The Ancient Mesopotamian Tablet as Cookbook

Like most premodern cooking manuals, the Babylonian recipes rarely list the quantities of each ingredient, and so basic experimentation is needed to determine viable proportions for the assembly of a dough or the salting of a stew. The tablet with the stew recipes abbreviates instructions to a minimum, and nouns are not always inflected in the correct grammatical case, not unlike many modern food recipes. We know from other texts that the cakes could be spicy and variously scented, but because nothing is specified by the recipe, we chose a neutral option to intrude the least on the overall taste of the dish.

Source: www.laphamsquarterly.org