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Therefore is the name of it called Babel;
because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

- Genesis, chapter 11: 1 – 9 -

The Story

Legend has it that everyone on earth spoke the same language in ancient times. As people migrated from the east, they settled in the land of Shinar, southern Mesopotamia. People there sought to make bricks and build a city and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for themselves, so that they not be scattered over the world. It was then that God came down to look at the city and tower, and remarked that as one people with one language, nothing that they sought would be out of their reach. God went down and confounded their speech, so that they could not understand each other, and scattered them over the face of the earth, and they stopped building the city. Thus the city was called Babel, known locally as Babil.

Food in Ancient Babylonia

Written evidence from the 3rd millennium provides us with the oldest systems of tastes and traditional means of transforming raw materials into delectable dishes.

Cooking Methods in Babylonia

The ancient Mesopotamians had well and truly domesticated fire. They exposed their foodstuffs to flame or glowing embers to grill or roast them. They also used intervening agents like hot ashes or shards placed on embers, to modulate cooking heat. Using clay cylinders heated internally, flat rounds of dough were baked on the walls. The accumulated heat in the walls and floor allowed them to bake fermented dough and leavened breads in a slow moist heat.
Meats were roasted, boiled and "touched with fire". Fish was cooked upon glowing coals. One of the more unusual but popular preparations was a kind of locust 'shish kabob'. A relief from the ancient city of Khorsabad shows servants serving them on skewers.

Bread in Babylonia

The earliest food lists were written in both Sumerian and Akkadian and contained at least 300 breads. Barley and other cereals were ground into flour and mixed with oil, milk or beer. Some were leavened, some were not. They might be sweetened with honey or date sugar or flavored with spices and fruits. There was great variety in the shape and size of bread, from very large to miniscule and every kind of thickness.

Ingredients in Cookery

A group of cuneiform documents written in Akkadian and datable to about 1700 BC proved to be a collection of cookery recipes that revealed "a cuisine of such richness, refinement, consummate technical know-how and art that we would certainly never have dared to imagine so advanced nearly 4,000 years ago." All recipes contained garlic, onions and leeks. Flavorings used in ancient recipes included mustard, cumin, coriander, mint and cypress berries. Semolina, flours and malted barley gave thickness and smoothness to liquids. Sometimes milk and beer were also added.

Beer in Babylonia

Beer was the fermented national drink of the Babylonians. Prepared with a cereal base following various refining techniques, it could be made into beer that was 'white', 'russet', 'light', 'dark', 'cloudy', sweetened with honey and flavored with many aromatics, sometimes diluted but often strong. Beer would be drunk from a common vessel by sucking it out of a jar through drinking tubes whose lower end had a kind of grille to filter impurities. Until Hammurabi's time, women brewed beer and the craft was protected by female gods. Ration lists for palace employees recorded the distribution of one quart to one gallon a day of beer, depending on the rank of the recipient.
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Many, many years were passed in building the tower.
It reached so great a height that it took a year to mount to the top. A brick was, therefore, more precious in the sight of the builders than a human being. If a man fell down, and met his death, none took notice of it, but if a brick dropped, they wept, because it would take a year to replace it. So intent were they upon accomplishing their purpose that they would not permit a woman to interrupt herself in her work of brick-making when the hour of travail came upon her. Moulding bricks she gave birth to her child, and, tying it round her body in a sheet, she went on moulding bricks.

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67 Stoke Newington, Church St, London N16 0AR

020 7254 3697

info@babilrestaurant.com

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