Archeology Magazine had some interesting pieces on how people cooked and ate in ancient times:

The first difficulty a twenty-first-century home cook runs into when attempting to explore cuisines hundreds or thousands of years old is in establishing the ground rules. Does one make use of refrigeration? (The answer, after a brief but definitive analysis of logistics: an emphatic yes.) What about mutton, one of the most common meats throughout the Old World but now almost impossible for the common consumer to obtain in this country? Would I be cheating if I settled for lamb? (In America today, sheep are slaughtered almost exclusively before the end of their first year, making them technically lamb. Anything older is very, very tough–to buy, I mean, although I presume it also presents a challenge to the incisors.) And what about all those archaic food-preparation methods? I possess neither a horse under whose saddle I can shove meat for tenderizing, as the Mongols did, nor a yard into which I can dig a six-foot-deep hole to cook my turkey Maya-style. And then there are the Sumerian recipes that call for blood. Is it safe to cook with blood? Is it even legal?

Blood…

Read more here.
See recipes here.

(Thanks to Blogger Rabbit for the heads up).

This entry was posted on Friday, December 17th, 2004 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Humor & Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.