Is anyone here into reconstructing lost ancient dishes?

They tried.

I too am interested in lost cuisines and recipes as they give you an idea of life back in the days (not meaning that these dishes are better than what we eat nowadays)
In a museum I once read about roman dish with honey-glazed rats. It sounds kinda disgusting and at the same time interesting

Examples? I thought the average person only ate shitty meats, grains, vegetables and plain yogurt. The only dishes I know of are stews, and those I know of are low-effort as fuck.

please get help
you sound forensically ill

Rodents aren't unheard of in older cuisines. I can't imagine it being too bad, provided it's sanitary.

Some Russians top chefs are currently reviving traditional pre communism era foods, its really interesting to see

In country where Im from, there's been a surge in chefs relearning old imperial recipes and bringing it in more modern way, it's not for average plebs to do though desu, as some ingredients can either very rare or expensive

Sure, I actually am curious about them

Amerindian dishes would be difficult since the only known written language was Mayan and they weren't documenting recipes. By the time ethnographers arrived on the scene the indigenous populations had already assimilated techniques and ingredients from the Europeans. I suppose as you said there are isolated pockets of peoples still maintaining traditional methods although I suspect they're hard to find. I know in North America some tribes are reviving the old ways and there are even some websites that present recipes that are supposedly precontact.

Thanks OP, I've been recently interested in this stuff myself. I remember a recipe for wine roasted rats. It was used by people in or taking care of a wine cellar. Literally all it was: capture a rat. Roast to size, letting the consumed wine act as flavor. Something very comfy about that. I also found a mustard recipe online that was supposedly from the apicius. It's very good, but I don't know if I buy the whole Roman-ness of it.

It is difficult. The Mesoamerica and South America regions are much easier than the US + Canada regions because things were better documented and there's more indigenous people still around. Though as you pointed out, the fact that there are still a lot of indigenous villages isn't nearly as helpful as it should be. Many of these communities do not have modern infrastructure (e.g. no internet) and there is widespread racism against them so little effort is made in documenting their culture/cuisine even now.

In general there was an effort NOT to document indigenous cultures unless it was for another purpose (like informing people abroad or helping with religious conversion). It also doesn't help that Mayans had a written language since almost all of their books were collected and burned (and as a result we now know less about the Maya than other groups who passed on their knowledge through song-poems).

For sources you can find stuff sometimes talked about in important events (e.g. feasts hosting early European travelers into the Americas), codices (e.g. important religious feasts or historical feasts), song-poems (there's a number of old song-poems that have survived but Amerindian languages use a lot of metaphor, lateral thinking, and stuff like difrasismo which make understanding them difficult). The first cookbooks for many of these cuisines didn't start getting published until the 1800s (e.g. El Cocinero Mexicano, Mexico's first cookbook).

(cont.)

We know very little about Roman cuisine. The best we have is a novel about the Feast of Trimalchio which shows a slave who rose to fame having a party in which he gives his guests food with symbolic reasons according to their zodiac. However, this only shows food at the height of the Roman empire, close to the decline.

Some examples:

Olives
Chickpeas
Chicken testicles
Mushrooms
Prawn
Goat cheese
Duck
Ram testicles
Bull eyeball
Bread (which was religiously coveted at the time, like Adeptus Mechanicus technology)
An entire pig stuffed with sausages. Not what we think though. Like a furry razorback pig no longer than a slave is tall.
Whole fish with Garum sauce
Baked apples with honey.

Romans made extensive use of honey and organ meats.

The biggest thing though, imo, with older Amerindian dishes is that you sometimes have to change the way you think about food and recipes. I'll try to give an example to show what I mean.

When people prepare sandwiches at home they make them out of whatever they think sounds good. Countless sandwiches are invented and forgotten on a daily basis. On the other hand, if you look up sandwiches in a cookbook or on a menu you will find lots of them with recognizable names and thus implied recipes (eg. Reuben, BLT, Philly Cheese Steak, etc...). Now, suppose for a moment that you are a traveler from an advanced civilization. You don't really understand human culture and you're trying to write a cookbook on modern human cuisine. So you asking people for recipes and going out to try things. Eventually you will end up with recipes for some of these named sandwiches in your cookbook (but no general "sandwich" recipe because it's not really a thing in itself).
>A Reuben is a dish comprised of... to prepare it you will need...

Fast forward 200 years when humans have been conquered and assimilated to modern society and your cookbook is one of the primary references for how to cook human food. People no longer make sandwiches the same way their ancestors did. Instead they make variations of Reubens or BLTs. The idea of a sandwich as a general concept now completely gone.

This is similar to what has happened with many Amerindian dishes that have survived onto modern times.
>Enchilada
>Entomatada
>Enmolada
>Enfrijolada
>etc...
Are really all just variations of a simple concept. That of rolling some meats into a tortilla and covering it with a sauce as a dish.

The examples I used above are a little contrived in that they're familiar and easy to understand but the point is that dishes back in the day (when food didn't come from cookbooks and menus) weren't conceptualized in the same way they are now. Sometimes the few things that are obvious don't tell the whole story.

Wait, by consumed wine you mean the wine the rat ate while it invaded your wine cellar?

I've been trying to learn more about food in Asia prior to the Columbian Exchange, but haven't tracked down any recipes.

There is a little reconstruction of cooking utensils, cooking places (especially the special ovens) and dishes at the Hampton palace. Was there 3 years ago. Can't remember very much, but they mentioned special ovens they are trying to reconstruct and medieval preparation of dishes and some medieval bread baking. They were also talking about getting the better parts of the old cuisine back. I don't remember clearly what made the ovens so special, I think it was because of the advanced heat distribution or something like that, likely to make meat tender in a super fast way. Take everything I say with a grain of salt, like mentioned before it was 3 years ago and I wasn't into cooking back then, so I forgot most of it, sadly. But I remember there being a reconstructed feast for lower aristrocats.

I think that was the special oven, pictures are not mine.

...

fried mice

Thanks for the info.

I've been curious about that too. Especially places that make heavy use of chili peppers in their modern cuisine.