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FRASIER’S FRIDAY FACT

Volume CDXXXI

11/27/25

Hello everyone,

Happy Friday! Welcome back to Frasier's Friday Fact, where we cherish knowledge and continually build our mental database of useless information to use at parties.

I hope many of you are enjoying a relaxing Friday after Thanksgiving, working your hardest to digest the large meal from yesterday. Whether you stuck with the old staples of the holiday or tried something new, chances are that you reached for a recipe at some point.

Recipes are a fantastic cultural exchange, and a way to pass down knowledge from generation to generation. And they have been around a long time. The oldest written recipe we have discovered is nearly 4,000 years old. On cuneiform tablets stored at the Yale University Babylonian Collection, archaeologists have discovered recipes for stews and broths that would have been common in the ancient Mesopotamian region.

Unfortunately, the recipes are not very instructive - akin to trying to get your Nonna to document all the steps in her red sauce. They are more a list of ingredients - it reads something along the lines of: “Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. You crush and add leek and garlic.”

Maybe give it a try next thanksgiving!

Stay eating, my friends.

Fraish