I suppose beer might be a good candidate—it’s Spanish name, cerveza, could be recognizable to a Roman knowing it as cervisia.
But “rice”, “bread”, “noodles”, even “beer” are generic terms. That’s kind of what I was getting at by specifying “named” foods and giving an example of how even “fried rice” was too generic for my criteria of a “named” food.
What I’m talking about isn’t just “what are the most ancient foods eaten”, but something like a food with a name for a specific preparation style or recipe to differentiate it from other related foods of the same type (“Yangzhou fried rice” versus “fried rice” much less just “rice”), or something named for a location associated with that style.
“Lucanica” is a great example because in Latin, it originally designated a type of sausage from the region of Lucania - one that became so very popular that it’s become the legacy name for a range of narrow, smoked sausages across the Mediterranean. It was not a generic term for any old sausage or smoked meat.
“Matzo” is interesting because it designates sheet form unleavened bread that is required eating at Passover, but can be eaten any other time as well and in other shapes, c.f. Matzo Ball Soup as commonly served in many diners in my area, listeda alongside French Onion, Chicken Noodle, and Minestrone. I could well believe that if you brought a box of Manishewitz Matzoh back to King Solomon, and handed it to him at a Passover meal where he demanded some, he wouldn’t complain, except maybe to comment on its regularity of form.
On the other hand, over time, recipes change. The example of the Mayan Papadzules may be something like that; the article linked to by Riemann says “it isn’t clear that this dish was actually made in pre-Hispanic times, at least in the way it is made today”. On the other hand, the differences seem slight enough, and the terminology similar enough, that an ancient Mayan would likely just think of it as a locally different way to make it, rather than think it was weird permutation of a familiar food.
The reason I started thinking about this in the first place was because my son requested not a birthday cake but a birthday Napoleon, or mille-feuille, from our local pastry shop, named “The French Workshop”. I wondered if that meant the dessert was created or named for, or in honor of, Emperor Bonaparte. Instead, the etymology in Wikipedia says it probably came from the French napolitain, designating it a dessert with origins in Naples, which became associated/corrupted with the name of Napoleon during his reign. And that the original version, as described by a French cookbook circa 1800, was filled not with custard but with marmalade or almond paste, which my son would HATE.
So if I were to take his preferred “French” dessert of a “Napoleon” back to the time of Napoleon, they might have a dessert by the same or similar name, but they would not recognize his food by that name!
I think Ba Bao Fan (eight treasure rice) is a pretty good candidate for the winner at 3000 years. Check out the references in the Wikipedia article on ancient dishes linked above. Anything that old it’s going to be hard to definitively separate myth from reality, but its invention is purported to be associated with a real historical battle. And it’s still a common dish today. The pronunciation of Chinese characters will have evolved over time, but that’s going to be true of any language to some degree. The written form is exactly the same in classical texts.
Unless that suffers from the same deficiency as “fried rice.”
Is “milk” too generic? Seems like it was always called something recognisably as the same word.
Would houmous count or not then?