Ancient Cooking! Recipe 1: Sumerian Wild-Fowl Pie
What do I mean, exactly, by “Sumerian cooking?”
Let’s start with the Sumerian people themselves. They lived in what’s now Iraq, over a very long span of time —the first evidence of them comes from around 7,000 years ago, and their language survived until about 2,000 years ago.
They called themselves ung sang-gíga — literally, “The Black-Headed People,” presumably because they had black hair. In their earliest days, they were mainly farmers and fisherman.
But around 4,000 BCE, in places called Eridu and Uruk, the Sumerians came together in huge numbers and basically invented civilization: Cities, the wheel, writing, bureaucracy, sewers, paved roads, standing armies, taxes, public schools — as far as we know, the Sumerians came up with all this from scratch, one invention after another.
Once you start reading about Sumerian culture, it isn’t long before you start wondering what these people liked to eat. Luckily for us, one of the Sumerians’ many inventions was the cookbook.
Well, sort of.
Sumerian recipes tend to suffer from what one historian calls “Grandmother’s instructions syndrome” — you know, “Throw in a pinch of our spice mix, just enough of all the vegetables we like, and bake it until it looks right.”
As if that wasn’t confusing enough, nobody knows what a lot of the ingredient names mean. We can translate the way the words sounded, sure — but what kind of vegetable is shumgud or shumhush? Your guess is as good as mine — and about as good as the guess of a Sumerologist, too.
We can make informed guesses, though.
We know, for example, that Sumerians loved their alliaceous veggies — onions, leeks, garlic, etc. — just as cooks in many modern Middle Eastern cultures do. They grew wheat and barley, too; along with beans and chickpeas. They liked cucumbers and lettuce, which are still staples of Middle Eastern cuisine today. And we know they ate a lot of fish—farmed them, in fact — and also farmed ducks, geese and other fowl. No chickens, though. Those were domesticated in China and Southeast Asia, and wouldn’t make it to Mesopotamia for another two thousand years.
We also know a lot of foods the Sumerians couldn’t have had, because they originated in distant parts of the world that had no contact with Sumer. Potatos and tomatoes, for example, both originated in the Americas, and wouldn’t make it across the Atlantic for thousands more years. Same for squash, pumpkin, corn, vanilla, blueberries, and lots of other ingredients we take for granted today.
That’s the general outline of what we know.
Based on that outline — along with Sumerian words for animals and spices whose translations we know for sure — we can reconstruct most of the main ingredients in some Sumerian recipes. Once we know the general idea of the dish, we can “back into” likely translations of the other herbs and spices, based on how people in the modern Middle East season their food — or just what seems like it’d taste good.
In other words, there’s a lot of room for improv here.
The Recipe: Sumerian Wild-Fowl Pie
I based this recipe on two others I found: Wild-fowl pie and quail on barley flatbreads. I couldn’t find any quail or duck at my local grocery store, so I’m improvising with chicken — which, like I said, the Sumerians didn’t have. We’re doing the best we can here.
For the filling:
- 1 raw chicken (or 2 quail or a duck)
(I used a roast chicken this time, but a raw one would work better.) - 1 leek (or onion)
- 4 shallots (or small onions)
- 4 cloves garlic
- 3 tbsp fresh mint leaves
- 3 tbsp cumin
- 3 tbsp cinnamon
- 1 tbsp salt
- 1/4 cup honey
- 2 tbsp semolina (or whole-wheat flour)
- 1 cup milk
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tbsp vinegar
- 2 cups cider or blond beer (Sumerians brewed all kinds of different beers, and most of them tended to be on the light, sweet side.)
- I’m also throwing in a few handfuls of dried rose petals, because the Sumerian recipe calls for “wild tulip bulbs,” and I have no idea where to find those.
For the crust:
- 3 cups semolina (or whole-wheat flour)
- 1/2 cup rendered fat (or Crisco or butter)
- 2 teaspoons salt
- 1 cup milk
For the Watch!
- Lol.
Let’s set the mood with some Sumerian music.
Chop up the leek, 3 of the shallots, and the garlic, and caramelize them in 1 tbsp olive oil (add a little more if they’re sticking to the pan). Make sure everything has turned nice and tan. Toward the end, throw in the cumin and cinnamon, so they’ll get toasted and release their flavors.
Put the chicken (on the bone), the caramelized leek / shallot / garlic mixture, salt, vinegar, honey, milk and beer into a pot, cover it, and set it to simmer (about 125° C / 250° F). Be patient — it’s probably going to take 45 mins to an hour to get cooked and tender. Now is a great time to play the Royal Game of Ur!
After 40 mins or so, when the chicken is almost cooked (just barely a little pink), throw in the last shallot (chopped), mint leaves, rose petals (or wild tulip bulbs, if you’ve got ‘em) and semolina. Stir until you’ve got a sort of chicken salad, with a little light gravy. Remove as many bones as you can, to get a nice pie filling. Ninkasi be praised!
Make the pie crust. Knead the semolina, salt and rendered fat, adding milk as necessary to get a dough that’s fairly sticky, but still moist enough to mold.
Preheat oven to 175° C / 350° F. Coat a pie pan with butter or olive oil, then press in about 2/3 of the crust. Spoon in the pie filling.
Roll out the rest of the crust into a circle, and press it on top of the pie. Brush the top lightly with melted butter (this will make it nice and crusty), and poke a few holes in it with a fork.
Bake the pie for about 30 mins, or until the top turns tan. Set it on the counter and let it cool for 10 to 15 mins.
A-li-li! It looks delicious!
…and it is!
Since the mix of flavors in this recipe is so unusual to a modern (especially Western) palate, feel free to mix and match spices, and to adjust the proportions as you taste-test along the way.
I added 1 tbsp garum and 3 tbsp asfoetida powder, which I had left over from some Parthian chicken I made for a Roman dinner party a few weeks ago — and it was great. You can also try substituting date paste for the honey, for a little more of that Middle Eastern flavor.
So now the big question: Would an actual Sumerian person, 6,000 years ago, have eaten a pie like this? Well, probably not exactly like this — but the flavors, ingredients, and structure of the recipe are all faithful to the Sumerian recipes we have. Sumerians would definitely recognize it as an imitation of their cuisine — for whatever that’s worth.
Enjoy it with a cup of sweet blond beer or cider, and maybe some figs or olives, while relaxing to the sweet sounds of Sumerian lyre music, and you’re about as close to an ancient Sumerian dinner as you can get.
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