THE COOKBOOK TEST #112: THE OLDEST KITCHEN IN THE WORLD

INSTALLMENT #112 (PAID) The Double-Edged Sword of Time / A Serious Man / Flat Meat Pies / Take Me Down to Chickpea City

Dear Subscribers,

If you read this newsletter regularly, you understand that time is no barrier to cuisine. Immerse yourself in the right book, and you can be cooking in the Roaring Twenties, or Revolutionary France, or the so-called Dark Ages, or Feudal Japan, or just about wherever and whenever you want. It’s not quite as immersive and transportive as a literal Tardis, but it’s not a bad approximation.

Thus this week’s title, THE OLDEST KITCHEN IN THE WORLD, which collects 4,000 years of culinary lore from the Assyrian community. Assyrians are loosely defined here as Christian descendents of the Assyrian empire in modern-day Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. (The Christian point is salient because the book includes recipes that feature pork and alcohol, nonstarters for Muslim descendents from the Assyrian part of the world.)

The joy of The Oldest Kitchen in the World is that the recipes within feel preserved throughout the ages such that you’re cooking like Middle Eastern people who walked the earth 4,000 years ago. The agony of The Oldest Kitchen in the World is... exactly the same thing.

Because the book is an effort to preserve an ancient tradition from a specific region, the pantry of its recipes is necessarily constrained. There aren’t modern glosses or fusion spins - there aren’t chef-led reinterpretations or TikTok influencer recipes. Everything fits together - putting together a complementary menu using this book would be simplicity itself.

This means that the book’s pages include a lot of variations of flatbread, yogurt with wheat, ground meat on flatbread, yogurt with dill, lamb stew, flatbread salad, wheat balls, beef stew, bread salad... and so forth. It’s a cozy universe of flavors and ingredients, which makes for a tremendously coherent book. Is it too coherent? If you’re looking for a working encyclopedia of Assyrian cuisine, no. If you’re looking for a workhorse modern pantry cookbook, yes.

at your service,

James

THE OLDEST KITCHEN IN THE WORLD: 4,000 YEARS OF MIDDLE EASTERN COOKING PASSED DOWN THROUGH GENERATIONS
BY MATAY DE MAYEE
TRA PUBLISHING | 2024 | $35

Depending upon how well you know me - and if you’re reading this, it’s somewhere between “almost complete stranger” and “married to me,” which is a nice healthy range - you might be surprised to hear that I do not regard myself as a very serious person. Like: I guess I take my work seriously, and I endeavor to write efficiently and with precision. But I play a lot of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and have specific voices and characters for improv acting the inner lives of my cats, and I love it when stuff gets set on fire tableside. Just love it! OPA! I do not think that makes for a serious person.

Yet: I love it when cookbooks get comprehensively and gravely serious. It tells me that the author is truly committed to their subject, and whatever foolishness I encounter will be created honestly, and not as the byproduct of an AI-assisted voice-to-text book development process that calls to mind the last stage of a meal’s lifespan rather than the first one.

The Oldest Kitchen in the World starts out with a Tolkien-esque illustrated map of the region, a rundown of important religious festivals and fasts, a glossary of food-related terms in Surayt, Sureth, and Akkadian, a rundown on specialized grains and other ingredients, and a snapshot of kolonya, a scented liquid offered at Middle Eastern meals and other social rituals for guests to refresh their hands and faces. It’s nothing less than an earnest and clearly written primer on a culture under-appreciated in the Western world, and I respect it a lot.

BASRO ‘AL DAWQO (SPICED MEAT ON MINI-FLATBREAD)

I was immediately drawn to this recipe because - like many pizza fans - it’s hard to compete with meat cooked atop thin pieces of bread in terms of an appealing meal concept. But ultimately, whether from my execution or the original concept of the recipe, this one didn’t ultimately deliver.