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.
1. Cereals
A. Millet and Sorghum
Arabic sources agree as to the presence and consumption of wheat, barley, and rice in medieval Egypt. Only millet (dukhn) arouses some controversy. According to Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, millet was entirely unknown in Egypt except in the uppermost part of Sa'id where it was cultivated. However, according to al- Umari millet was one of the most popular Egyptian cereals.But al-Baghdadi antedated al-Umari by over a century, which allows one to suppose that during this period millet either started to be imported from the Upper Egypt to the Delta area, or came to be grown in the Lower Egypt as well. At the same time, Ibn Iyas clearly confirms that the consumption of millet was in fact rather unusual in Cairo: in his annal for 875/1470–71, the chronicler noted that when food prices increased that year and bread disappeared from the markets, people started to eat bread made of millet and sorghum.
According to Ibn Iyas, such a situation did not happen before, even in the period of ghala' (dearth or, more literally “[period of ] inflated prices”) which occurred during the days of al-Malik az-Zahir Jaqmaq (842–857/1438–1453), when for an irdabb10 of wheat one had to pay seven Ashrafi dinars.All in all, millet, if used in Cairo at all, was most probably fed generally to animals, and not to people and, as such,is not of great importance for the present study. Sorghum (dhurra; Sorghum L.), although also generally avoided by the Cairenes, deserves more attention. Like millet, it apparently was one of the crops particular to the Upper Egypt. Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi saw it being cultivated, together with millet, in the uppermost parts of Sa'id. This was confirmed by Ibn al-Athir who, in his annal for 568/1260, mentioned that “dhurra was the food of the Nubians.” Generally disfavored by the urban population of the Egyptian capital, sorghum was, however, appreciated in the periods of famine or economic hardship. With wheat beyond their reach, people definitely preferred sorghum to all other substitutes for wheat, such as millet, broad beans, or bran, all of which were used in making “emergency bread.” In the crisis year of 892/1486–7, sorghum became so commonplace that people immortalized the cereal in a chant to which they danced: “My hubby—what a laughing stock he is—feeds me with sorghum bread!” Indeed, the quantities of sorghum imported that year to Cairo were so huge that its surplus finally caused the decrease of wheat prices. But, contrary to what Ibn Iyas maintains, sorghum bread had been consumed in Cairo before. In fact, according to his own chronicle, there were at least three more incidents in previous years when people were forced to replace regular wheat bread with bad sorghum bread.
B. Barley
Of wheat, rice, and barley, or the most popular cereals of medieval Lower Egypt, barley (sha'ir; Hordeum vulgare) may have been the oldest cereal to grow in the Nile valley. Very much in demand in ancient Egypt, where it was given to both man and beast, with time barley began to lose its position as one of the staple food items of the local population.Moreover, from ca. fourth century C.E. it also ceased to be the grain of the Egyptian brewing industry.Never giving up its dominant position as fodder, by the Middle Ages barley continued to be the most sought-after grain for thousands of the Cairene garrisons’ mounts.At the same time, however, it became the least important cereal for the humans. S.D. Goitein stressed that as far as the Geniza documentation was concerned, barley was completely absent from the table of the urban population.His assertion proved to be valid not only for the Fustati Jews but for Cairenes in general as well. Indeed, barley flour, if used in bread production at all, seems to have been nothing more than an unwanted admixture added to wheat flour by dishonest millers.Barley, like rye, produces hard, heavy loaves unless wheat flour is added. Discarded as bread ingredient, barley was not, however, completely useless in the food preparation. An fifth/eleventhcentury medical treatise reveals that barley was used for making the socalled kishk (crushed grain mixed with yoghurt and then dried in the sun) and sawiq (a meal of parched grain, made into a kind of gruel, to which was added water and butter or fat from the tails of sheep). Nevertheless, it seems that Cairenes preferred to make both products from wheat. Indeed, culinary preparations in which barley was valued as an ingredient were rather few. In its rotten form, barley grains were indispensable for making condiments such as murri, a “soy sauce” of the medieval Arabic-Islamic cuisine, made of rotted barley in a complicated and timeconsuming process, and kamakh ahmar, the production of which required pounding the grains and kneading them with salt and fresh milk. Left in the sun until browned and then seasoned with spices, kamakh ahmar was served with bread.
C. Rice
In his article on rice in the culinary cultures of the Middle East, Sami Zubaida observed that “until recent times, rice was considered a luxury food, for the tables of the rich and for special occasions in most parts of the region.”Whatever its validity for individual areas of the region and for particular periods of their history,the view seems to harmonize with what has been observed in reference to Egypt and Cairo of the Middle Ages. Such observations include, for example, Amalia Levanoni’s remark that rice belonged to foodstufffs which were considered symbols of social status by the Cairenes, and a firm comment by Eliahu Ashtor who maintains that in regions other than Mesopotamian Lower Babylonia (where rice was cultivated and was a staple cereal) rice dishes remained luxury items, while rice itself was by no means within the reach of the working masses. This was supposedly applicable to Egypt as well—despite the fact that Ashtor points out elsewhere that by the Middle Ages rice was “abundant” in that country.But was rice indeed a luxury food for the tables of the rich throughout the centuries of its presence in the Cairene menu? Actually, the medieval sources are not particularly rich in records documenting rice cultivation in Egypt.
Rice (aruzz; Oryza sativa L.), which arrived there only in the course of the process referred to as the “Arab agricultural revolution,” was the newest of the locally grown cereals.No traces of it were ever positively identified either in Pharaonic or Hellenistic Egyptian remains.From at least the fourth/tenth century rice was grown in the oases, in the Fayyum area, and in the Sa'id.There is no reason to assume, however, that rice fields covered any significant part of these areas. Moreover, the episodic character of historical references to rice allows one to suspect that the cultivation of rice in Egypt in the pre- Fatimid and the Fatimid epoch could hardly have exceeded what might be called an experimental level.
The post-Fatimid sources are not much more informative regarding the cultivation of rice. Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (the sixth-seventh/twelfth-thirteenth centuries) does not discuss it at all, while al- Umari (the eighth/fourteenth century) simply mentions its name among other edible plants cultivated in Egypt. So does Ibn Zahira (the ninth/fifteenth century), who additionally stresses the exceptionally good quality of Egyptian wheat, barley, rice and broad beans.Oddly enough, al-Maqrizi does not mention rice at all, even though he devoted part of his Khitat to a discussion of the crops of Egypt.The first more detailed information on rice cultivation in Egypt dates back to the beginning of the tenth/sixteenth century and is included in the travel account of Leo Africanus. According to his observations, rice cultivation was quite widespread in the Delta, particularly in Anthius of the Rosetta area, where inhabitants “had a custom to carry rice to Cairo and gain a high and excellent profit on it,” in Thebes, and in Barnabal. In Barnabal rice was exceptionally abundant, so much so that the Berber rice threshers who worked there earned enough to enjoy the services of “almost all the prostitutes of Egypt.” The latter came to town in great numbers, attracted by the vision of stripping rice threshers of their earnings.As for the records documenting the consumption of rice in the al-Fustat—Cairo area, those dating back to the Fatimid epoch are indeed very few. Probably the earliest of them is to be found in Kitab al-Aghdhiya wa-l-Adwiya, a dietary treatise by Ishaq al-Isra'ili (the third-fourth/ninthtenth centuries). Apart from quoting Galen’s remarks on the cereal, his short section on rice contains fragments which seem to be al-Isra'ili’s own comments. These discuss the preparation of rice with milk and sugar, the ways of cooking rice, as well as the comparison of rice to dried cakes of grains and yoghurt called kishk.Another Fatimid era source to refer to rice consumption is the chronicle written by the Fatimid wazir Ibn al-Ma'mun al-Bata'ihi (the sixth/twelfth century). One can learn from it that provisions allotted to certain official included, apart from sugar, honey, rose jam, vinegar, and various kinds of nuts and oils, also half a wayba of rice. And that the son of the official was entitled, apart from mutton and bread, also to a plate of rice with milk and sugar.It should be kept in mind, however, that al-Isra'ili’s medically-oriented theoretical comments relate to undefined circumstances, while the data provided by Ibn al-Ma'mun refer to the very limited circle of the Fatimid milieu. Consequently, it is not possible to use these authors’ information, however valuable, to establish whether rice was eaten by the ordinary urbanites in any noteworthy quantities or not. In fact, the only source to cast some light on the actual consumption of rice in al-Fustat—Cairo of the Fatimid epoch is probably the hisba manual written by ash-Shayzari. It confirms the availability of rice in the market in two ways. The author’s direct mention of rice refers to it as to the grain which, when milled to flour, was used by bakers to adulterate wheat flour, because rice flour “made bread heavy.”The logic behind this kind of swindle is obvious in the case of barley, broad beans, chickpeas, etc., or grains and legumes that were much cheaper than wheat and that, milled to flour, were sometimes added to wheat flour by dishonest dealers. But if rice was indeed as costly as it is sometimes believed to have been, how could the adding of rice flour to wheat flour turn out to be profitable? One of the possible answers is that rice flour was a particularly efficient adulterating agent. The other possibility—which does not exclude the former—is that rice in Cairo was not always as costly as it is sometimes believed to have been, at least not in the late sixth/twelfth century. By indicating that dishes sold by the street cooks included dishes presumably made of rice, ash-Shayzari’s manual seems to confirm the hypothesis—albeit in an indirect and vague way.
These dishes included labaniyya, a dish which could be made of meat and leeks or onions cooked in yoghurt together with pounded rice, and bahata, also called muhallabiyya, the preparation made, according to some recipes, of rice, fat meat boiled with coriander, mastic, sticks of cinnamon, syrup or sugar and, according to others, of milk, pounded rice, and sugar.Obviously, two rice dishes in the entire street offer is not much. However, a market inspector’s manual was not supposed to be an index to the cook shops’ production, and it is quite possible that their offer actually included some more rice preparations. Other sources are not much helpful in defining the position of rice in the local menu. The Jewish Geniza documents do not seem to point to a particularly high demand for or consumption of this crop in al-Fustat—Cairo area. However, the existence of the House of Rice (Dar al-Aruzz) or a toll house in al-Fustat, which was a storehouse and a bourse for the sale of rice all in one, may suggest relatively high sales of rice. Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, an otherwise keen observer of Egyptian foodstuffs and edible plants of the beginning of the seventh/thirteenth century, mentions rice only once, as an ingredient of fish preparations consumed by the people of Damietta.Nevertheless, his account is remarkable, as the people whose meal Abd al-Latif observed in Damietta were not the local privileged few but quite ordinary members of the local population, possibly fishermen who would not go for expensive foodstuffs. All in all, the above-discussed records, ambiguous as they are, seem to indicate that rice was not the principal cereal grain consumed in Egypt of the Fatimid and Ayyubid epochs. But they also show it was not a food item exclusively for the elite. Whatever the true role of rice in the Cairene menu of the pre-Mamluk era, the increase of both the quantity and quality of references to this cereal in the literature of the Mamluk epoch may point to the increase of its role in the local culinary culture. As for literary fiction, two works deserve particular consideration. One is Nuzhat al-Nufus wa-Mudhik al-'Abus, translated into English as The Diversion of the Souls, Bringing a Laugh to a Scowling Face,a collection of prose and verse written by Ali Ibn Sudun al-Bashbughawi (the ninth/fifteenth century). Densely interwoven with allusions to food, the work includes one short anecdote devoted to rice.
It reflects the appreciation for the versatility of rice and its “graciousness” or “patience” as a food ingredient. Also, it names and describes a number of dishes which, different though they are, call for rice. There appears “rice made with milk,” called aruzz al-laban, a dish which the cookery books feature as rice cooked in milk seasoned with Chinese cinnamon and mastic.There is judhaba, otherwise a popular plate of the Arabian Nights, here described as rice with stock and milk but in its original form a sophisticated dish consisting of a sort of sweet pudding baked in the oven under the roasting meat to catch its running fat and juices. According to Charles Perry, roasted meat, although served separately, constituted a part of this dish.
And there is also aruzz mufalfal, another favorite of the Nights. Generally, aruzz mufalfal was made of rice seasoned with Chinese cinnamon and mastic, optionally colored with saffron, with pieces of meat (stewed in sheep’s tail fat melted with spices) arranged on top of it. In the anecdote in question, however, it is described as “rice made with geese and chicken stock, and with sheep’s tail fat and fat poured on it.” Furthermore, Ibn Sudun mentions a dish of “rice made with sugar water, or molasses, or Egyptian honey, or date molasses.” The simple preparation, called “al-azizi,” seems to have been a much favored delicacy. While evaluating the real fondness for this dish—“the most dear of all the rice preparations”—one should, however, be aware of the biased nature of Ibn Sudun’s attitude towards food and, particularly, of his predilection for sweets typical for a hashish addict. Whatever caution the views of Ibn Sudun may require if used to indicate the general taste preferences of Cairenes, no similar care is necessary with other messages transmitted in the anecdote. First, the text clearly indicates that rice dishes consumed in the ninth/fifteenth-century Cairo had little to do with these dishes’ sophisticated prototypes, praised many centuries earlier in the Abbasid court poetry and documented in the recipes created in the courtly setting of Baghdad. At the same time, the oversimplified versions of aruzz mufalfal and judhaba as depicted in the anecdote demonstrate how wide the gap was between what the cookery books recommended and what was promoted by the actual cooking practice. Doubtless by the end of the Mamluk era, the art of cooking was in decline, both in the sultans’ kitchens and in the city streets.If, however, in the ninth/fifteenth-century Cairo judhaba was indeed degraded to a dish of rice with stock and milk, it also means that it was an item of the popular, rather than elite, menu. Although it is difficult to define explicitly whether the oversimplification of rice dishes was the effect or the reason of the popularization of rice, Ibn Sudun’s anecdote contradicts the opinion quoted earlier, which defined rice as a medieval luxury food item. This does not mean, however, that rice was not appreciated anymore. Simplified and devoid of all the old refinement, degraded from both the culinary and social point of view, rice preparations in the ninth/fifteenth-century Cairo could still be liked and valued. After all, stock, milk, or date molasses go quite well with rice indeed. “The Tale of Judar and His Brothers,” or one of the Cairene stories of the Arabian Nights collection, shows rice dishes from the perspective of the lower end of the social ladder. As the main plot of the tale has it, Judar, a poor fisherman, happens to get access to the magic bag of a certain Maghrebian necromancer. The bag, like the horn of plenty, could supply its owner with food, and among the delicacies which Judar could get from it were rice with honey and mufalfal rice. Very much like roasted chicken, stuffed lamb or sweets, these two preparations were what hungry people dreamt of, apparently knowing their appearances and smells from the cooks’ shops located along the city streets and bazaars. However, to be out of reach for those with no means was not necessarily synonymous with being a luxury food item. “The Tale of Judar” seems to be far from confirming that the consumption of dishes like rice with honey or mufalfal rice was limited only to the circles of the privileged and well-to-do. Instead, it reveals the Cairenes’ fondness of rice dishes, of which rice with honey and mufalfal rice were perhaps the most popular. The message coming from the non-fiction literature supports similar conclusions. Basically, the data provided by such literature is of four kinds. One involves annalistic notes routinely recorded by chroniclers such as al-Maqrizi or Ibn Iyas, and dealing with fluctuations of prices that occurred in Egypt on various occasions.The second consists of the hisba treaties, known as the manuals for the market inspectors, which present the food business as practiced in the city streets and bazaars.
The third kind of data is that included in the cookbooks, used here primarily for cross-reference and as a source of information on trends and phenomena most likely applicable to the culinary culture of medieval Cairo. And finally, there is Khalil az-Zahiri’s Zubdat Kashf al-Mamalik, a “picture of Egypt under the Mamluks” which includes a long list of royal Mamluk dishes. To start with the last, the list of Khalil az-Zahiri (the ninth/fifteenth century), often quoted as an important source of data on “Mamluk food,” was presented by its author as a list of “dishes prepared in the sultan’s kitchens. ”It is probably worth stressing, however, that such a royal qualification of food was not, in the Cairene context, tantamount with the “palace cuisine” designation. In other words, such a qualification did not imply that the preparations styled this way were unknown to the ordinary people. Therefore, the list is used here as an index to preparations which, quite probably, were also consumed by an average, middle-class inhabitant of the ninth/fifteenth-century Cairo and which, at the same time, presumably contained rice. The latter seems to refer to seven out of the total forty two dishes included in az-Zahiri’s list. One of them, the famous aruzz mufalfal, was already discussed above. In the Arabic-Islamic culinary culture, ma'muniyya, a dish allegedly named after the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun (d. 218/833), was almost as famous. Made of boiled chicken, pounded rice cooked in milk, syrup, and sheep’s tail fat, it was usually scented with musk and sometimes also with rose-water and camphor. Apart from these two preparations, az-Zahiri’s list includes also: khaytiyya, made of lean meat boiled with mastic and cinnamon, then fried into fibers, then boiled together with pounded rice, and served with syrup or honey; narjisiyya, made of fat meat boiled with onions, carrots and rice, seasoned with spices and melted sheep’s tail fat, and covered with egg yolk and egg whites; fuqqa'iyya, made of meat cooked with onions, Swiss chard, spices, mint, rue, little rice, and soured with lemon juice; and labaniyya, a dish of meat and leeks or onions cooked in yoghurt together with pounded rice. Summaqiyya, a dish made of fat meat, leeks, fried eggplant, walnuts, almonds, and tahna, spiced with Chinese cinnamon, mastic, coriander, and mint, soured with sumac, could optionally contain rice. In terms the Arabic-Islamic culinary theory, some of the rice preparations, such as fuqqa'iyya and summaqiyya, belonged to the hawamid, or sour dishes category. A significant number of the savory rice preparations, however, were sawadh, that is “plain” or non-sour dishes. Apart from regular meat and chicken preparations cooked in the pot, rice was also relatively often used for making the so-called tannuriyyat, or “oven dishes.”These included, for example, the already discussed aruzz al-laban and judhaba, as well as sukhtur, a kind of sausage stuffed with meat, rice, chickpeas and seasoned with Chinese cinnamon, mastic, and other spices. Ibrinj majani, a complicated Persian preparation made of sheep+s heads and trotters, scented with Chinese cinnamon and mastic, and made with chickpeas and rice cooked in pilaf style, was also cooked in the tannur oven. As a perfectly universal ingredient, rice matched not only savory but also sweet tastes. Sweet rice plates were extremely simple, but nevertheless much favored preparations. They were generally made of rice cooked in water and mixed (or covered) with sweet ingredient—be it sugar, honey, or molasses. Meatless, usually spiceless and fat-free, with sweetener as their only extra ingredient, they could not be expensive, particularly if sweetened with date molasses. The presumably attractive price could have added to their popularity. The most famous of them was probably 'asida, an unpretentious, rural-style preparation made of flour, rice and sesame oil, covered with honey or syrup and sprinkled with nuts. Due to its nourishing values the composition seems to have been one of the favorite local fares to be consumed during cold days.Its porridge-like consistency became proverbial and, although the recipes for the dish itself are missing from majority of the cookery books, it is often cited in other recipes as an example of proper thickness. Washed, dried, and picked over before cooking, rice was indeed a very “patient” (to use Ibn Sudun’s expression) and universal ingredient and could be used in a wide variety of preparations and employed in a variety of ways. From what the medieval recipes say, rice could be thrown onto the top of the contents of the pot either in the last stage of cooking or in the middle of it. It could also be added, in its grain or pounded form, to the boiled meat and then cooked with it. It could be also powdered and cooked, after which chicken was thrown on top of it, or could be left to moisten with milk and then stewed with chicken meat. It could be made into meatballs with pounded chickpeas, or made into sausages, or pounded into rice groats. When pounded fine, it could be used as a thickening agent or made into pudding. It could be either cooked close to softness, with each separate grain very slightly bite-resistant (i.e. mufalfal, or cooked as for pilaf), or allowed to be saturated with water to the point when it becomes soft and fluffy. It could be cooked in water, stock, milk, or yoghurt, or, following the Turkish manner, fried in clarified butter, then dried, ground, and then kneaded with sugar and clarified butter.It usually complemented chickpeas, meat, and chicken.
As for cooking rice with fish, an explicit answer cannot be provided. On the one hand, the Damietta fish-and-rice dishes noticed by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi or similar dishes eaten in Iraq confirm that preparations made of fish and rice were consumed both in Egypt and in the more eastbound parts of the Middle East. On the other hand, however, such dishes do not have counterparts in the medieval Arabic-Islamic cookbooks, which may suggest that in the Middle Ages the fish-and-rice combination was reserved for the poor. Be that as it may, rice could be sour or non-sour, salty, spicy and sweet, it could be enriched with fat, often colored with saffron, flavored with cinnamon, mastic, coriander, cumin, and/or onions (but apparently not too often with garlic). Interestingly, unlike today, rice did not accompany mulukhiyya dish in the Middle Ages.
The cookery books are not a record of what a given community really ate or of what its alimentary preferences were. As a source for studies on certain aspects of a culinary culture the cookery books are, however, invaluable. When it comes to identifying the place of rice in the food culture of medieval Cairenes, the first conclusion is suggested by the number of recipes calling for rice and included in the Cairene cookbooks. They seem to point to an average interest in the consumption of this cereal. A similar tendency can also be drawn from Khalil az-Zahiri’s list of dishes cooked in the sultan’s palace kitchens. The cookery books allow for two more observations. One is that rice was the only so-called filler—apart from wheat bread crumbs and wheat grains—used in the Cairene cooking on a relatively broad scale. Maghrebian couscous did not win the Egyptian palates and was used only occasionally, while noodles and burghul groats were almost non-existent. The other point to be made is that rice, at some point more widely accepted and used in the cookery in a variety of ways, seems not to have enjoyed any special esteem in medieval Egypt, nor was it treated with particular respect. Its processing or cooking never became a strictly observed ritual—as was, for example, the case with rice in Iran, with couscous in the Maghreb, or with burghul in Syria and Iraq. Indeed, in medieval Egypt rice never gained the position as a primary staple, nor did it ever manage to equal bread in its popularity. But in Cairo it was by no means as uncommon an item as is sometimes believed. True, as far as rice consumption is concerned, the hisba manuals of the Mamluk epoch do not differ much from the manual written earlier by ash-Shayzari. Two elements, however, may be of importance. One is that Ibn al-Ukhuwwa (the seventh-eighth/thirteenth-fourteenth centuries) included in his book a section on rice dealers, or razzazun, whose significance in the food business apparently grew by the early fourteenth century. The other is an inconspicuous reference to rice incorporated by Ibn al-Hajj (the eighth/fourteenth century) into his hisba-style chapter in which the bazaar cooks are dealt with. What is meaningful in this reference is that it reflects, if anything, the commonness of rice rather than its exclusiveness. Inserted by Ibn al-Hajj into one basket with chickpeas, Swiss chard, colocasia, eggplant, pumpkin, carrots, cabbage, and turnips, otherwise rather inexpensive products constituting ingredients of dishes sold by the street cooks, rice could not be a highly priced or luxurious food item. What seems to support the hypothesis of the relative popularity of rice and deny its presumed exclusiveness are the chroniclers’ reports on periodical changes of prices in medieval Cairo. In the majority of cases, the reports refer to various ordeals or crisis situations which manifested themselves in the increase of prices, particularly of basic foodstuffs. Since the occurrence of such situations intensified in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the reports refer mostly to that period. The information they provide is of a rather fragmentary character and cannot be compared with the earlier periods. Yet, this does not diminish the credibility of the most significant messages included in these accounts: namely, that in Cairo of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries rice was an important food item and that it was not excessively expensive. Mentioned by the chroniclers together with such vital articles as wheat, flour, carrots, sugar, cheese, meat, honey, oils, melons, and broad beans and barley (the latter two being used mostly as fodder), it apparently mattered in the Cairene menu. True, rice does not dominate these reports—unlike wheat, barley or meat. This, however, should not be surprising; fried cheese, a distinguishing mark of the medieval Cairene menu, does not appear in the price lists on a regular basis, either. Apparently, important as they were, neither rice nor fried cheese were primary dietary staples. As for the prices themselves, what one paid for rice was indeed more than what one spent on wheat. Thus in 804/1401–2, for instance, the price of an irdabb (about 70 kilograms) of wheat reached 50 dirhams, an irdabb of barley 25 dirhams, while for an irdabb of rice one had to pay 190 dirhams. A year later the prices increased significantly, but the ratio changed in favor of rice: in 805/1402–3 an irdabb of wheat sold for 95 dirhams, and irdabb of barley for 60 dirhams, while for an irdabb of rice 250 dirhams were demanded.A year later, in 806/1403–4, the prices increased further: wheat sold for 100 dirhams per irdabb, barley and broad beans for 70, while the price of an irdabb of rice reached 200 dirhams, with the ratio of rice to wheat improved even further. The years mentioned above were, to use al-Maqrizi’s words, the times of ordeals and ruination, when only few were able to afford the food they liked. Obviously enough, the prices featured in the records apply only to the years in which they were recorded. Nevertheless, it seems possible to use them as examples of a more general relation between the prices of rice and those of other cereals. And this relation, while revealing how expensive rice was when compared to barley and wheat, seems to indicate that rice was within the reach of an average middle-class person. Three elements substantiate such a conclusion: one, that barley (in 806/1403–4 almost 3 times cheaper than rice) was, above all, a fodder and generally not a food item to be fed to humans. Two, that wheat (in 806/1403–4 costing half the price of rice) was a strategic agriculture product of which bread, the basic Egyptian staple, was made. An average middle class household seemed to have used as much as one irdabb of wheat per month.And three, that rice was merely an ingredient used in a number of cooked preparations and, as such, was comparable neither to barley nor to wheat. This means that rice was in fact not as expensive as it appears to have been at the first glance.Doubtlessly, rice was beyond the reach of those with the lowest income or no income at all—but so were most of other food items, ordinary bread and cheese included. For the middle class Cairenes, however, a rice dish was not something they could not afford. Moreover, the evidence dating back to the early post-medieval period and showing not only popularity, but also commonness of rice in Egypt, indicates that in the later Middle Ages the situation could not be very much different. Whatever its true share in satisfying the alimentary needs of medieval Cairenes, the popularity of rice was unquestionable in the ninth/fifteenth century. At the time of the Ottoman conquest of 922–3/1517, the demand for rice was apparently high enough to assure the well-being of rice threshers working in rice cultivation centers in the Delta. By the end of the century, a Polish traveler Mikolaj Radziwill (in Egypt in 1580) noticed that the offer of the city kitchens included lamb, chicken, and geese, but that it was rice and cakes with oil that were the most abundant of all. A decade later de Villamont (in Egypt in 1590) observed that “they quite frequently use rice in their soups,” while Christophe Harant (in Egypt in 1598) confirmed that rice was one of numerous food items sold by the Cairene cooks.
At the same time, Mustafa Ali, a Turkish visitor to Cairo (in Egypt in 1599), spoke of “stewed meat and rice and saffron pudding” which, beside “sourdish and caraway soup of very low standard,” were part of the meals that “some of the great give for the people.”Mustafa Ali makes it quite clear that those of the city’s rich who indeed offered charity food (tasteless as it was, according to him) subsidized the cheapest foodstuffs. Rice could not thus have been a costly item by that time. Moreover, not only was it commonplace and sold well but, as Coppin noticed (in Egypt in 1638–1639 and 1643–1646), when added to soup it constituted one of the elements of the otherwise poor and “valueless” menu of the lowest orders of the society. In the eleventh/seventeenth century rice was reportedly “so common in Egypt, and [grew] in such quantities, that it [was] exported abroad by full boats. Not only children [ate] rice, but all the inhabitants, craftsmen, bourgeois, and even grand lords. There [was] no meal that would go without a number of rice dishes or at least prepared with rice. Rice [was] a savory food, substantial and [sold] well.”
A century later rice, rich in starch and nourishing, was still popular. As Richard Pococke (in Egypt in the eighteenth century) noted down, “their dishes consisting of Pilaw, soups, Dulma, which is any vegetable stuffed with forced meat: as cucumbers, onions, cawl leaves.”True, both “Pilaw” and “Dolma” can be prepared with burghul or a kind of cracked wheat (still very popular in Turkey and the Levant). Considering, however, that burghul was never approved of in Cairo, we should rather assume that what Pococke saw or ate was made of rice. By the time Pococke visited Egypt, the Ottoman tastes and culinary preferences, including the extensive consumption of rice, were already well entrenched in Cairo.
So much so that with time rice not only became a widespread cereal, but apparently also an indispensable item of the local menu. Common and important as it finally became, rice never supplanted or replaced bread as a primary staple. Habitually, a portion of rice was eaten with bread, like any other dish of the local cuisine.
Wheat (qamh, hinta; Triticum spp. L.), the most important of the medieval Egyptian cereal grains, was known in Egypt since antiquity. But the main variety grown and consumed in ancient Egypt was not identical with what was grown and eaten in the Middle Ages. The former was husked wheat, or emmer, the three genome Triticum dicoccum, continuously cultivated from Pre-Dynastic times up to the Roman era. The varieties consumed in the Middle Ages were the so-called naked wheats, particularly Triticum durum. Introduced to Egypt only in the Ptolemaic and Roman times, they steadily supplanted the local emmer wheat. The pace of change was fast, and within a relatively short period the switch to Triticum durum was almost total. Apart from the periods of crises which from time to time devastated Egyptian agriculture and economy, wheat remained throughout the Middle Ages the cereal from which bread was made in Egypt.
Bread was the basic food for the poor and an indispensable addition to any dish for the well-to-do; as such, it was the medieval Egyptian staff of life and the staple whose principal position in the local diet was incontestable. Hence the strategic importance of wheat in the Egyptian market and its central position among the Egyptian crops. The cereals used for bread production are what differentiated the Egyptian and, more generally, Levantine loaves from Western ones of the same period. Until the times following the Black Death, the majority of Europeans, regardless of social class, ate mostly barley, rye, or mixed bread, and it was only the most privileged who could enjoy the white bread made of wheat.No wonder, then, that for many Western travelers it was the color of the Egyptian loaves that attracted attention. Frescobaldi, who noticed that the Egyptian bread was very badly baked, at the same time appreciated it was as white as milk—which was because they had “very fine and good wheat.”Symon Simeonis also noticed the whiteness of Egyptian bread, while Sigoli, even more impressed, observed that in Alexandria there was “the most beautiful bread and good and cheaper at any time than at home.”For the Arab visitors the quality of the Egyptian bread must have been remarkable, too: the fourth/tenth-century Syrian traveler al-Muqaddasi noticed that only fine, huwwari bread was baked in al-Fustat. Al-khubz al-huwwari, or pure, wheat-flour white bread, sometimes sprinkled with assorted seeds,might have been the only kind of bread al-Muqaddasi saw in al-Fustat. It is hardly possible, however, that it was the only kind of bread available in town. The existing records show that the Egyptian bread, although generally made of one kind of cereal, was by no means uniform. As anywhere else, in al-Fustat and Cairo the quality of loaves baked for the well-to-do had to differ from the miserable and cheap bread of the poor. The former probably preferred al-khubz al-huwwari or al-khubz as-samid, or expensive semolina bread,while the latter had to make do with al-khubz al-khushkar, or bread made of coarsely-ground and not well refined flour, sometimes additionally enriched with various non-wheat admixtures.Black bread, or al-khubz al-aswad occasionally mentioned by some authors, seems to have been not so much the bread of the poor but a crisis-time bread made of barley or sorghum, possibly with admixture of some of cereal substitutes which included flour made of broad beans, lupine, chickpeas, lentils, bran etc. Goitein is probably right to observe that using the term “loaf” to designate the Egyptian bread raghif is convenient but also somewhat misleading, for the “Near Eastern bread is flat, round, and soft, to be easily broken by hand.”Indeed, it seems it was almost always flat and usually round; its softness, however, was a demanded attribute rather than the real feature of what the city bakeries produced. Ideally, it should have been made of “soft, white and new flour to which water was added little by little until it became not too moist and not too dry.”Well kneaded and baked on slow fire, the dough was then supposed to be “left for a while in the open air, so that its moistness was absorbed and its steam allowed to go out.”
In real circumstances of everyday life, however, good, new flour was not always available, bakers were not always patient enough to knead the dough properly, the oven fire was difficult to control and, moreover, the proportions of leaven and salt were left to the discretion of a baker or his apprentice. In effect, the much sought-after bread, “made according to the rules, with appropriate quantity of leaven and salt, with its dough well kneaded and raised, baked on a slow and moderate fire long enough to be well-cooked,”was not the only kind available from the market. There was also bread that was “made with little leaven and little salt, with its dough kneaded not long enough and rising for too short and, moreover, underbaked. And there was what was made with too much leaven and too much salt. And there was sour fatir to which no leaven nor salt were added at all.”The unleavened and unsalted fatir was, as al-Isra'ili points out, quite popular among peasants and harvesters who “found it tasty.”No wonder, then, that the Cairene bread, important as it was in the local daily menu, did not evoke particular enthusiasm among its consumers.
Ibn Ridwan who, apart from being a renowned doctor, was also a son of a poor baker from Giza (the fourth-fifth/tenth-eleventh centuries) complained that “the bread made from wheat produced in Egypt is not edible if it sits for a day and a night. After that, it is no longer enjoyable and does not hold together in one piece. It is not chewable and becomes moldy in short time; the same applies to flour. This is different from the breads of other countries.”Ibn Ridwan, who looked at the world from the Galenic perspective, maintained that a similar situation concerned all the crops and fruits in Egypt as well as products made from them. This was so because they were “doomed to early spoilage on account of the swiftness of their transformation and alteration.”For al-Maqrizi, the reasons behind such a condition of the local bread related to human behavior rather than to natural circumstances. While reporting on inedibility of the Cairene bread during the periods of privation, he explained that it was the high degree of impurity that made the loaves tasteless as soon as they became cold.True, during periods of crisis bread was particularly bad, but the poor quality of flour was not a matter of temporary occurrence in medieval Cairo. Buying flour at the flour-dealer’s or bread from the bakery or the street stand was apparently always a risky transaction, so much so that to avoid irritating surprises people preferred to make their own bread out of their own flour which they had milled out of their own wheat. Another problem with the thin Cairene bread loaf was that it was not resistant to heat and that, as Arnold von Harff noticed in the fifteenth century, the great heat of the sun within three hours made the bread as hard as stone, and thus inedible. This was also why, according to him, there were so many bakeries, “for the bread had to be eaten hot from the oven.”And this was also why, in one of the Cairene Arabian Nights stories, a mother asks her son to get her “hot bread and cheese.”was, above all, that any bread other than hot from the oven was simply inedible.This feature of the Egyptian bread seems to have been known in other parts of the Near East, too. Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi, the Persian mystic who had never been to Egypt, must have heard this truth during his stay in Syria. Down-to-earth as it was, for some reason the information proved inspiring enough to make this otherwise spiritual poet use it with his uniquely candid finesse:
'My poetry is like the bread of Egypt
The day after, you cannot eat it
Eat it while it is fresh
Before dust has settled on it'.
It is impossible to judge how many loaves an average medieval Cairene consumed per day except by comparing with contemporary bread consumption rate in more traditional households. It seems certain, however, that bread was a dominant item in a regular middle-class household expenditures.According to the Geniza documents, the weekly ration allotted by a husband to his working wife was four loaves of bread, “each weighing approximately a pound, a total of about 1,750 grams,” and a pound of meat. The same quantity was “handed out by the Jewish community of al-Fustat to a destitute person.” Indeed, four loaves was a meager share, even if we take into consideration that bread in Cairo was never eaten by itself. Essential and satiating as it was, as a staple food item it did not always play the role analogous to rice in Southeast Asia or manioc in tropical Africa. Dipped or used as a spoon, plate, or an ingredient in cooked preparations, it could either be served as a side dish to to the principal food or constitute one of a preparation’s essential ingredients. Without it, however, no dish was complete. Be it simple food like “sour milk and cucumbers when in season, fried eggs, and oil to dip the bread in” or “salt cheese like curds,” or be it the elaborate preparations of the Arabic-Islamic haute cuisine, all had to be served with bread. As a cooked food ingredient, bread was a multipurpose and useful item. Cut into triangles, stuffed with either meaty or sweet filling, and fried in oil, it could be made into sanbusik, or samosa-style pies.It could be also stuffed—as in recipes for famous bazmaward “sandwiches”—with pounded roast meat seasoned with leaves of mint, wine vinegar, salted lemon, walnuts, and rose-water. Cut into thin pieces, bazmaward was arranged on a tray or in an earthenware vessel and covered with mint leaves.The same filling could be also spread on a loaf of flat bread which, made into a roll, was cut into slices and called awsat.In a number of dishes called jawadhib, two flat bread loaves could serve as a base and cover for various sweet fruit, almond or poppy fillings arranged between them. Since immediate drying was not an exclusive feature of the Cairene bread, but of most of the bread loaves of this kind baked in the region, it came only naturally that the Arabic-Islamic culinary culture boasted a vast collection of culinary preparations in which day-old bread was used. Of these, the priority is definitely due to tharid, one of the most classical of the pre-Islamic Arab dishes and probably the most famous of them all. Mentioned in the Sunna and praised by the Prophet as the best of dishes, it was possibly known not only in Arabia, but among the Bedouins of Syria and Egypt as well. But even if tharid had been consumed in the Egyptian deserts before the Islamic conquest, it seems that in Egyptian cities it was popularized only some time later, either in the course of adopting the desert dish from the Arab warrior newcomers or after its reappearance in Egypt as a dish already adopted by and adjusted to the new wave cuisine. All in all, it seems certain that in the fifth-sixth/eleventh-twelfth century tharid was eaten in Cairo. Made of stewed meat and of crumbled or torn-up bread which was simply thrown on the broth to moisten, tharid was cooked and sold in the city streets by the dealers of cooked sheep's heads.Another dry bread preparation of Bedouin and pre-Islamic origin was hays, sweet meatballs covered with dust of fine-ground sugar and made of dried pounded bread mixed with pounded biscuit (ka'k), pitted dried dates, pounded walnuts, almonds and pistachios, toasted sesame seeds, and warm sesame oil. Enduring and appropriate for lunch boxes, hays was recommended as “excellent for travelers.” But the recipes for dishes which called for bread crumbs were by no means limited to those originating in the food culture of the pre-Islamic Arabian Bedouins. There were also Egyptian preparations such as asyutiyya, a kind of pudding named after the Egyptian city of Asyut. With a filling made of crumbed and sieved dry bread mixed with honey, syrup, poppy seeds, dry dates, saffron, almonds, and pistachios that was arranged between two flat breads, fragranced with musk and rose-water, it was cooked while covered with tail fat and sesame oil in the tannur oven.And there was harisat al-fustuq, or pistachio porridge, a dish which was not only Egyptian but, very probably, specifically a Cairene invention. The dish was made by toasting sieved dry bread crumbs in sesame oil, to which syrup, honey, pounded pistachios and torn chicken breasts were later added. Optionally colored with indigo, the dish, when cooked, was perfumed with musk and rose-water. These are only some illustrations of what the urban Arabic-Islamic food culture recommended with regard to day-old bread. Other examples included various kinds of “puddings,” either of the judhab or khabis kind and generally similar in style to asyutiyya dish, as well as several varieties of basisa, or a “bread crumb dish” still popular in the ninth/fifteenth century Cairo and made of day-old bread hand crumbled with sesame oil so that “it became like poppy seeds” to which sugar, poppy seeds, toasted sesame seeds, syrup or honey, and rose-water were added. The Near Eastern palates clearly preferred a combination of bread crumbs with sweet ingredients, but sweetness was by no means the obligatory feature of all the bread crumb preparations. Tharid is one example of a savory bread crumb dish. Another one is a variety of summaqiyya, a dish of fat meat and vegetables in which macerated and strained bread crumbs were used to thicken sour sumac water with which the preparation was flavored.Interestingly, crumbled bread could also serve as a kind of base upon which the elements of meat dish were arranged. This was the case of trotters (akari') which, cooked in the tannur oven, were served on crumbled bread moistened with broth. Kabis, a cinnamon flavored oven dish of fat meat, chickpeas, and wheat could be served upon crumbled bread, too.Important as it was for making various sweet and savory dishes, dry bread was also essential for preparing murri, a very particular relish comparable to soy sauce and to Roman garum. Its monthslong production process consisted, roughly speaking, in leaving pounded unleavened bread, mixed with rotten barley and some seasonings, in the heat of the Near Eastern summer sun.
Ordinary bread loaves were not, however, all that was baked of wheat flour in Cairo. Al-khubz at-tannuri bi-jubn Khaysi, or “bread with the Khaysi cheese baked in the tannur oven,” is one of the most interesting examples of a number of more or less refined breads the descriptions of which can be found in cookery books. With dough kneaded of wheat, eggs, spices (abzar), fresh milk, and pieces of fried salty Khaysi cheese, it must have been an exclusively Egyptian specialty and possibly a specifically Cairene item as well. Its actual popularity is, however, impossible to define. Other extraordinary breads described in the cookbooks included different varieties of spice breads, usually made with milk instead of water, often with fat, sometimes with nuts or seeds, sometimes with sugar. The most popular of the products akin to bread was probably ka'k, a biscuit made in a number of versions. In its simplest form, ka'k was “made by peasants from crushed wheat” and, dried, “it [was] their food during the entire year.”The ka'k baked in the Fatimid kitchens must have differed from the coarse ka'k of Egyptian fellahs, and so probably did the version eaten by the inhabitants of urban centers such as al-Fustat and Cairo. Generally, cookery books show ka'k as a sweetish, fragrant, ring-shaped biscuit bread whose dough was made of flour kneaded with clarified butter (samn), musk, and rose-water, and fried in sesame oil. While fresh, it could be served dipped in syrup and sprinkled with crushed pistachios. When dried, it could be used instead of dried bread for making tharid and hays; when pounded, it could be used for making condiments such as bunn or kamakh.Only slightly less popular than ka'k must have been khushkanan, longish dry biscuits made of flour kneaded with sesame oil and filled with a mixture of sugar, almonds and spices. Basandud, or cakes made of two pierced biscuits prepared of khushkanan dough and layered with halwa sadhija, seem to have been as common. Well documented from the Fatimid times on, these two kinds of biscuits were usually accompanied by fanid, a sweetmeat made of melted sugar, flour, and honey. Apart from baked goods, flour was also used for making sweets of the halawa kind. In this case the preparation, usually made of flour mixed with clarified butter or oil, sugar, honey or molasses, and various kinds of nuts, was either cooked in a pot or made without cooking. Bread, biscuits, and sweet-spicy cookies were not all that was made of wheat grain. Apart from being the basic ingredient of baked goods, wheat, either in the form of grains, groats, or flour, was also used in a number of cooked preparations. The most distinctive of them was, doubtlessly, a meat porridge called harisa. Appreciated by the common people of the Abbasid Iraq, harisa was equally popular in Fatimid al-Fustat Cairo, where it was not only sold ready-to-eat in the city markets but also cooked in the caliphal palaces. Made of beef and/or mutton,it did not require any fanciful ingredients or spices.
It involved, however, burdensome work and professional kitchen equipment, such as a sizable pot made of lead, and the tannur oven.The name harisa, coming from the verb harasa, or “to crush, mash, pound until tender,” only partly reflects the laborious process of its preparation. This involved shredding boiled meat and boiling it again together with clean, ground wheat. The cooking should have been done in a tannur oven rather than on an open fire. After that “the top of the pot was to be covered and sealed around with dough and sealed on the outside, and the top of the tannur [was] covered all the night.”
When the pot was opened in the morning, the contents was beaten until it gained the consistency of a smooth paste. Then fresh melted sheep’s tail fat could be poured over the surface. The dish, optionally sprinkled with cumin and ground Chinese cinnamon, was served with murri sauce or lemon juice. The Jews of al-Fustat also prepared harisa which, owing to the long process of warming, became their Sabbath specialty. Interestingly, their dish, which Goitein calls “medieval hamburger (ground meat and wheat fried in much fat)” was not identical with harisa we know from Arab sources. This time- and labor-demanding dish had a number of easier versions. One of them was qamhiyya, or “wheat dish.” Qamhiyya however, made simply by cooking wheat grains with meat,could not match harisa, even if ennobled by addition of spices. With the rustic chic so visible in it, qamhiyya was still only a peasant fare inserted into urban menu. The same refers to a preparation featured in one of the recipes for hintiyya, literally also a “wheat dish.” The recipe, written in the tenth/sixteenth century Damascus, instructed to “take wheat and boil it in a little water until it gives up its starch” and then to “add water and put meat in it.” Although the anonymous author of Wasf supplemented the recipe with some suggestions meant to upgrade the quality of the preparation by more careful and complex treatment of wheat grains, the final result still constituted just a “wheat dish.” The above remarks do not, however, concern the hintiyya dish as described in al-Baghdadi’s Kitab al-Tabikh. Although basically also made of meat, wheat, and spices, the Abbasid gourmets’ contribution to its refinement allows one to consider the dish as an urban rather than peasant food. Al-Baghdadi’s version read:
Cut fat meat into middling pieces and fry lightly in dissolved tail ...Then throw in a little salt, brayed dry coriander, and some pieces of cinnamon. When nearly cooked, increase water as required by the wheat, and add a little dry dill. When properly boiling, take sufficient shelled wheat, crush fine in a mortar, wash, and add to the pot ... Sprinkle with fine-brayed cumin and cinnamon, and if desired add squeezed lemon.
Yet, qamhiyya or hintiyya, however simple, were not the crudest of Egyptian wheat preparations. This honor should go to nayda—even coarser, even less refined, and very much “peculiar to Egypt”—as a medieval Iraqi traveler observed. Indeed, nayda, “a sweet dish of wheat,” was not—to use the words of another traveler—“prepared anywhere else except here [i.e. in Cairo] and in other places in Egypt.”Coarse as it was, it nevertheless seems to have had its enthusiasts abroad—Ibn Iyas maintained nayda was exported to Syria.“Red turning to black, it is sweet, though not exceedingly. It is prepared with wheat which has germinated and then been cooked until its substance is completely deposited in the water. After that it is clarified, and they cook it until a heavy deposit is left. When it is at this point they put in as much flour as it will take and remove it from the fire.” The dish, if prepared this way, was called naydat al-bush and sold “at the price of bread.”There was also a more expensive and better version of the dish: called nayda ma'quda (coagulated nayda), it was prepared by cooking wheat until it solidified, without adding flour.
The above description, noted down by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi in the beginning of the seventh/thirteenth century, is probably the only historical record dealing with nayda in such an informative way. Oddly enough, the name of this unique Egyptian dish, still popular in Cairo as late as in the ninth/fifteenth century, is not to be found in the form described by al-Baghdadi in any of the known Cairene cookery books. Naydat al-khulafa, or “nayda of the caliphs” has nothing to do with the genuine, country-style nayda, as its recipe calls for bread crumbs, sugar, honey, sesame oil, and pistachios. The absence of nayda from a majority of cookbooks might easily be justified by the primitive character of the dish and its low social status. However, such a justification appears inadequate. After all, other foodstuffs of the peasants or of the city’s poor, such as salted fish (sir), salty fish pastes (sahna), dried yoghurt (kishk), local salty cheese, bread steeped in broth, “wheat dish” etc., were adapted, in a more or less modified form, by the “bourgeois” food culture. What seems to explain the problem in a more satisfactory way is that nayda, “a sort of ersatz sugar” of the poor, was indeed nothing more than that. With its sweetness produced by means of malting the wheat grains, nayda as a confection made only for the poor. Sweetish rather than sweet, it was definitely not sweet enough to satisfy the palates of those who could afford regular honey/sugar sweetmeats. The medieval Islamic world knew, probably since remote antiquity, two wheat products which, originally of a very local nature, with time, became basic and most distinctive food items for the vast territories covering most of the Middle East and North Africa. Widespread though they were, the two products maintained their regional character: couscous dominated the territories spreading west of Egypt, while burghul prevailed in the region lying east of it. Michael Abdalla observes that the expansion of burghul in the western Middle East ends exactly where the domination of couscous begins. He maintains that the area of burghul consumption covers, roughly, the lands which in the seventh century B.C.E. were occupied by the Assyrian state.
Indeed, the correctness of Abdalla’s theses can hardly be questioned. It should be added, however, that the Egyptians, although they had experienced Assyrian occupation,seem to have never included burghul in their diet. The historical sources referring to medieval Egypt or Cairo are silent about this specialty. Produced from hard-wheat varieties by grinding grains which were boiled and dried in the sun, burghul was in fact a rural, regional and seasonal food meant as provision for winter. The Egyptians clearly did not care for wheat processed this way. Its diffusion westward seems to have stopped on the eastern frontier of Egypt which thus became a kind of buffer zone between the couscous- and burghul dominated territories.
Resolutely rejecting the Middle Eastern groats-like specialty, Egypt seems to have been more positively disposed towards what was coming from the west. Originally the distinctive food of the Berbers and today the primary staple food throughout the Maghreb, couscous (kuskusu) consists of granules of about two millimeters in diameter, made of semolina flour. Today, the traditional process of its production involves “a bowl of flour sprinkled intermittently with salted water as the fingers of the right hand rake through it in sweeping, circular movements, causing balls of dough to coagulate. The granules are also rubbed between the palms or against the side of the bowl to shape them.” When dried, they “are sieved several times to obtain granules of uniform size.”Couscous is generally cooked in steam, in a metal or earthenware colander sealed with paste to a pot in which the stew is being cooked. A dish “call’d Cuscasow,” which Richard Pococke saw eaten by “the Moors” in the twelfth/eighteenth-century Egypt, was not much different from the contemporary version: “made with flour temper’d with water, and rolled in the hands into small pieces, and being put in a cullender, over a boiling pot stopped close round, it is dressed with the steam, and then they put butter to it.”The precise date of its introduction to Egypt, as well as its early history in general, remain unclear. Although the Fatimid epoch was the period of the intensive Berbers’ infiltration of Egypt and their settlement in the al-Fustat—Cairo area, sources dating back to that time do not mention couscous. This may indicate that by that time couscous, if consumed by the Berber troops and settlers at all, was their specific ethnic dish.
According to Charles Perry, however, “the suspicious silence” about couscous in sources from before the seventh/thirteenth century in general suggests that couscous arose among the Berbers of the North Africa only as late as between the fifth/eleventh and seventh/thirteenth centuries.Be that as it may, the continuous presence of the Maghrebian community (not too numerous but prominent, distinct, and tending to retain its own traditions) in medieval Cairo must have contributed to the relative popularization of couscous in the city.
Far from becoming commonly appreciated by the Cairenes, by the Mamluk times couscous was recognizable enough to attract the attention of some of the authors of cookbooks who included recipes for couscous dishes in the books they compiled. One very complicated recipe for a spicy dish with meat, eggplant and couscous made of North African semolina, is to be found in Wasf. Of the two others, both of which are given in Wusla, one mentions the traditional granules, made by stirring water-sprinkled flour by hand and cooked by steaming, while the other refers to short noodles made of stiff dough and cooked by boiling.Compared with the number of recipes for rice or wheat dishes, three recipes for couscous is not much. The number of the recipes, coupled with the impression that all three of them were included in the cookbooks as oddities rather than as known and appreciated meals, suggests that couscous never truly won over the Cairenes’ palates. Sparse as they are, these recipes nevertheless confirm that couscous, unlike burghul, was to some degree accepted and consumed in medieval (and later) Cairo,if only by the “Moors.” Interestingly, couscous and burghul were not the only wheat grain dishes out of favor with the local population. This might also have been the case of jashish, or ordinary ground/crushed wheat (or grains in general) of which dishes called jashish(a) were made. In its genuine Arab form jashisha was made of ground wheat cooked together with meat and dates to acquire a thick, porridge-like consistency. The dish was said to have been served by the Prophet to one of his wives. As a result of the Islamic conquest, the dish was carried by the Arabs as far as al-Andalus, where it was significantly modified: Andalusian jashish was either ground wheat cooked with hulb (fenugreek?)and colored with saffron or, in another version, ground wheat simply cooked in milk and little water with no seasoning at all. As for Egypt, cracked wheat preparations were known and consumed there in the pre-Islamic times. Nevertheless, medieval Egypt seems not to have particularly fancied this kind of food, at least not in urban centers. The Cairene traces of jashish are, in fact, very few. One of them is to be found in the Geniza documents, where the profession of jashshash, or jashish maker, is mentioned a few times. The other is a recipe included in one of the medieval Egyptian cookery books, where crushed and ground wheat grains are used to make Khorasanian kishk. Apparently, Cairo preferred to stick with bread.
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. 136-173. Edited and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa
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