The World That Was - Savoury Hittite Applesauce

Hello and Welcome to The World That Was

Today, I'll be making a recipe based on fragmentary records of Hittite banquets. The Hittites were a population (and empire) located in Turkey, Syria, and Northern Mesopotamia, around the 14th millennium BC! This is a savoury applesauce, in contrast to sweet applesauce that is common today. As the recipe is based on only a few fragmentary ingredients, we'll have to take a few educated guesses.

Let's take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube recipe above!

Ingredients:

1 onion (finely sliced)

3 apples (peeled, cored, and chopped)

2 tablespoons butter

1 teaspoon marjoram/oregano (or za'atar, if you have it)

120ml / 1/2 cup water 

Method

1 - Prepare the Apples

To begin making this applesauce, we need to start with apples. I'd recommend using some green cooking apples - like Granny Smith, or Bramley - but any apple that isn't overly sweet or too bitter would work fine. Peel the skin from about three of these, and cut out the core of them. Then, roughly chop these into pieces, each about as big as your thumb. Remember to keep them all roughly the same size, so they'll cook evenly.

2 - Prepare the Pot

Toss three or four tablespoons of butter into the pot and put this over a medium-high heat for a few minutes, until the butter starts to melt. Don't let this get too hot, or you'll wind up making browned butter at best - which is actually delicious, but not what we're looking for here - or burnt butter at worst, which is just bad.

3 - Chop the Onion

Next, finely chop a yellow onion. It sounds out of place for applesauce, based on modern perceptions of applesauce, but still. Toss your diced onion into your pot with the butter, and cook this for about 5 minutes, or until the onion starts to turn transparent at the edges.

4 - Mix the Ingredients

When the onions are done, add your chopped and cored apples to the pot, along with a small amount of water, maybe 120ml or a half cup of water. Cover this all with a lid, and place it onto medium-high heat for about 15-20 minutes. Keep stirring this every few minutes, to make sure nothing is sticking to the pot and burning. The apples should break down into a soft mixture in this time.

5 - Season

Your Hittite Applesauce will be done when it looks like this! Before you take it out of the pot, pour about a tablespoon's amount of fresh marjoram/oregano into it and mix it up. If you don't have that, you can use some Za'atar. But if you don't have that, then some thyme and marjoram/oregano will work as a quick substitute. In any case, stir this all together, before serving up! It's quite thick and lumpy, so if you're not too enticed by that, you can blend this all using an immersion blender, or food processor to make a smooth, much more appealing spread.

Since we have no context for how this was eaten, I tried using it on a flatbread, and it was actually pretty nice - completely at odds with how I thought it would turn out. It's sort of the halfway point between sweet and savoury, and would go great with some roasted meat or vegetables. The Hittites had lists of laws and regulations regarding apple groves and onion harvests, so this is an interpretation of what these populations may have served up for feasts - or perhaps a votive offering!