Comment by dvh
17 hours ago
Apparently their beets looked the same as ours:
> The kind of beets used in such an ancient recipe should not be different from the beets we use today, even in name. We read in Dictionary of Assyrian Botany (by Campbell Thompson, 1948) that in the ancient Mesopotamian region it was called ‘shumundar,’ it was as red as blood, and has a spinning-top shape (pp. 49, 51).
In arabic they are called "Shamandar"
Intresting. In Hindi/urdu it’s called “chukandar”
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If it's any consolation, their lambs were nothing like ours.
This period is early enough that sheep weren't yet sheared.
Oh! So were sheep just for meat back then?
Maybe also for leather?
And in nature sheep drop their coats without shearing.
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No, the sheep were harvested for wool, but not by shearing. When they shed, we picked the shed wool from them.
Modern sheep grow their wool continuously, but that took a while to breed in.
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The recipe is also similar to Hamedh [0], a delicacy in Iraqi and Baghdadi Jewish households. The only major difference is the addition of tomatoes thanks to the Columbian Exchange, and rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet.
On that note, in Arabic, Farsi, and Hindustani the word for Tomato is essentially shared (tumatar/tamatimu) with the English word "tomato".
But anyhow, a lot of home cooking and traditional meals actually have a pretty long history.
[0] - https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2000/12/12/hamad-iraqi-b...
> rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet
Surprisingly it was still imported in surprising quantities nearly 1000 years before it started to be cultivated. Not significant enough quantities for it to be a common staple, but still an interesting tidbit
One day, someone - someone like you, maybe, someone with the Hacker Nature - was looking at the rice they'd bought and thought "You know what, it just *cannot* be all that difficult to just grow this stuff here, it costs a fortune to import. How hard can it possibly be?"
So they set to digging irrigation trenches, and had a go at it, and maybe a couple of shitty harvests later they'd got the trick nailed.
And here we are.
Actually, in Persian, tomato is literally translated as “western plum”. This is common in our language as we usually say “western” or “foreign” as a prefix to many things that were introduced to Iran (strawberries, sit-style toilets, etc)
As an aside, tomatoes are golden apples (pomodoro), and oranges are Chinese apples (Apfelsin) in some languages.
A lot of cultures appear to name botanicals using apples or, in GP’s context, stone fruit as “reference” points.
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Chinese does the same thing, using prefixes like 西 (western), 番 (foreign), and 洋 (foreign) for introduced items.
For tomatoes, interestingly, it has two common names that follow this pattern: 西紅柿, literally translated as "Western Red Persimmon", and 番茄, literally translated as "Foreign Eggplant".
Other produce examples include 番薯 (Foreign Yam) for sweet potato, 西瓜 (Western Melon) for watermelon, 洋蔥 (Foreign Onion) for bulb onion etc.
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Interesting, in various European languages those tend to be "Turkish": turkey hens (the bird called turkey now), Turkish corn (maize), Turkish beans (long beans).
Again, trade routes.
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Austrians call tomatoes Paradeiser, from an older word for Paradise.
There is a bird native to the Americas which in English is called the turkey, from its original name "Turkey fowl", because it was thought to come from "the east" of which Türkiye is the country with which most Europeans were familiar (due to being the closest). In Turkish, the bird's name references India ("hindi"); the same is true of other languages such as French ("dinde", from "poule d'inde", chicken of India).
Appreciate the clarification!
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In the Levant we use the word بندورا "bindora" in Arabic for tomato.
Huh. Like Pomodoro. That makes sense.
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