The date and pistachio confection of the Old Babylonian palace kitchens, dates pounded with green pistachios and clarified butter, bound with toasted barley flour and pressed into a cake
Origin: Ur, Mari and Babylon, Mesopotamia (modern Iraq)
From the journey of Date.
Mersu is among the oldest dishes anyone can still cook. It is named repeatedly in cuneiform administrative tablets of the early second millennium BCE, in the palace records of Mari on the middle Euphrates and in temple accounts from the southern cities, listed as an offering, a ration, and a delicacy issued to officials. The tablets are inventories rather than recipes, so what survives is a list of what went into it: dates, pistachios, clarified butter, and at times figs, raisins, cheese, and flour. That is enough to reconstruct honestly, because those four principal ingredients only assemble one way. Dates give the sugar and the body, pistachios the fat and the green colour, butter the binding, and a little toasted flour keeps the paste from being cloying. Every one of them was a Mesopotamian staple: the palm and the barley from the irrigated south, the pistachio from the Zagros foothills to the north-east, and the butter clarified because unclarified butter has no future in an Iraqi summer. The dish belongs to a family that has never gone away. The Arabian hais, the Gulf mafrookah, and the Iraqi date paste that fills a kleicha are all the same idea, and they are all doing what the Babylonians were doing: turning a fruit that keeps into a food that also carries fat and protein, in a form that will travel and will not spoil. This version leans on Jean Bottéro's work on the Mesopotamian kitchen tablets and on the ration lists themselves. It is a reconstruction and says so, but it is a reconstruction with no invented ingredients in it.
Dates were the sugar of Mesopotamia and the tablets do not distinguish varieties, so use whatever is good. A firm Zahidi gives a chewier cake, a Medjool a softer one. Clarified butter is not a modern refinement here. Butter was clarified in Mesopotamia precisely because it had to keep, and the ration lists specify it. The figs, raisins, and cheese appear in some tablets and not in others, which suggests mersu was a category rather than a fixed formula. Cheese has been left out of this version because the surviving evidence gives no guidance on what kind, but a dry, salty, crumbled curd is a defensible addition and takes the dish very close to the Arabian hais. Barley flour is more likely to be authentic than wheat and is worth seeking out. Plain flour works. The Akkadian word rendered here as pistachio, buṭnu, is read by most scholars as Pistacia vera, but a minority identify it with the terebinth, Pistacia atlantica, whose small resinous nut was also eaten in the ancient Near East. The dish works either way; the pistachio is the safer and far more available reading.
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