These Are the Oldest Recorded Recipes

Determining the oldest recipe in history seems like it would be tricky right from the outset — anyone who’s ever asked an older relative for a recipe knows that often, the ingredients and instructions for a favorite meal have never even been written down. Yet historians do have a fairly clear answer for what the oldest known written culinary recipes are, and they date back more than 3,700 years. The cuneiform tablets didn’t contain just one recipe; one of the texts dated to around 1730 BCE had approximately 24 recipes for stews and broths. The other two featured fewer recipes, but written in more specific detail. Though the stones are damaged and truncated in parts, some of the stew recipes are intact in their entirety.