MEDIEVAL CAIRO - FOOD AND FOODWAYS - FOWLS & EGGS

THE CAIRENE MENU: INGREDIENTS, PRODUCTS AND PREPARATIONS

The multiplicity of possible approaches implies that the foodstyle of a culture can be discussed in a number of ways, ranging from historical and economic to social and anthropological. In the case of the present study, two modes of presentation seemed to be more fitting than others. One involved following a nineteenth-century manual titled Notes and Queries on Anthropology which contains a huge set of instructions in the form of a complex questionnaire, meant to guide anthropologists in their field work. The questionnaire, proposed by a Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and recently rediscovered by Peter Heine, covered all possible aspects of human life, food culture included. The appropriate section, arranged according to areas such as “foodstuffs and their preparation,” “presentation and storage of food,” “cooking,” “condiments,” “prescribed and forbidden foods,” “exceptional foods,” etc., provides a researcher with convenient guidelines for investigation.

Investigating a complex and multifaceted medieval Cairene food culture from the anthropologists’ perspective means, however, depriving the study of its historical, political, and some of the social contexts. Besides, such an approach would inevitably involve countless repetitions. Cheese, for example, would have to be considered first in the category of foods that were eaten fresh, then of those that were cooked, then of those eaten cold, then of those eaten hot/warm. Furthermore, it should also be discussed in a section dealing with milk and forms of its preservation as well as in a section dealing with salted preserves—to mention only the most obvious of cheese’s possible classifications. In effect, one might fail to discuss its varieties, its social standing, or its popularity as a menu item.
Another possible way of arranging the research would be to follow the order of some of the medieval Arabic cookery books. The recipes presented in Arabic cookbooks are often organized according to a similar scheme, though particular works differ in details. In the case of Kitab Wasf al-A'tima al-Mu'tada (“The Book of Description of Familiar Foods”), for example, the chapters include:
1. sour dishes (hawamid) and their varieties;

2. simple/plain dishes (sawadh); 3. fried dishes (qalaya) and dry dishes (nawashif);
4. porridges (hara'is) and oven dishes (tannuriyyat)
5. fried dishes (mutajjanat), cold dishes (bawarid), and samosas (sanbusik);
6. fish (samak), both fresh and salted;
7. vinegar pickles (mukhallat), relishes (saba'igh), and condiments (mutayyibat);
8. puddings (jawadhib and akhbisa);
9. sweetmeats (halawat);
10. pancakes (qata'if) and biscuits (khushkananaj, etc.);
11. digestive beverages (hadimat);
12. dishes for the sick and dishes eaten by the Christians during the Lent.

Such an arrangement, apparently natural for the medieval Arab cooks and consumers, and probably attractive for an experimenter-cook of today as well, does not, however, seem to make much sense as a framework for research. Differentiating between the dishes according to their being or not being sour, and then, concurrently, dividing others according to the style of frying, etc., would not only confuse the reader, but also make it impossible for the researcher to make clear and systematic comments about a culinary culture which invented and practiced this approach.

At the same time, constructing the study according to chronological order was out of the question, if only because following the chronology of over five hundred years history of a complex culinary culture does not make much sense. Nor was it possible to apply the sociologically-oriented research questions suggested by Richard M. Mirsky in his “Perspectives in the Study of Food Habits.” Finally, organizing the study according to food courses was also unfeasible, as in the medieval Arabic-Islamic food culture there was generally no tradition of distinguishing between what we know as starters, soups, main courses, desserts, etc., let alone of serving meals according to different groups of foodstuffs.

Under such circumstances, the only way to make the inquiry and its presentation relatively clear and effective was to organize it according to main food categories. In other words, to combine the pattern applied in the food science with that which guides authors who write on the lore of the kitchen. In effect, the food of medieval Cairo will be discussed according to the following order:
1. Cereals:
A. Millet and sorghum;
B. Barley;
C. Rice;
D. Wheat
2. Meat
3. Fowls and eggs
4. Fish
5. Dairy products

The scheme not only makes it possible to investigate in an orderly way what the ordinary Cairenes of the Middle Ages actually ate, but also to reveal various historical contexts of their menu. It also allows one to answer a number of questions which are so important from the anthropologists’ perspective, such as whether a given substance was eaten fresh or raw, warm or cold, or whether it was customized to the local tastes and needs by means of drying, salting, fermenting, or preserving. Furthermore, such a scheme makes it possible to allude to the batterie de cuisine and the techniques of food preparation and allows one to mention what was proscribed. Wherever the names of plants or fishes may raise doubts or be considered confusing, Latin names of species are given.

3. Fowls and Eggs

Medieval Cairenes of all social classes and ethnic origins loved bird meat. Birds were served on the caliphs’ and sultans’ tables, sold in the streets, and provided to soldiers as a part of their pay. Birds were usually served in considerable quantities on the royal menus. The Fatimid food banquet held to celebrate the breaking of the Ramadan fast was, for instance, an occasion to present 21 trays on each of which 350 chickens, 350 pullets and 350 pigeons were piled up upon 21 roasted muttons.

Compared with this, 400 geese and 1,000 chickens slaughtered for the banquet held by sultan Barquq in 800/1396–7 seems a manifestation of modesty. But the share of poultry in the diet of the Mamluk elites was relatively high on a daily basis, too: in 1512 Domenico Trevisan, a Venetian ambassador to Cairo, noted that the sultan’s court consumed 500 chickens a day. The quantities of what was offered to ordinary Cairenes in the city markets were also huge. Al-Maqrizi had fond memories of times when, after the afternoon prayer, the fowl fryers used to sell their merchandise while sitting in a row which stretched all along the way from al-Kamil’s madrasa to the door of madrasa of an-Nasir.

Although the number of bird-meat fryers decreased in later years, by the end of the ninth/fifteenth century “great quantities of boiled and roasted fowls” still characterized the offer of street cooks of Cairo. It seems that fowls prepared in the street could sometimes be much better than those cooked in the kitchens of the elites. It must have been for this reason that one of the high ranking Mamluk officials went down to Bayn al-Qasrayn square every night to buy huge quantities of fried (mutajjan) chickens, sand grouses, small pigeons, and fried sparrows for the wazir Fakhr ad-Din Majid Ibn Khasib. Fowls were consumed in Egypt since antiquity. In antiquity, however, most of the species used for culinary purposes were migratory birds.  Captured while on their way between central or southern Africa and Europe, they formed seasonal items in the diet of the local population: cooked and pickled, salted, skewered and roasted. Contemporary scholars are still unable to assign scientific names to many of the ancient Egyptian species. Those which have been identified include drop, a quail-like species, ostrich, as well as goose, duck, and crane. Once captured in traps and nets, they were subsequently moved to cages and force fed. Doves and pigeons were raised in cotes, the architecture of which did not differ much from the so-called pigeon towers of today (the best known examples are seen in the Fayyum oases). It seems they were the only domesticated local species, and, at the same time, the favorite table fowl of the local population. Most of these birds must have been still consumed in Egypt in the days of the Islamic conquest. Wild species, such as sparrows, partridges, quails, sand grouses, francolins, geese, ducks, and larks, were still caught by bird hunters, while pigeons continued to be fattened in coops or towers. But what satisfied the Egyptian villagers could not meet the demands of the busy urban markets. A big city needed a more predictable, more regular, and more stable supply. Luckily for Cairo, some time between the Arabs’ arrival from the east and the Fatimids’ arrival from the west, domesticated chicken appeared in Egypt, and soon became the city’s most popularly consumed fowl. Actually, it is rather difficult to indicate when exactly chickens started to be consumed widely in Egypt.  Some consumption of chickens must have occurred before the Fatimids founded their Egyptian capital in the fourth/tenth century. But it was probably the palaces and the streets of Fatimid Cairo that developed the taste for chicken meat in Egypt. In fact, this must have been a side-effect of the process of adjusting the Fatimid diet to the fashion imposed by the new Arabic-Islamic culinary culture. Indeed, the recipes of the new wave cuisine favored chickens over other fowls,and the local market’s demand for chickens seemed to have increased significantly over a relatively short period. Moreover, the traditional chicken hatching clearly proved inefficient. We do not know who (and when) first had the idea of making a masscale business of artificial chicken production based on applying the ancient Egyptian pigeon-rising know-how to the concept of incubating hens’ eggs. The non-Western authors who visited Egypt between the fourth/tenth and sixth/twelfth centuries (there are almost no Western sources for this early period) are silent on chicken-producing hatcheries. Al-Jahiz (the second-third/eighth-ninth centuries), who in his Kitab al-Hayawan (“Book of Animals”) included a section titled “Tending of Chickens in Egypt,” does not demonstrate any knowledge regarding the existence of chicken incubators in Egypt, either. Actually, all that he says is that “In Egypt, they are grazed the way the sheep are grazed; they have a herdsman [ra'in] and a caretaker [qayyim].”Moreover, the Geniza documents seem to be silent about these kinds of incubators, too. From Goitein’s study one can learn that Egypt was renowned for its chickens, that the Fustatis, both Jews and non-Jews, appreciated chicken meat, and that at least part of the town’s demand was satisfied by deliveries from the countryside. It is not clear, however, whether the fowls were naturally or artificially hatched.  According to al-Baghdadi, the “chicken factories” worked all over the country and “nothing was more rare than to find in Egypt chickens hatched naturally by incubation of the hen; one frequently saw among the Egyptians people to whom this natural process was unknown.”Both the popularity of the method and the level of expertise with which the craft was practiced seem to indicate that by the end of the sixth/twelfth century the incubators had been working in Egypt for generations.

The oven-like structures were clearly an obligatory tourist attraction which made a hit with all the Western visitors who must have been as surprised at the sight of curious chicken incubators as were the Egyptians abroad at the sight of chickens being hatched in a natural way. It was even reported that a certain Egyptian, having learned about the absence of chicken incubators in Syria, went to that country to establish one in the al- Uqayba area. The plan was carried out and in the summer chickens hatched in the facilities; as soon as the autumn came, however, the technology clearly failed, for no new nestling appeared. The entrepreneur had to give up the unprofitable business and went back to Egypt. Judging upon the enormous quantities of eggs incubated in the installations, the Cairene market’s demand for chicken must have been very high, probably much higher than that in any other urban center of the Arabic-Islamic world. Chicken meat was tasteful, reasonably priced and, which was important in places where firewood was scanty, its cooking required less time, and thus less fuel, than red meat. Chicken meat was also a quite universal culinary material.

It was used in sour and sweet-sour stews, in which it either replaced red meat, or was cooked together with it. It could be boiled in water and roasted; it could be fried or deep-fried in sesame oil, parboiled or not. It could be pounded, cut in joints or in halves, or left uncut. In the latter form, it was used whenever cooking in the oven was involved. Such oven preparations included sweet jawadhib puddings, in which chicken, roasted in the oven, simply served as a source of tasty juices and fat that ran from the meat onto the pudding cooked below it.  Uncut chicken could also be used for making dajaj mahshi, or stuffed chicken. Dajaj mahshi could be either sweet or sour (hamid). The stuffing for the sweet version was made of rose jam or of sugar and almonds/pistachios perfumed with rose-water. The sour one was prepared with parsley, mint, caraway, lemon juice, and hazelnuts or almonds. Such dishes could be made of fried, ready to eat chicken, or of chicken which had been lightly parboiled. In the latter case, the cooking continued in the furn oven after the fowl had been stuffed. When used for making harisa porridge, chicken either replaced red meat or accompanied it.

In the latter case, it was usually simply thrown into the pot together with meat. “Some people,”  however, “boiled the chickens, and sautéed them with spices and, having ladled out the porridge, put them on its surface, which was better.” It seems that decorating a preparation with chickens or their parts was a rather popular style of presenting dishes. Roasted or cooked in syrup, such a decoration was a source of concern for those who cared for manners: disjointing a chicken could result in spraying the co-eaters with grease. In stews of red meat, chicken was usually simply jointed and thrown into the pot to be cooked together with meat. Chicken breasts could be also pounded with red meat, as in naranjiyya (“bitter orange dish”) or mudaqqaqa kafuriyya (“camphor meatballs”). In a dish called ma'muniyya, chicken meat was boiled, cut into strips, pounded, and then thrown on nearly done ground/milled rice cooked with milk, syrup, and tail fat. Then everything was cooked until done and, finally, scented with rose-water and musk. In a version of the dish called madira, chicken, cut into joints, was stewed in oil with onions, spices, and yoghurt. In zirbaj, sautéed hens were cut up and simply put in a thick sauce made of sugar syrup cooked with pounded almonds, wine vinegar, starch, egg white, and green mint. Generally, pounded nuts or almonds were almost de rigueur in chicken dishes; so were Chinese or Ceylon cinnamon, dry coriander, and mastic. Chicken dishes could be also seasoned with dry or fresh mint and sometimes with murri. The prevailing medico-culinary theory recommended avoiding garlic and onions in chicken preparations, and indeed, these ingredients were absent from most of the recipes. There were, however, exceptions: kuzbariyya, or chicken meat stewed with spices and chopped coriander leaves, was to be fragranced with both garlic and onions.

Chicken dishes, usually colored with saffron, were often decorated with eggs. As Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi observed while commenting on Egyptian cuisine, the regular, savory chicken stews “had nothing in particular, or very little, different from those consumed elsewhere.” Apart from these, however, there were also chicken stews which the Egyptians “prepared with all kinds of sweet substances,” and these were “strange.” In order to prepare such sweet stews (muhallat), “they boiled a fowl, then put it in a julep, threw over it crushed hazelnuts or pistachio nuts, poppy seeds or purslane seeds, or roses, and cooked the preparation until it coagulated. Then they seasoned it and removed from fire.” Depending on the kind of nuts and seeds of which they were made, the dishes were called fustuqiyya (“pistachio dish”), bunduqiyya (“hazelnut dish”), khashkhashiyya (“poppy seed dish”), wardiyya (“rose dish”), or sitt an-Nuba (“Nubian lady),” a purslane seed dish named after its black color. Judging by al-Baghdadi’s bewilderment, he never happened across sweet chicken stews before his coming to Egypt. Apparently quite popular in Cairo, a combination of chicken meat, nuts/seeds, a sweetening agent, musk and/or rose-water must have been a rarity elsewhere in the Near East. Actually, a majority of the above-named sweet nutty/seedy chicken stews are described in the Arabic-Islamic medieval cookery books. Most of the books in which these names appear, however, date back to the periods later than al-Baghdadi’s lifetime (d. 629/1231). The earliest of the available Arabic-Islamic cookbooks, the fourth/tenth-century Kitab ab-Tabikh compiled in Iraq by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, does not include recipes for sweet chicken stews at all. In another Iraqi cookery book, Muhammad al-Baghdadi’s Kitab al-Tabikh (the compilation of which might have coincided with the lifetime of Abd at-Latif al-Baghdadi), fustuqiyya is the only representative of sweet chicken stews. In every later (i.e. post-seventh/thirteenth-century) Near Eastern cookery books the recipes for this kind of dishes are more numerous. Significantly, each of these books is, most probably, at least partly of Egyptian origin.

The way in which recipes for sweet chicken stews are distributed in the cookery books seems to confirm Abd at-Latif al-Baghdadi’s comments on the exclusively Egyptian character of these dishes. Moreover, one may conclude that such dishes were indeed unheard of outside Egypt in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries. However, the idea of making sweetmeats of chicken seems to have reached certain parts of the Near East not later than in the first decades of the seventh/thirteenth century, so that a recipe for fustuqiyya dish could be included in the 623/1226 copy of an Iraqi cookbook compiled by Muhammad al-Baghdadi.

But even if the idea of making sweet preparations out of chicken meat spread outside Egypt, it apparently remained vague and uncommon enough that Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, a traveler interested in food by virtue of his medical profession, had never heard of it before coming to Egypt. Be it because of the Cairenes’ particular taste preferences or because of the abundance of chickens, sugar, honey, and nuts in the local markets, these kinds of dishes might have been one of the Cairene culinary peculiarities, only occasionally (if at all) consumed in other urban centers of the Arabic-Islamic world. As for other fowls, we do not have too many details regarding the ways they were prepared. Most probably, they, like chickens, were also roasted, stewed, and stuffed. Sparrows, which seem to have been particularly popular, were sometimes fried with oil, salt and seasonings, sometimes together with chicken meat, and at other times with eggs, so that a kind of omelette was prepared. Sparrows could also be pickled to be consumed as the so-called bawarid, or cold snacks. Preparing such pickles involved splitting cleaned birds through the breasts and stuffing them with a mixture of salt, Chinese cinnamon, and mastic.  Put in special jars of glass (qatarmiz zujaj), they were covered with salted water and left for some time to ripen. One recipe instructed the cook to “clean [pickled] sparrows of salt, intestines, and hearts,” which suggests that these birds, like fish, could be also preserved by covering them, ungutted, with salt. When finally cleaned, salted sparrows were washed four times with wine vinegar and covered with oil mixed with lime juice. They were served immediately, cut into small pieces and seasoned with spices, parsley, and rue. As in most of the world cuisines, bird eggs were almost as popular in medieval Cairo as was bird meat. Although the recipes generally did not specify the kind of eggs to be used in a given preparation, it may be taken for granted that chicken eggs were the most commonly consumed. Widely used in many types of cooking, eggs could be fried, scrambled, and pickled or applied in meat or chicken dishes as a decoration. In sweet preparations eggs were rarely used only sometimes the albumen was employed, mostly for its being a good foaming agent. Most likely, Egyptians did not eat raw eggs. The most typical egg dishes were those called 'ujaj and mubatharat. Although the recipes do not always allow one to determine what the final form of a given dish actually was; “omelettes” and “scrambled eggs” are probably the most appropriate equivalents of the two Arabic terms mentioned above. Omelettes, or 'ujaj, were usually very rich: prepared in a soapstone pan with spices and a lot of oil, they could include fried meat, fried sparrows, fried chicken livers, cheese, or tirrikh—salted fish. Scrambled eggs, or muba'tharat, could be made with meat, too, but generally preparations of this kind were not as rich as omelettes.  They could also be made of simple combination of eggs, oil, and spices, with or without onions. The street version of scrambled eggs was seasoned with pepper, Ceylon cinnamon, and cumin, but the cookery books recommended a more sophisticated spice mix. It was supposed to include ginger, galingale (khulanjan), Ceylon cinnamon, saffron, pepper, cumin, thyme, dried rosebuds (zirr al-ward), and nard. Individual recipes sometimes also called for coriander and caraway, while omelettes were additionally seasoned with murri. Interestingly, some fried eggs preparations called for boiled eggs. Such was the case of a dish called bayd maqli, or “fried eggs,” and bayd mutajjan or “sautéed eggs.”It seems that such dishes could be eaten both as a warm course and as bawarid, or cold snacks. Hard boiled eggs could be also used as stuffing for awsat, rolls made of flatbread and meat or, devoid of the white part, as stuffing for makhfiyya meatballs.

Eggs could also be pickled. To prepare bayd mukhallal, or “eggs in vinegar,” one had to sprinkle shelled boiled eggs with salt, dry coriander and Chinese cinnamon, arrange them in a glass jar, and cover them with vinegar. The details could differ: in a version called bayd mukhardal, or “mustarded eggs,” for example, boiled eggs were covered with salt and cumin in the morning, to be seasoned with vinegar, mustard seeds, mint and spices (atraf at-tib), and saffron as late as in the evening.

By Paulina B. Lewicka in the book 'Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes-Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean', Brill, Leiden (the Netherlands) & Boston (U.S.A), 2011, p. 198-209. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa