Drinks by Deity Drinks by Deity - Paperback

The oldest surviving recipe on earth is for beer, and it is a hymn to the goddess who taught it.

Four thousand years old. It has no measurements in it either.

Fifty Mesopotamian figures. Fifty drinks. Not one measurement anywhere in it.

That is the format, not an oversight. No ounces, no shots, no parts, no jigger and no shaker. Every drink here is built in the bottle the mixer came in: you pour some off to make room, you put things in, you put the cap back on and turn it over. Quantity is the container. You already know how to do this.

What replaces the measurement is the flavour. In a measured drink the design lives in the ratios; here it lives in which product and which variant, so every ingredient in this book names one. That is also why the spirit is written generically. It says vodka, or whipped cream vodka, and never a brand, because in a drink carrying candy and fruit punch the bottle you bought is a price signal and not a flavour decision.

Enkidu was a wild man who lived with animals until somebody sat him down with bread and seven jugs of beer, and it was the beer that made him human. He gets Seven Jugs.

Enki got so drunk at a party that he handed over every fundamental power of civilisation to Inanna, one at a time, and spent the next morning trying to get them back by boat. He gets The Hangover.

The drinking straw is in this book as itself. They drank communally from a shared vessel through long straws, and the ones pulled out of the royal graves at Ur are gold. It gets Long Straw.

Every character gets two facing pages and nothing is continued overleaf. Who they were on the left, the drink on the right. You never turn the page in the middle of making something.

Ten of the fifty have no alcohol in them at all and nothing put in their place. They are not shoved in an appendix at the back, because they are characters. They are marked in the contents and listed together at the end for whoever is driving.

Most of these figures have two names, a Sumerian one and an Akkadian one, separated by more time than stands between us and the Romans. Inanna is Ishtar, Utu is Shamash, Enki is Ea. This book uses the Sumerian and names the other at first mention.

One of eight. Norse, Greek, Eldritch, Egyptian, Aztec, Japanese, Polynesian and Mesopotamian.

Gilgamesh went to the end of the world looking for immortality and the first thing he found there was a tavern keeper telling him to go home and enjoy his dinner.