Bread Beer and Tiger nuts

Atlas Obscura has an article on the diet of the ancient Egyptians, and discusses recipes based on tomb paintings. Recipes included.

Workers painted scenes on tomb walls to commemorate the deceased’s accomplishments and to ensure that important ceremonies, from food to burial rituals, would endure in the Field of Reeds, the Egyptian afterlife. Some tomb paintings even included images depicting how workers prepared food......

This detail of a painting from the tomb of Ramses III shows workers preparing spirals of emmer wheat bread. PUBLIC DOMAIN

bread and beer formed the true bedrock of ancient Egyptian cuisine. Bakers usually made bread with emmer wheat and barley, two of the oldest cultivated grains. Bread was so important, in fact, that it had an outsized influence on ancient Egyptian writing. Historians have recorded 14 distinct hieroglyphics for bread.

but the article also mentions something called tiger nuts, which were mixed with honey to make small cakes: the earliest Egyptian recipe described how to  prepare it for the gods, but it was also eaten by folks.

Wiikipedia commons

I had never heard of "tiger nuts", but it turns out to be chufa, aka turkey food, which I am familiar with since it grew wild near my home when I lived in Appalachia. 

It is a grass/sedge with small tubers which are edible.

wikipedia article discusses, including discusses similar plants that look like it but are bitter.




and here is a discussion of Egyptian food that discusses how to make tiger nut cakes at 9 minutes.