The oldest known written recipes don’t come from a cookbook – they come from three cuneiform clay tablets, dated to around 1730 BC, now held in Yale University’s Babylonian Collection.
The tablets contain roughly 35 recipes, mostly meat stews, written in a condensed style – closer to notes for someone who already knew the basics of cooking than to full beginner instructions.
In effect, the impulse to write down and organize recipes – exactly what any digital recipe archive does today – is nearly 4,000 years old; only the medium has changed completely.
The urge to browse organized recipes turns out to be one of humanity’s oldest culinary habits.
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