How Cavemen Ate: Cookbook Reveals 77 Recipes Stretching Right Back To The Stone Age (And They Taste Surprisingly Good!)

By Eddie Wrenn

PUBLISHED: 09:54 EST, 4 May 2012 | UPDATED: 09:58 EST, 4 May 2012  

Fancy something new for dinner tonight? Well if you don’t fancy a Chinese or a Thai, researchers have pulled together 77 recipes which were eaten during the Stone Ages.

And the surprise is how delicious the recipes, some of them 16,000 years old, sound – with your typical Neolithic families spicing up their meals and using plenty of fresh fruit and herbs along with the simmering main dishes of game.

A Culinary Journey Through Time can join Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay on the bookshelves of adventurous cooks, with recipes such as pepper sausage with pine nuts, spicy bread containing goat cheese, bay leaves and aniseed, and cucumber layered with mint and vinegar.

The recipes are organised by season, and combine menus from the Stone Age, the days of the Romans, and recipes from the Vikings and Middle Age chefs.

While many recipes are labour-intensive, and require obscure ingredients like ‘liquamen’ – a preservative made from salt, fish, oregano and apple juice – they can provide a challenge for those who can stomach it.

The menus were compiled bu three Danish archaeologists, based on evidence such as cookware, art depicting meal-times, and analysis of bones and plan material found in cooking pots from the eras.

Reporter Sara Reardon, writing for New Scientist, gave some of the recipes a go, and gave them the Stone Age version of the thumbs-up. 

She enjoyed the experience, despite some reservations, such as: ‘Never before have I seen a recipe that called for an entire cup of salt, but I’m fairly certain that the bottle of liquamen in my fridge will never spoil.

‘Yet many recipes are quite simple: desserts throughout the past 16,000 years seem to have involved only fruit and honey, and unassuming porridge appears to have been a staple in every culture.’

She added: ‘Inspired by the book, I had to try preparing some of the dishes, selecting a few recipes from those Roman celebrity chefs whose custom of cooking on grids over a fire was easily replicated in my apartment kitchen.

‘The Vikings, by contrast, hung heavy pots over their fires and earlier peoples threw their meat and pots into pits of heated stones – that, I decided, was a task for another weekend.’

She tried cooking a Roman menu of pepper sausage with pine nuts, with Alexandrian cucumber, layered with mint and vinegar, and mustea – the spicy bread containing goat cheese, bay leaves and aniseed.

And then, for fun, some ‘anachronisms’: Medieval chicken in red wine sauce and a Viking dessert cookie made with honey.

She reported: ‘The results were variable. The chicken was excellent; stuffed with shallots and mushrooms, it was not unlike a modern-day recipe.

‘The exotic mustea, with cheese baked into hard rolls balanced on bay leaves, was probably the most popular dish.

‘Stuffing sausage meat into a raw intestine by hand, however, turned out to be a rather arduous task, and the final result was less than appetising.’

She warned: ‘It is difficult to tell at first glance which recipes will work out well. Measurement units are inconsistent even within recipes, oven temperatures often nonexistent, and I can’t instinctively guess whether mugwort leaves will go well with my wild hare.’

www.dailymail