Invite you to explore the cuisine of ancient Mesopotamia at

The French Culinary Institute

Tuesday, October 21st , 2003

“ What’s Cooking in Mesopotamia?”
by Nawal Nasrallah

With all of the recent tragedies in Iraq, we may forget that Mesopotamia was home to a dazzling, sophisticated civilization with highly advanced arts, including the culinary arts. Mesopotamia gave us the world’s first documented cuisine, with complex recipes incised in clay tablets ca. 1,700 B.C.E. Nawal Nasrallah, who lived in Iraq until 1990, has meticulously researched the history of her homeland’s cuisine around the Tigris and Euphrates and has now lovingly told the story of Iraqi cooking from its earliest records in a splendid new book, Delights from the Garden of Eden: A Cookbook and History of the Iraqi Cuisine (2003). Combining a native’s intimate knowledge of cookery with a scholar’s eye for detail, and drawing extensively on archeological research and contemporaneous literary sources, Ms. Nasrallah weaves a vibrant tapestry of culinary history with recipes that can easily be created in modern American kitchens. Ms. Nasrallah will describe the ingredients, techniques, recipes, and social and religious aspects of the Mesopotamian kitchen to paint an unparalleled insider’s portrait of one of the world’s most ancient cuisines that still reverberates in the Iraqi kitchen today. We will sample Sumerian tannour flat bread with Hummus, taste a Lamb and Dried Apricot Stew, and finish with desserts of date syrup with tahini and the ancient qullupu pastries, all accompanied by beer, the national drink of the ancient Mesopotamians, or bottled water, second best to the pure refreshment of the river Tigris.

Nawal Nasrallah has a Masters of Arts in English and Comparative Literature and taught English and American Literature at Baghdad and Mosul Universities from 1977 through 1990. She has lectured on Mesopotamian and medieval Baghdadi cuisine, as well as the cooking of modern Iraq. She has produced a television program on Mesopotamian baking and has won cooking awards in Bloomington, Indiana and nationally under the aegis of Gourmet Magazine. Delights from the Garden of Eden is her first cookbook.

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