It’s official. Americans’ favourite ingredients for a celebratory feast are Coke and crisps. Archaeologists from the University of Arizona have proved this by sifting through rubbish bins in Tucson. There are more sanitary and less laborious ways of proving the same point, but archaeologists love trash. When they reach inside the bin-liners of Tucson they are simply bringing their usual practice up to date. In the middens of antiquity, the remains of discarded feasts reveal what lost civilisations liked to eat and drink. Minoans prized dolphin flesh; revellers at the wake of King Midas drank a punch of mixed wine, beer and mead. The earliest feast of which we know the menu happened 5,000 years ago, on Hambledon Hill in Dorset, leaving behind the bones of lots of pigs and cattle.
Celebratory eating is part of the civilising process: evidence that food counts for more than nourishment, transforming elementary, alimentary beasts into social creatures. Indeed, it could be the first step out of the wild. A recent discovery of primatological fieldwork is that hunting chimpanzees distribute monkey meat according to what looks like a kind of ritual, serving the members of the tribe in approximate order of rank. So food-rites cement hierarchies. Our own ancestors got to this stage of socialisation maybe a couple of million years ago, when they ceased merely to scavenge for dead flesh, and to eat it furtively, and took up hunting and killing for food. Feasts have helped to define power relationships ever since. After a feast, host and guests behave towards one another in transformed ways.
To succeed as a feast-giver you need plenty of food. In most societies, big men who aspired to chieftainship could satiate their guests into submission by stunning them with abundance. That is why the literature of antiquity is stuffed with heroic eaters, such as Loki and Lodi, who contended for kingship in the Icelandic Edda by engaging in an eating contest. The winner ate the plates as well as all the food. Over the whole course of history, the power to garner and distribute enormous quantities has probably been the most important source of legitimacy for historic elites. The labyrinths of Knossos were built not to house a Minotaur, but to store many thousands of jars of oil and sacks of grain. The viziers and pharaohs of Ancient Egypt measured their success by defeating famine.
In most periods, therefore, the amount of food alone distinguished a feast from a meal or signified superiority of class — not the ingredients or the way the food was cooked. In some places, socially differentiating cuisine never developed at all. In parts of West Africa, to this day, kings eat the same food as everyone else, albeit more of it, and, usually, with distinguishing rituals. So how did cuisine start — if we define it as special food, specially prepared?
In an enticing new book of Ancient Mesopotamian recipes discovered by the author Jean Bottéro, he calls Babylonian court cooking of around the mid-second-millennium BC “the oldest cuisine in the world”. But the first special ingredient was probably served hundreds of thousands of years earlier at cannibal feasts. A taste for fellow species-members’ brains, ritually extracted from carefully butchered victims, was a peculiar — perhaps a defining — feature of the hominids from whom we are descended. No other mammal — not even chimpanzees, which have occasionally been known to resort to what looks like pathological cannibalism — does anything quite like this. Yet the bones of cannibal banquets underlie the stones of just about every civilisation. In historic times, cannibals have rarely eaten people for sustenance or survival. The usual motive is to appropriate magical or moral qualities from the food, or, in some cultures, to dispose of the dead with reverence. So most cannibal meals are splendid, ceremonial occasions, which confer or confirm special status among the partakers. The Coke and crisps in the Tucson bin-liners begin to look a little less dyspeptic by comparison and could almost be called fruits of progress.
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We know nothing of other socially differentiating food ways until agrarian civilisations started generating enormous and reliable food surpluses. It then became essential for rulers and the rich to find other methods than mere excess for making their feasts seem special. This is probably how table etiquette at court arose, along with elaborate cooking methods and ingredients valued for rarity. No courtly recipe books survive from Ancient Egypt, though we get glimpses of what are probably pharaonic foodstuffs in medical prescriptions concerning diet. A doctor in Crocodilopolis recommended minced pigeon cooked with liver, fennel, chicory and iris as a specific for stomach ache. Chinese sources yield an early recipe for marinaded carp, and poetic texts allude to “yellow heron and black crane, sliced with peppered herbs into millet pies”, or “pickled suckling pigs and the flesh of newborn puppies floating in liver sauce, with radish salad and Indian spices ”.
Only Mesopotamia, however, yields anything like a corpus of recipes from as early as the second millennium BC. You will not be able to reproduce them faithfully, even with the aid of a guide as conscientious as Bottéro: there are untranslatable terms in all of them. But you can get the general idea. Royal cooks browned meat or birds before braising in water laced with fat. They thickened the sauce with blood, and flavoured it with a paste of mashed garlic and leek and, au choix , with onion or turnip, butter or buttermilk, coriander or cumin, mint or milk.
Now the tradition inaugurated by the court cooks of Ancient Mesopotamia is dying. The last haute cuisine, crafted by Escoffier before the First World War, was smothered by truffles and cream and glistening, debauched reductions. Cuisine minceur began to starve out this style in the 1970s. Now gastronomes’ gullets rage for Mediterranean simplicity and the artisanal products of provincial cookery. The Connaught, London’s last temple of grand hotel cuisine, has been Gordon-Ramsayfied. The Côte Basque in Manhattan has re-opened as a bistro. Lancashire hotpot has invaded the Ritz. In many Western homes, the microwave seems to be driving people back to the pre-social eating habits of our ancestors, with generations abandoning the common table and eating alone, under video monitor, like some primitive scavenger gobbling under a rock. A new generation of chefs, led by Ferran Adriá at Roses in Catalonia, and represented in England by Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck at Bray, is working on a repertoire of dishes that owes little to tradition, much to globalisation, and more to culinary technology. Few can afford their work, and as far as I know there are no research teams picking through their middens, but the archaeologists of the future are in for a treat.
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The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia is published by The University of Chicago Press, £16