Did the ancient Egyptians have any eleaborate recipes? Or did they eat mainly plain foods. I expect thattheir diet was heavily slanted toward bread-they were probably the firt people to mass produce bread. What about vehetables? What crops did they grow?
Have any cookbooks from the era survived?
Lots of ancient history today, eh? There are no ancient egyptian cookbooks that I’m aware of (in the western world I’m pretty sure the earliest recipe compendiums that we would think of as cookbooks are Roman, such as* De Re Coquinaria*. Art and archaeology (in the form of mummified and carbonized) foodstuffs have provided a good bit of information, however.
Outside of the elite, the diet was based on wheat or barley bread (The wheat species used were mainly different than our bread wheat), which was fairly dense and flat, coarsely-ground with a touch of grit, and beer, which was rather thick, sort of like a cold alcoholic porridge. These were supplemented with vegetables and legumes. Most people didn’t eat a lot of meat; I’ve read a study of butchery patterns from animal bones found at the worker’s settlement at Amarna (I think) which concluded that the people butchering the animals weren’t very good at it and probably hadn’t had a lot of practice. There’s a relief sculpture (can’t find a good photo of it, unfortunately) of a worker having what was probably a typical meal: he’s eating bread, onions, and cucumbers. Probably would have been better with a bit of cheese, but HMMV.
