About

Hello, my name is Luise. I’m an archaeologist and in my free time I love to try out new old recipes (which do not always taste as I had planed…)

Recipes from foreign cultures have always been exciting to me: Tasting exotic fruits and dishes prepared with unknown spices. The delicious smell escaping from pots and ovens of market stalls, while people are bargaining in some language that I do not understand. Whenever I enjoyed the taste of such an exotic dish, I tried to recreate the recipe at home.

Recreating Mediterranean Bronze Age cuisines gives me the opportunity to travel back in time and take a closer look at cultures long bygone. These recipes are a unique window to the habits and tastes of the people of the past and allow me to step a little bit into their shoes.

When I am not setting my kitchen on fire, I study archaeology and history at the University of Munich. I was born into a family of gardeners, and as a child I loved exploring the forests and meadows of Bavaria with my mum, brother and aunts during my summer holidays. We collected berries to make jam, herbs and eatable flowers for salads, or mushrooms, nuts and anything else we could find. Although I was a rather picky child and refused to eat unknown things, I fondly remember a lasagna my aunt made using weeds she had collected while working. I still remember this today, patiently waiting for her to make it again. Nowadays, I love trying every strange dish I come across in other countries.

With this blog, I want to recreate some of the recipes from the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean. These dishes offer me completely new experiences – and hopefully you, too – and an exciting glimpse into past peoples’ lives. For me, experimenting with such a basic thing as cooking is a way of feeling closer to the people of the past and enables a better understanding of their sensory experiences. Of course, my recipes can only be an interpretation of what we know today about cooking in the past and they are not meant to understand as exact recreations of past dishes. However, looking at archaeological findings, historical sources, illustrations and other scientific research enables us to get an idea of the ingredients and make it possible for me to develop recipes.

A lot of the scientific background has been provided by Prof. Dr. Philipp Stockhammer from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the team of his ERC project “FoodTransforms”. He and his colleagues are searching for food residues in Bronze Age vessels and human dental calculus from the 2nd millennium BC Eastern Mediterranean using scientific methods.

Now enjoy reading the Blog and try out the recipes while hopefully not setting the kitchen on fire!