Think our current culture has become food-obsessed? Take a look at this wall painting from ancient Egypt.
Long before Food Network, before Michael Pollan, before pop-up restaurants, humans were taking the time to enshrine the art of cooking. The painting depicts a recipe for baking bread that was carved on the wall of an Egyptian tomb some 4,000 years ago.
It's one of the many fascinating snapshots from the history of food that journalist William Sitwell chronicles in his first book, A History of Food in 100 Recipes.
The gastronomic compass guiding Sitwell's journey through time? The recipes, in all forms, left behind by the foodies whose tastes have helped shape the sophistication of our palates.
"I wanted to pinpoint foodie references in history that to me, told a very important part of the story of food," Sitwell tells Morning Edition host Renee Montagne.
Sitwell decided to start with one of the most basic foods, bread. Which is how he ended up in Luxor, Egypt — an ancient capital for pharaohs known in antiquity by its Greek name, Thebes.
"I found myself scrambling up the dusty slopes of a hillside overlooking the Nile in Egypt, where there's this amazing tomb," he says.
That's where he found the carvings in the photo above. Ancient Egyptians filled their tombs with riches they thought would follow them into the afterlife. The fact that someone included a recipe signals just how important it was, he says.
By 1700 B.C., recipes had made the jump from walls to clay tablets — such as this one for a meat and vegetable stew, from ancient Mesopotamia.
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