Sohla Makes the Oldest Recipe in the World (...maybe?) | Ancient Recipes With Sohla

so this ancient recipe it wasn't super specific it said two bunches of stinging nettles some venison and a cup of barley so uh i'm feeling that sting should i wear gloves they wouldn't have had gloves back then should i return to the spoon hey there i'm sola alwayly and this is ancient recipes with sola in each episode we take a dish you may recognize and attempt to recreate one of the oldest versions of it to ever exist so it's a little cooking a little history and a whole lot of me what's not to love [Music] all right in this episode we are going back further than we ever have before beyond ancient rome beyond stonehenge even beyond ancient egypt yes we are going back 8 000 years all the way to the stone age to recreate the oldest recipe ever well maybe we think so it's like really really old so we're going to go with it what we are going to make is a type of nettle and barley pudding now you know the ancient recipes deal by now this pudding is nothing like an american pudding no and also in britain the word pudding is used differently than it is here in the states the way they're using it here is meaning anything boiled in the gut like sausage or haggis so this recipe is really just a boiled ball of weeds [Music] so the recipe that we're making today is based on one that a group of researchers worked on in 2007 when they were trying to learn more about food history in the uk so they combine archaeological evidence a little experimentation research to get to this and it's basically a lot of greens so these are herbs that they would have foraged back then and they're going to all go into this pudding here we've got some sorrel which is a really lemony tart bright green it's really different whether you get young soil or old sorrel so when it's nice and tender you can just eat it like a salad and when they get older they're a little bit more tough but they cook down really tender so it's a lot like kale or collard when they get older we've also got some stinging nettles here which are named that because they have these little they're almost like little needles that prick you and drop little bits of histamine into your skin so you get super itchy but don't worry as soon as you apply a little bit of heat that stinging ability it just goes away and the great thing about them is they're super nutritious they do kind of taste like spinach and much like spinach they're very high in iron there's also going to be chives which we know and love everybody knows a chive dandelion greens which dandelion greens have been used like forever they're pretty much everywhere and the cool thing about them is you can eat all of the dandelion green you can eat the leaves you can eat the flowers you can eat the roots people roast the roots and make something that kind of tastes like coffee but with no caffeine they're going to add some nice bitterness here and they're super nutritious half a cup of dandelion greens have as much calcium as a glass of milk and some watercress watercress is related to wasabi and mustard so it's gonna be nice and peppery so even though it's a bunch of greens there's a lot of distinct flavors happening here we've got we've got the bright acidicness the bitter the peppery the oniony and the spinachy so i think that's going to be great so this recipe comes to us from the mesolithic era where people were starting to get into settlements and do a little bit of farming but people were mostly hunters and gatherers so that's why we have all these gathered greens so here i have some dry barley we've soaked this barley overnight and now i'm going to crush it this is going to really help bind everything together otherwise it's really just herbs another dish that the britons ate around the same time that you'd find this one is hedgehog with cinnamon sauce which i don't even think i've seen a hedgehog outside of sonic there was a bread made with barley that was found in the later stone age so it is possible that they would have had that bread with this meal [Music] gift went off camera to smash my barley all right so now i'm going to chop up some venison to mix in with my barley and herbs they probably didn't have knives right stone age they would have just smashed but you know i've done enough smashing for the day i'm gonna do like a tartar mints here nice and fine chop it up and then this is going to get mixed up with everything else and then we're going to boil it okay so i'm going to give this a nice chop this is really nice lean venison i think it's going to taste pretty good so far like everything in this i have no problem with barley all of these herbs are fantastic who doesn't love venison the thing that gets a little scary is when we put it inside of the beef bun they might have used a stomach we tried to find a stomach but we could not find one but i think that they might have used like a sheep stomach or a lamb stomach i don't know do they have lamb back then a smaller animal not like a cow or an ox because they have very large stomachs it's almost like this is a precursor to haggis haggis a lot of people give it a bad rep but i think it's pretty delicious you take all of the innards of rabbit or sheep and you mix it up with some oats some seasoning and you boil it inside of a stomach and uh i don't know i think it's good if you like black pudding and stuff oh do you know what black pudding is that's the sausage that's made out of blood it's also delicious i i think that i may be into this i'm getting a little excited talking about all of the stuffed puddings i already know about but funny thing so in england the word pudding yes it can mean something stuffed inside of a gut like haggis but it also refers to any dessert with no creamy pudding vibes at all you know like stiffy sticky toffee pudding in america that's a cake in england that's the pudding uh what are other english dessert mince meat pie they call that a pudding here it's a pie everything's a pudding over there you know this is already looking really good i would season that up with like a quail egg a little mustard some mustard seeds i think that would make a really good tartare okay we're gonna continue our smashing our folding or chopping gif went off camera to smash my barley and he has returned okay so now i guess we're just gonna mix it all up and shove it inside of a beef bun so there's you can get different kinds of fix thicknesses widths no you can get different widths of sausage casing so like uh when you see a really skinny um merguez that's a sheep's casing a little bit bigger you got hog beef bunk is the biggest one around that's like reserved for mortadella so this is gonna be a honkin piece of puddin okay i feel good about that and i'm just gonna flop this right into my barley let's throw this guy in there too and we shall begin to mix this up in here i've got my barley i've got my venison now i'm gonna add my herbs so here are my peppery dandelion greens you can probably find these in your own yard and if you do really get in there and eat them because they're delicious watercress nice they definitely would have had a lot of things with watercress watercress is also one of these things that's just like all over the place and ah the lemony tart sorrel just perks everything right up the fancy restaurants have made soil really cool so it's easier to find which i'm really happy about because i love it now our stinging nettles everybody's going in and a little bit of chives and i'm actually going to get in here with my hands and knead this i think that that's what we need to do we'll bring it all together so this ancient recipe it wasn't super specific it said one bunch of dandelion greens one bunch of watercress one bunch of sorrel two bunches of stinging nettles some venison and a cup of barley so uh i'm feeling that sting should i wear gloves they wouldn't have had gloves back then should i return to the spoon perhaps it's prickly okay i'm gonna mash i would use gloves today but they definitely didn't have that i imagine that they just like had a couple of rocks that they smooshed this around in oh gosh okay we switched to a bigger bowl and i'm gonna keep my hands out of this i don't know who would be like this thing really hurts my face let's eat it but you know what they did and it's not a bad thing because it's super nutritious you know what i think would be funny if we did like a call and response and i was like this recipe is so old how old is it this recipe is so old stonehenge was being erected in 3100 bce and this recipe is 3000 years older than that huh okay okay all right this recipe is so old it dates back to the mesolithic era where most people are hunters and gatherers and just eating weeds and tubers okay how about another one okay this recipe is so old back when people were eating this they even had harder teeth for all the tough things they were chewing i don't know that wasn't great um i just need to mash a little more and then we're stuffing it and we're boiling it and we're eating it it's all gonna happen okay so now it's time for the fun part this mixture is gonna get shoved inside of this beef bun beef bun is the polite term for beef intestine delicious delicious okay the last time i worked with this stuff was in culinary school so uh we'll see how this goes we we went with beef bun because we couldn't find the stomach and because it is the biggest of the casings the largest in the casing family it should be the easiest to stuff where do i begin i'm gonna you know i'm gonna just prep it a little you know so we can ease our way inside maybe let's uh use this spoon to get us going you know whoa i got this okay delightful this is how they make sausage so that's why this was easy to find we still use this stuff today don't get grossed out you've eaten beef bun probably and you don't even know it now what's crazy is archaeologists have found human remains in that great britain area that go back 500 000 years but because of ice ages and freezing tundra climates people haven't actually been able to settle there permanently until 9 500 bce the nice thing about this beef bun i gotta say unlike sheep's casing it's sturdy it is like it is not uh ripping on me i was afraid of it like ripping and tearing but we're doing okay we're doing okay [Music] oh boy oh you know what else happened during the stone age that's when we started to find people using pottery you know clay pots and stuff for storing and cooking food they actually found some fragments of pottery in china that go back 20 000 years so yeah man people have been cooking in pots for a long time this does not smell good can you smell it from over there oh yeah okay oh this is when everybody tuned turns off we just need them to watch 75 of this video to get the view so we'll just start this after 75 percent you know oh gosh i haven't torn it yet which is exciting i wonder if i should take this beef bun home for my own projects what else can we shove inside of here is that going to be the merch what else can we shove inside of here it's so sturdy i am shocked but you know back then when they were hunter hunters and gatherers they like had to track this animal down get together in a group throw rocks at it until it died you're not wasting any part of it you're gonna use that beef bun okay i think i've got enough here let's begin the stuffing oh come on buddy okay that was exciting all right i'm gonna trim it right here and we're going to stuff that much of it that feels like the size of a sheep's stomach okay here we go so i'm just going to start shoving stuff inside of here you know i feel like this beef bun could make a great like ancient purse it's very sturdy you could keep your stones in there oh yeah how many times can i save beef bun today it is so sturdy i am so impressed i did not know there was something made inside of an animal's body that was this tough cows you know they give us leather they give us beef bun [Music] i think beef bone purses is going to be the future we should get the trademark on that so i think i need just a little more sorry guys it'll be over soon i mean i don't know why i'm apologizing i'm the one that's touching it okay this seems like i mean this is a really smart way to like cook your food you know you can mash up a whole bunch of stuff and turn it into something nutritious this regardless of how this tastes this is going to be super nutritious i mean we've got lots of vitamins and minerals from our greens we got protein we got collagen from that beef bun people nowadays pay for a lot pay a lot for like packets of collagen he could just eat beef bun that's what it's made out of collagen okay i think this feels good to me i'm gonna tie this baby up and then we're gonna simmer this until it feels nice and firm i'm not totally sure how long it's gonna take because this is not a recipe i've made before but you know ancient times i don't think they were looking for like precise temperatures like mid-rare they're probably just cooking it until it was cooked so that's what i'm gonna do okay so if you are gonna do this at home and you don't happen to have beef bun or stomach lying around you can just take this same mixture and tie it up in a sturdy fabric like a few layers of cheese cloth or muslin and then try the same thing because i actually think regardless of how the beef bun looks or smells right now i think this is going to be tasty all right we are gonna tie her up and then let it simmer you know right now it's just a nice little sausage big sausage big hunk and sausage you know some people say that cheese was invented because they put milk inside of a sheep's stomach to store it and then that's where they discovered rennet renit comes from the lining of a sheep's stomach and that's the stuff that helps milk coagulate and become cheese by accident they were just trying to they just made a little water bottle you know for their milk and then boom cheese one of the greatest inventions of mankind okay we did it oh it was a journey but we got there so now that i've got my bun all tied up i'm going to toss it in some boiling water and cook it up we can toss the old bung around [Music] hey that's not terrible okay all right so here is our beef bun it kind of plumped up during the simmering but that sturdy sturdy bug held it all together i think okay so what's crazy is it had like a really funky smell when it was raw but after cooking it i kind of just taste or i kind of just after cooking it i kind of just smell greens you know what i mean almost like a spanakopita you know what i think it's kind of cute doesn't that look like an audi like a belly button okay i am gonna slice into this bad boy but like i don't know maybe back then they just ate it like a hand fruit right just walking around eating your nettle and barley pudding ooh slice is nice huh huh come on so far surprising okay we have to do a very dramatic reveal you guys ready hey that looks pleasant inside okay okay when i cut into it i get more like cat food vibes but i think that's the venison being cooked for so long venison does have a tendency to get gamey when you cook it for a long time we tempt it the internal temperature of this because you know we have the capability to be food safe so we're going for it it cooked to 180 which is very high for venison but okay gotta say when you get a beautiful cross section like that that's kind of cute i guess it's time there's no more stalling the texture is really nice it just slices really really well a lot like a blood pudding i'm i'm going for a small cube you know i'm to start small hmm all right [Music] first thought it's bland it needs a lot of salt but it tastes like it would be delicious i mean i get a lot of like the long cooked greens that's the like first flavor that comes through the flavor of the venison isn't even that strong it's more barley it's very very barley forward i'm getting i'm not getting any like specific green it's just like combo of greens all together you know like when you make um cuckoo sabzi or you know a spanakopita that's kind of the vibe i'm getting or even like long cooked collards but the venison is more just a texture and it's just really greens and barley no not that bad once you get past the idea that this is inside of this beef bun thing it's actually it doesn't taste that bad it's really just barley lots of greens and then you get the texture of the meat um i think that if you were to like sear this up get it nice and crispy on both sides and add a good bit of salt this would be perfectly delicious i mean would i make it again maybe but i wouldn't go through the trouble of getting the beef bun it doesn't really add any flavor it's more just like looks cool i think you can make this inside of like a cloth and then it would be perfectly delicious but um hey what a surprise i was not looking forward to this one but it ended up pretty good i guess they wrote down these recipes for a reason if you liked what you saw today be sure to like and subscribe and hit us up in the comments if there are any other ancient or vintage recipes you want to see me try out and i'll see you later you

Channel: HISTORY

Views: 324,006

Keywords: history, history channel, history shows, history channel shows, the history channel, documentary history channel, history documentary, documentary, history channel full episodes, documentaries, history channel documentaries, sohla, sohla el-waylly, ancient recipes, cooking shows, cooking, cooking history, historical cooking, culinary history, recipes, kitchen, bon appetit, binging with babish, babish, how to cook, oldest recipe in the world, nettle pudding, how to cook nettles, pies

Id: by8WDtgE_Dc

Length: 21min 53sec (1313 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021