Archaeologists discovered 7,000-year-old focaccia seasoned with animal fats and vegetable oils

Imagine eating freshly baked and seasoned focaccia with your friends and family. No, these aren’t just your upcoming Thanksgiving plans — they’re a 7,000-year-old dining tradition.

The researchers, including those from La Sapienza University of Rome and the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, ​​found that agricultural communities living in the Middle East between 7,000 and 5,000 BC probably baked and consumed large loaves of bread and focaccia seasoned with animal and plant ingredients. derived ingredients. Their findings, detailed in a November 5 article test published in the magazine Scientific reportsstrongly suggests that late Neolithic people in the Fertile Crescent region enjoyed a rich – and clearly delicious – culinary tradition.

“Our study gives a vivid picture of communities using the grains they grow to prepare breads and focaccia enriched with different ingredients and eaten in groups,” said Sergio Taranto from La Sapienza University and lead author of the study at the Autonoma de Barcelona University statement. “The use of the peeling trays we identified leads us to conclude that this late Neolithic culinary tradition developed over approximately six centuries and was practiced across a large area of ​​the Middle East.”

The study found that previous research had already shown that Late Neolithic communities in the region baked loaves with water and flour on husking trays – large, specialized clay trays with low walls, oval bases and intentionally rough interior surfaces designed to to make it easier to remove the baked bread. . Scientists tested this through experimental archeology, using replicas of shelling trays to bake (what’s the point of studying prehistoric bread if you can’t try it yourself?).

As a result of these experiments, the team theorized that late Neolithic bakers placed trays in dome ovens with an initial temperature of 788 degrees Fahrenheit (420 degrees Celsius) for about two hours. Each loaf weighed about 3 kilograms, suggesting that people ate it in a group.

The study also checked whether baking trays can be used to bake cereal-based cakes, possibly seasoned with vegetable oil or animal fat. To determine this, an international team analyzed organic remains in fragments of shelling trays dating from 6400 to 5900 BC from the archaeological sites of Mezraa Teleilat, Akarçay Tepe and Tell Sabi Abyad along the Syrian-Turkish border.

Their analysis suggests that people in the late Neolithic used husking trays to process flour from cereals such as wheat or barley, and some trays to prepare food using animal ingredients such as animal fat. The study found that in one case there was even evidence of plant spices.

Moreover, “the state of decomposition of the residue suggests that in at least two cases the trays reached temperatures consistent with those experimentally verified for baking dough in dome ovens.” In other words, the organic remains apparently confirm that the trays were exposed to temperatures that previous experiments had shown were necessary for baking bread in dome ovens. Scientists also identified wear marks (marks left by the use of an object) on shelling trays associated with leftover bread and seasoned focaccia.

Overall, the study adds to previous findings on late Neolithic bread-making in the Near East by highlighting some of the ingredients processed on shelling trays that likely contributed to a more complex culinary tradition. Basically, people living in modern-day Turkey and Syria have been eating tasty focaccia for as long as 9,000 years before we started buying it from Eataly. That’s just 3,500 years since the end of the last Ice Age and confirms what Italians have always known: focaccia transcends history.