Tuh’u is the kind of dish that reminds you just how long humans have been trying to make life taste a little better. Long before borders, before religion as we know it, before France invented the idea of “cuisine,” there was Mesopotamia. A world of clay tablets, beer-thick mornings, dust, gods, and hunger. And somewhere in that world, bubbling away over a fire, was Tuh’u—one of the earliest stews we can still trace.

Forget marble statues and epic myths. Picture a banquet in Babylon: oil lamps flickering, wine sloshing in clay cups, the air rich with cumin and smoke. Kings lounged on cushions. Commoners ate standing. But both of them—if those ancient tablets are right—knew Tuh’u.

The recipe appears in the Yale Cuneiform Tablets, some of the oldest cookbooks on Earth, written nearly four thousand years ago. And like most ancient recipes, it’s maddeningly vague. A whisper instead of instructions. Just enough to tell you this was meat cooked slow with spices, grains, maybe even fruit. Food meant to last, food meant to comfort, food meant to impress.

The word itself—Tuh’u—still puzzles linguists. Maybe it meant “stewed.” Maybe it meant “softened.” Maybe it meant beetroot. Yeah, beetroot. Some scholars think it could’ve started life as a beet mash cooked with beer and spices, something earthy and sweet—proof that even then, cooks were tinkering, riffing, making dishes their own. Whether meat-heavy or plant-based, Tuh’u wasn’t just calories. It was culture.

And it was eaten everywhere power shifted: Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria. Empires rose and fell, but the food stayed more or less the same. Clay pots. Fire. Beer as broth. Lamb stewed until it surrendered. Onions and garlic thrown in because they make everything better, even the ancient world. Coriander and cumin—still the backbone of the Middle East—perfuming the air. Dates or pomegranates for sweetness because sugar didn’t exist yet. Sesame oil because olives didn’t grow here.

If you make it today—lamb, onions, garlic, beer, pomegranate molasses—you’re not just cooking a stew. You’re time-traveling. You’re dipping a spoon into something a Babylonian king might’ve eaten after declaring a new law, or a temple worker slurped after a day hauling bricks in the sun.

Tuh’u isn’t pretty. It isn’t delicate. It’s not going to appear on a tasting menu in Copenhagen.

But it’s real. It’s ancient. It’s human. A reminder that long before we argued about cuisine or authenticity or who invented what, people were just trying to wrestle flavor out of the world around them—and finding joy in a bowl of something warm at the end of the day.