles made from millet flour. Analysis published in Nature confirmed that the noodles were made by stretching millet dough into long, thin strands for boiling. This tells us noodle-making was already an established technique in the region, but again, no written instructions survived alongside the physical food.
The Oldest Surviving Cookbook
The distinction between a single recipe and a full cookbook matters here. The oldest surviving cookbook is De Re Coquinaria, a Roman collection attributed to Apicius. The original text likely dates to the 1st century CE, though the oldest surviving copy comes from the 5th century, near the end of the Roman Empire. It contains hundreds of recipes organized by ingredient type, covering everything from sauces to seafood. Compared to the Babylonian tablets, it’s a much more recognizable cookbook, but it’s roughly 1,700 years younger.
The Yale tablets sit in a unique position: they’re older than any surviving cookbook by nearly two millennia, yet they contain enough detail to actually reproduce the dishes. The Hymn to Ninkasi is older still, but it’s a poem first and a recipe second. And the bread at Shubayqa 1 proves humans were following repeatable food preparation methods over 14,000 years ago, long before anyone thought to write them down.