The World That Was - Savoury Hittite Porridge

Hello and Welcome to The World That Was!


This week, I'll be taking a quick look at a dish from the Hittites - a stew known from Assyrian sources as "a broth of pulses". Since this is a very vague description (even by bronze age source standards), I'll be basing my version off of with what we know about Hittite eating habits!


In any case, let's now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above!


Ingredients

1 onion, minced

½ cup broad beans (also known as broad beans or butter beans)

½ cup chickpeas, soaked overnight

½ cup lentils

½ cup yellow split peas

½ cup bulgur wheat

½ cup pearl barley

2 tbsp butter

1 tbsp cumin cumin

fresh Rosemary or Thyme

4 cups water or stock


Method

1 - Chop and Cook Onion

To begin with, toss two tablespoons of butter into a large pot, before placing it over a medium heat. While this is melting, finely mince an onion, before tossing this into the butter when it's melted. Let this cook away for a couple of minutes.


2 - Cook the Pulses

When the onions have turned translucent, we need to toss in a half a cup of broad beans (or lima beans, butter beans, or kidney beans. There's a lot of beans you can use here) into our pot, along with a half a cup of chickpeas, a half a cup of yellow split peas, a half a cup of pearl barley, and your spices - a tablespoon of ground cumin, and coriander seeds, if you have them.

Stir this around in the butter and onions over a high heat for a few minutes, until the pulses start to brown and the spices turn fragrant.


3 - Add Broth and Cook

When the pulses are browned slightly, pour 1 litre of water (or broth) into the pot. Toss a couple of sprigs of rosemary or thyme on top of this, and bring everything to a boil. When it hits a boil, turn the heat down to low, and let it simmer away for about an hour.


Your stew should be done when it starts to look like a porridge. Fish out the sprigs of rosemary, before serving up in a bowl of your choice. Eat it with a bit of bread.


The finished dish is very simple, but extremely fragrant and herbal. It's packed full of protein, and is also very filling. The herbs used are ones commonly found in the region - but really any available aromatics would work well, as they would have been used by people in the Bronze Age frequently. This stew is one of those dishes that can be cooked for hours at a time, with ingredients being added at will - so really this could be interpreted as a rudimentary pottage. Hittite cuisine was based around apples, onions, and pulses - more so than their contemporary civilisations in Mesopotamia, due to the climate of Anatolia favouring these crops than the grains and cereals of the floodplains of Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age.

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