VII. The Question of Consistency and Continuity

Bottéro sees consistency and continuity of the Babylonian cuisine, as reflected in the culinary documents discussed above, in a much later recipe for what he calls ‘court bouillon,’ written around the fourth century bc. He believes it belongs to a larger collection of recipes, which are lost to us today. The recipe deals with vegetable broth, which needs to be reduced to one liter, after which it is strained and used for cooking meat. He concludes that the cooking routines and techniques revealed in the Babylonian recipes ‘had been practiced earlier and were continued afterwards down through the centuries’ (Mesopotamian Culinary Texts), with which I cannot agree more.