MIDDLE EASTERN FOOD HISTORY

The Middle East refers primarily to the Fertile Crescent of Syria and Iraq together with neighboring Turkey, Iran, and Egypt. Because of the cultural unity provided by Islam in this overwhelmingly Muslim part of the world, North Africa is regarded as part of the Middle East. Agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent, and early domesticates still predominate in the local cuisines. Wheat is still the chief grain (except in Iran and southern Iraq, where rice arrived in the early Middle Ages); sheep and goats are the primary meat and dairy animals; and chickpeas, lentils, and favas remain major sources of protein. Since most of these domesticates have reached Europe, Middle Eastern food may not seem as exotic to Westerners as some other cuisines.

This is also where writing began and where we find the oldest written recipes. It may be that recipes were occasionally written down in other places at other times, once literacy became sufficiently widespread, but have simply not survived to our time. The early Middle Eastern recipes date from two periods from which we have particularly abundant records: the seventeenth century b.c.e. and the eighth through thirteenth centuries c.e., the noonday of medieval Arab civilization. The oldest recipes are recorded on three cuneiform tablets in the Yale Babylonian collection. In many ways they resemble recipes that might be written today. For instance, broth is made by boiling “fat” (probably fatty meat) with flavorings such as leeks and garlic. There are recipes for game meats, such as venison and gazelle, and a number of game birds.

Most ingredients appear to be local plants and animals, both domesticated and wild, though the exact species referred to is often uncertain.

Two dishes are identified as coming from Assyria and Elam, Babylon’s great rivals, which suggests a certain degree of cosmopolitanism. There is one extremely long and complex recipe for a game bird and two recipes made in connection with religious sacrifices, but most seem to be the sorts of dishes that would be served in a well-to-do household of the time. In short, what we see in these recipes is somewhat familiar but with a strong whiff of the mysterious and archaic.

After these Babylonian writings, darkness descends for about 2,500 years. A few references in Latin and Greek literature cast a fitful light on Egyptian and Syrian breads, for instance, but the recipes for Parthian (northwest Iranian) and Numidian (Tunisian) chicken that appear in the second-century Roman cookbook of Apicius look thoroughly Roman to our eyes.

Eventually, in the eighth and ninth centuries, blazing light appears; by the end of the thirteenth century there would be six major recipe collections in Arabic, consisting of four hundred or more recipes each, and several smaller collections. During this period the Arabs were the only people in the world, so far as we know, who were writing cookbooks.

When Muslim armies from Arabia conquered Persia in 642–644, they found a highly developed cult of gastronomy in the Persian court. A clear picture of it is given by the short story “King Husrav and His Boy” (“boy” in the sense of page or servant) written in Middle Persian. It tells the tale of an impoverished young nobleman who petitions the king of Persia (presumably Khusrau I, who reigned 531–579) for a position in his retinue on the grounds of his noble ancestry, wide learning, mastery of the martial arts, and above all, his discriminating taste. The king proceeds to quiz him on what is the finest in thirteen categories. The young man answers in a formulaic way: “May you be immortal! Such-and-such is good, such-and-such is good and such-and-such is good, but such-and-such is best.” For instance, the finest fowl is a rooster fed on hemp seeds and olive oil, chased and frightened before killing, hung overnight and then roasted. In short, the story is really a handbook of gourmet opinions. And gourmet is really the word—nine of the thirteen categories concern food or drink.

Notice the extravagance and luxury that had so scandalized the Greeks about the Persians: a lamb is suckled on the milk of two mothers, a sweetmeat is made with the fat of the (proverbially lean) gazelle. Notice also the focus on hierarchical ranking of dishes: haute cuisine was a particularly strong marker of status in the aristocratic culture of pre-Islamic Iran. Gentlemen of the Sassanian court were expected to be knowledgeable about food, even to be able to cook—there are anecdotes of Persian kings organizing cooking contests among their boon companions, just as they organized competitions among the palace cooks. The crucial fact for food history is that Persian courtiers kept their own personal recipe collections, possibly including some unique dishes of their own, more likely versions of well-known dishes that they particularly fancied, probably taken down from the practice of the gentlemen’s household cooks.

The Arabs were dazzled by all this wealth and sophistication and adopted many Persian practices. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the caliphs of Baghdad organized cooking contests among their companions, just as Persian kings had, and it was also fashionable among gentlemen of their court to keep their own personal recipe collections.

This period saw some new gastronomic elements. It was when wine was first drunk from glasses, rather than from bowls or cups, so Arabic developed a more detailed vocabulary for describing the colors of wine than the Greeks and Romans had known. Different words for “red” were applied to young and old red wines, and a light rosé was called ‘ain al-dik, “rooster’s eye.” Al-Hamadhani’s tenth-century entertainment “The Wine Maqama” gives an example of wine-connoisseur speech, featuring the roguish exaggeration dear to the medieval Arab taste. In this tale, a barmaid boasts thus of her aged wine: “Bidding farewell to age after age, a secret in the pocket of pleasure, it has inherited bounties and the days and nights have taken from it until there remain only fragrance and sunbeams and the aromatic herbs of the soul ... (it is) like incandescence in the veins and a cold wind in the throat, a lantern of thought and an antidote to the poison of time.”1

So far as we know there had been no food poetry in pre-Islamic Persia, but ninth-and tenth-century Baghdad saw a vogue for it. Mostly the resulting poems are no more than courtly verse-making that mechanically compares every dish or ingredient to a precious stone, a fragrant flower, or a heavenly body, but some are more interesting, such as this verse by one of the leaders of the movement, Ibn al-Rumi: "Never will I forget a baker I passed Who rolled out thin flatbread in the twinkling of an eye. Between seeing it as a lump in his hand And seeing it rolled out, a disk like the moon, Was no longer than it takes a ripple to spread In water where a stone has been tossed.2"

We know a great deal about the courtly cuisine of this period because in the tenth century, a scribe compiled Kitab al-Tabikh (“The Book of Dishes”), the first recipe book in Arabic, at the behest of a patron who wanted to know the dishes “of kings and caliphs and lords and notables.” 3 This unnamed patron was almost certainly Saif al-Daula, the prince of Aleppo, somewhat of an upstart who yearned to robe himself in the glory of aristocratic tradition. As for the compiler, his name —Ibn Nasr ibn Sayyar— indicates that he was descended from a seventh-century Muslim governor of eastern Iran, and this family connection might have given him access to court circles. True to his assignment, Ibn Nasr ibn Sayyar identified many dishes by their courtly provenance: “a madira from the manuscript of Ibrahim ibn al-Mahdi,” say, or “a mulahwaja which was often prepared for Harun al-Rashid.” The unascribed dishes doubtless also come from the recipe books of aristocrats, just not those famous enough for his patron to care about.

In the eighth and ninth centuries, Baghdad was probably the largest and richest city in the world, and its court cuisine was suitably aristocratic and recherché. Many of the dishes in Kitab al-Tabikh have Persian names and some come with anecdotes ascribing them to various Persian monarchs (these recipes are written in fairly bad Arabic, so they might actually have been translated from Middle Persian). Many more dishes were invented by Baghdad cooks, under heavy Persian influence, and have names taken from an ingredient or a cooking technique. Nine dishes are named after figures of the court, and some of the names are still current, such as the rice pudding muhallabiyya, named for a governor of eastern Iran, and buraniyya (originally meaning fried eggplant but today the name for a wide range of dishes from stews of all sorts to cold vegetables dressed with yogurt), which was named for a caliph’s wife.

The dishes include fried, stewed, and roasted meats, fish dishes, stews, condiments, pastries, puddings, and candies.4 Like all medieval Arab cookbooks, Kitab al-Tabikh devotes the lion’s share of its space to stews of various kinds. Mostly they call for “meat,” which would have been either lamb or kid, though sometimes beef or game were called for. These are elaborate dishes flavored with nuts, spices, herbs (sometimes as many as four fresh herbs in a single dish), fruits, vegetables, and expensive aromatics like truffles and musk.

The appeal of these dishes to the book’s social-climbing patron was apparently shared by many lower on the social ladder, because this book has survived in three complete manuscripts and recipes from it were copied into other books. But many of the dishes must have been beyond an ordinary household’s abilities. For one, a large live fish is kept in a tank of grape juice in order to give its flesh a special savor. For another, the leg bones are removed from a calf so that each leg can be given a different sort of stuffing before it is roasted whole.

Still, Kitab al-Tabikh appears to have familiarized the Arabs with the idea of cookbooks. By the thirteenth century, there was a lively “publishing” industry in manuscripts, to judge from the fact that nearly all that have come down to us show evidence of multiple generations of copying.

The cuisine in these thirteenth-century books is by no means as aristocratic as that of Kitab al-Tabikh because there was no longer a metropolis of wealth and power comparable to ninth-century Baghdad in the now fragmented Islamic world. But their contents still tended to be special-occasion dishes designed to impress, and some texts off-handedly remark that the writer learned such-and-such a dish from a particular aristocratic household, so we may assume that social climbing was an enduring motivation for buying cookbooks. However, by this time there is also evidence of interest in food for its own sake, because people have written down recipes learned from unknown sources in the margins of nearly every manuscript. At all periods, there was interest in what were held to be the health effects of particular foods.

Cookbooks were being compiled in all the population centers of the Arab world in the thirteenth century. Two represent the cookery of North Africa and Moorish Spain: Fudalatal-Khiwan (The Excellence of the Table) and an anonymous and untitled manuscript generally known among food historians as the Manuscrito Anónimo after the edition published by a Spanish scholar.5

Such was the prestige of the Persian-inspired cuisine of Baghdad that North African cuisine has a clear family resemblance to that illustrated in the tenth-century book, despite the political separation of Moors from the Arab East, which began before Baghdad was the capital of the Caliphate. However, Moorish cuisine had a distinct culinary personality of its own.6 A ninth-century musician and gourmet named Ziryab, driven out of Baghdad by a rival, found a welcome home in Granada, where he introduced innovations including the idea of serving food in courses. The author of Anónimo writes, “Many of the great figures and their companions order that the separate dishes be placed on each table before the diners, one after another; and by my life, this is more beautiful than putting an uneaten mound all on the table, and more elegant, well-bred, and modern.”

In the east, cuisine was beginning to feel the influence of the cuisine of the Turks, who would later dominate the region.7 In the west, non-Arab and non-Persian influences came from the Berbers and the Spanish— the former seem to have invented couscous, the latter a sort of puff pastry. The Moors also developed stews and baked goods of their own.

Many Moorish stews were finished off by a procedure called takhmir; in Anónimo, 128 out of the book’s 420 recipes feature it. This word has puzzled scholars. It looks as if it is related to the Arabic word for yeast, so some have translated it as “to ferment,” and it nearly always involves eggs, so others have imagined that it means “to thicken.” Clumsy scribes sometimes wrote takhmir in ways that could be read as “to brown” or “to drown,” both regrettably plausible. In fact, takhmı¯r has the straight-forward dictionary meaning “to cover” and it refers to a coating of eggs, or occasionally bread crumbs, that was applied to a stew before sending it to the oven for a final cooking. This tradition survives in Tunisia, where a stew called tagine is so often topped with eggs that tourist guides may refer to it as an omelet.

Meanwhile, in the east, there are three major thirteenth-century cookbooks, related to each other in varying degrees, sharing recipes and details of chapter organization. Manuela Marin and David Waines, editors of the Arabic text of Kanz al-Fawaid fi Tanwi’ al-Mawaid (The Treasury of Benefits regarding the Diversity of Tables), have identified it as being compiled in Egypt, while Kitab al-Wusla ila al-Habib (The Link to the Beloved) is clearly Syrian and Kitab Wasf al-Atima al-Mutada (The Description of Familiar Foods) is from Baghdad, at least in part, because it consists of the text of a book written by a certain Muhammad ibn al-Karim al-Baghdadi, expanded a few years later by the addition of another 240 recipes.

The cuisine of these books continues in the same vein as Kitab al-Tabikh , though the percentage of Persian names declines relative to the Arabic names of newly developed dishes. The books are loyal to ju¯dha¯b (or judhaba), the most esteemed dish of medieval Baghdad. For this dish, a chicken was roasted in a tandoor oven. When its juices started to drip, a tray of pudding—the judhab proper—would be inserted under it to catch them, and the diner got a slice of this enriched pudding along with a piece of roast chicken. There were many judhab recipes, such as bread, rice, or apricot pudding, even a tray of nut-stuffed crepes. This dish was scarcely known to the Moors, because they used the European-style brick oven rather than the tandoor, which is basically a large clay jug with a hearth at the bottom.

The easterners also continued to revere a Persian confection called lauzinaj, which consisted of a cylinder of marzipan rolled up in a paperthin pastry and stored in sesame oil. Poets praised its delicacy: “pearled with sesame oil, star-like in color, melting before it can be chewed.”8 As a measure of their pride in this pastry, when the Seljuk Turks conquered Baghdad in 1055, the city fathers presented a tray of lauzinaj to the Seljuk chief, a rough nomad warrior named Toghril Beg, confident of impressing upon him the elegance and refinement of their civilization. They were dismayed when his response was “these are good noodles but they could use some garlic.”9 Fortunately, the Turks would learn to appreciate haute cuisine.

After the year 1300, the writing of cookbooks in Arabic virtually ceased; coincidentally, this is when cookbooks begin to be written in Europe. There might be many reasons. The region had seen war, famine, and plague, not to mention the obliteration of Baghdad by the Mongols, and economic life had begun to decline. The torch of Islamic civilization was passing from the Arabs to Turkic nations.

In Turkey and the Fertile Crescent, the dominant power came to be the Ottoman Turks. They revered Kitab Wasf and al-Baghdadi’s book, probably as a precious link to the culture of the Baghdad of the caliphs. They preserved two manuscripts of Wasf at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul and al-Baghdadi’s original manuscript was kept in the library of the Aya Sofya mosque. In 1438, a few decades before the Ottomans conquered Istanbul, Muhammed bin Mahmud Sirvani, the court physician of Sultan Murad II, translated al-Baghdadı into Ottoman Turkish, adding about sixty recipes of his own time, in the process creating the first Turkish cookbook.

In the next two centuries the Turks went on to create a new haute cuisine, the cuisine of stuffed vegetables, shish kebabs, and baklava-type pastries that dominates the eastern Mediterranean today. During the eighteenth century, they began writing cookbooks of their own, beginning in 1732 with Mehmet Kâmil’s Agdiye Risalesi. Over the next century and a half several other books appeared, first in manuscript and eventually in print, derived from Mehmet Kâmil’s book, including Turabi Efendi’s Turkish Cookery Book, the first published on the subject in English.

In the sixteenth century, the Ottomans began systematically conquering the Balkans and virtually the entire Arab world, with the exception of Morocco and desert Arabia. As a result there were no Arab courts to support haute cuisine outside Morocco, and no cookbooks were written in Arabic until the nineteenth century. In fact, one of the first was Malja al-Tabbakhin (1886–87), a translation of Melceüt-Tabbahin, one of the descendents of Mehmet Kâmil’s book.

Persian cuisine, which had such a great influence on Arab, Turkish, Central Asian, and Indian cuisines, is regrettably ill-attested before the sixteenth century, when two very valuable books were written by Nur Allah and Hajji Mohammad Ali Bavorchi Baghdadi.

Historical Views of Middle Eastern Food

The study of medieval Arabic cookbooks began in 1934 when the Iraqi scholar Daoud Chelebi (Daud al-Chalabı) published the text of al-Baghdadi. In 1939, A. J. Arberry, later to be one of the leading Middle East scholars of the mid-twentieth century, translated it into English. In 1945, Maxime Rodinson published a major study of the cookery literature, “Documents arabes rélatifs à la cuisine,” which included a study of Kitab al-Wusla. Ambrosio Huici Miranda published the Arabic text of Anónimo in 1956. In general, these Western scholars showed a traditional academic attitude toward cookery manuscripts—they might have been interested in them as texts, but they disdained recipes as such. Arberry’s and Huici Miranda’s translations were perfunctory and riddled with lazy errors. Rodinson was more interested in the recipes than either of them, but having made his name as a scholar with his essay, he never published a translation of Kitab al-Wusla.

A serious problem with this textual approach is that many recipes cannot really be understood by mere translation: they need to be tried. For many years scholars remarked on the peculiar medieval recipes for a condiment called murri, which was made by infecting lumps of barley dough with mold spores, rotting the barley for forty days and then grinding and mixing it with water and salt and allowing it to rot for another forty days or longer. Not until the recipe was tested was it discovered that it tasted like soy sauce, which is created by the same technique, although murri was never made from soybeans or indeed any legume, and it was always flavored with spices.

Likewise, the dish sikbaj, one of the most esteemed of the Middle Ages, looks pedestrian on the page: lamb stewed with apparently any combination of fruits and/or vegetables and whatever flavorings you like, always with saffron and a good deal of vinegar. Served hot, it can be repellently sour, but when allowed to cool, it turns out that the sauce becomes a jelly—that magical texture which was one of the glories of European haute cuisine until the late nineteenth century, when packaged gelatin rendered it commonplace. Because of the vinegar, the dish is essentially a lamb aspic, and Anna Martellotti has even argued that the word “aspic” itself comes from asicpicium, one of the stumbling medieval attempts to spell al-sikbaj (pronounced assikbij by the Moors) in Latin.

In the last twenty years, published Arabic texts and translations have been arriving at an increasing rate, but several medieval books await translation, notably Kanz al-Fawaid and Shihab al-Din Ahmadb, Mubarak Shah’s Zahr al-Hadıqa fi al-At‘ima al-Aniqa (The Flower of the Garden on Elegant Foods).10 The latter, which may date from late in the thirteenth century, contains about 167 recipes, including a particularly large number of murrı¯s, vegetarian dishes, and dairy products. The French translation of Fudalat al-Khiwan by M. Mezzine and L. Benkirane is unaware of certain key features of the cuisine, such as the nature of murrı¯ and the takhmir, and deserves to be superseded. The late Rudolf Grewe produced an excellent translation of the Manuscrito Anónimo before his death, and this should be published at some point; at the moment it languishes in a modern sort of limbo—Grewe wrote it using a word processing program that has fallen out of use.

Sirvani’s Kitabüt-Tabih deserves translation from Ottoman Turkish, or at least from the modern Turkish translation by Mustafa Argunsah and Müjgan Çakır, not only because of the unique fifteenth-century recipes appended to it but because the recipes Sirvani translated from the Arabic differ in details from those in the original al-Baghdadi manuscript, giving a picture of change in tastes during the intervening two centuries about which we are otherwise almost wholly ignorant.11 In Turkey there is sufficient interest in this issue that the English translation of al-Baghdadi has been published in Turkish. Turkish scholars such as Turgut and Günay Kut, M. Nejat Sefercioglu, and Priscilla Mary Isin have published significant essays on Turkish food history; Isin writes in English as well as Turkish.

Of immense interest and highly deserving of translation are the earliest recipe collections in Persian, Hajji Muhammad ‘Ali Bavorchi Baghdadi’s Karnameh dar Bab-e Tebakhi va Sonat-e An (from the reign of Shah Ismail, 1501–1524) and Maddet-ol-Hayat, by Nur Allah, cook of Shah Abbas I (who reigned 1587–1629). The books show late-medieval Turkic influences such as the Central Asian pancake chalpak and the earliest recipes for the modern Middle Eastern staples baklava and dolma (stuffed vegetables). They were published together by Iraj Afshar under the title Ashpazi dar Doureh-ye Safavi.12

Other Areas for Study

As more translations become available, there will be room for diachronic studies of the development of particular dishes and synchronic studies of their nature in the thirteenth-century books, particularly the three related eastern books. These studies will be able to speculate about local tastes and traditions, but they will have to proceed cautiously—the traditional way of writing a cookbook is what we would call plagiarism and most of the recipes in these books are drawn from various sources. Since it is possible that the scribes producing these books for sale felt it advisable to “pad” their volumes with more recipes, a book of, say, basically Egyptian provenance may include some undigested lumps of Baghdad.

Other natural subjects include what these books reveal about cooks in their time. Some recipes are phrased as neutral descriptions (“water is boiled”), some as instructions which may have been taken down from an illiterate cook (“you boil water”), some as instructions for the householder to pass on to the cook (“let him boil water”). Kitab al-Tabikh and Kitab al-Wusla mention some household cooks by name, mostly women.

An important subject is the mutual influence of Persian, Arabic and (in the thirteenth century and later) Turkic cuisines, particularly in the technology of grain foods and dairy products. There were also regional foreign elements, such as Berber and Spanish influences on medieval Moorish cuisine and traces of the Copts of Egypt and Aramaic-speaking Christians of the Fertile Crescent in the east. Kitab al-Tabikh connects certain dishes with the provincial Persian aristocracy (dihqan) and Anónimo gives dishes of the saqaliba, a class of European slaves in Moorish Spain.

A very rich subject would be the recipes that appear in Arab medical writings, above all Yahya ibn Jazla’s eleventh-century medical encyclopedia Minhaj al-Bayan, which was heavily plagiarized by Arab cookbook writers. Anna Martellotti’s Il Liber de Ferculis di Giambonino da Cremona studies one collection of recipes from the Minhaj which was translated not only into Latin but also Middle High German, and it indicates a number of medical sources in Arabic that deserve study from a culinary history standpoint.

Notes

1. Maqamat Badi al-Zaman al-Hamadhani (Beirut: Dar al-Mashriq, 1973), 61. English translation by Charles Perry in Maxime Rodinson, A.J.Arberry, and Charles Perry, Medieval Arab Cookery (Devon: Prospect Books, 2001), 271.
2. Ibn Sayyar al-Warra, Kitab al-Tabikh, Kaj Öhrnberg and Sahban Mroueh, eds. (Helsinki: Seuran Toimituksia, 1987), 36. English translation by Charles Perry.
3. The English translation of this important book by Nawal Nasrallah is generally reliable and equipped with extensive glossaries but is somewhat marred by naïve linguistic speculation.
4. Baghdad seems to have been the first place where cooks experimented with the higher densities of sugar syrup, making possible candies, taffies, and nougat-like sweetmeats. The recipes for them in medieval books are rather uniform, perhaps because of the nature of sugar work but perhaps also reflecting the traditional secretiveness of Middle Eastern confectioners—these might be the only recipes that escaped their freemasonry.
5. Traducción Española de un Manuscrito Anónimo del Siglo XIII sobre la Cucina Hispano-Magribi, a Spanish translation that appeared in Madrid in 1966 under Huici Miranda’s byline, is regrettably unreliable. Some years ago the author of this chapter agreed as a favor to a historical recreationist group to vet their translation of the Spanish. In the end he produced virtually a complete new translation directly from the Arabic, serviceable but lacking scholarly apparatus. He elected to allow the Society for Creative Anachronism to publish it themselves online. In time this translation should be supplanted by Rudolf Grewe’s.
6. Because of the relative abundance of texts from the east, writings about Arab food history have paid less attention to Moorish cuisine. A useful corrective is Lilia Zaouali, Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Berkeley: University of California, 2007). However, Lucie Boelens, La Cuisine andalouse, un art de vivre: XIe-XIIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), must be approached with caution, because Boelens relies largely on the notoriously error-ridden Spanish translation of Anónimo and is rather credulous toward certain food myths, such as the idea that the word qahwa already referred to coffee in sixth-century Damascus.
7. Contrary to the widespread belief that the Turkish peoples ate nothing but yogurt and shish kebab when they were nomads in Central Asia, their staff of life had been the grain they obtained by trade with settled people. Turkish grain cookery later influenced the cuisines of many settled peoples, particularly in the case of certain noodle products and the layered bread yufka which led in Ottoman times to the development of baklava. See Charles Perry, “Grain Foods of the Early Turks,” in A Soup for the Khan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era As Seen in Hu Sihui’s Yinshan Zhengyao, eds. Paul Buell and Eugene Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
8. Maxime Robinson, “Studies in Arabic Manuscripts Relating to Cookery,” trans. Barbara Inskip, in Medieval Arab Cookery. Medieval Arab Cookery (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2000), 271. The Arabic text appears in Al-Hamadhani, Maqamat Badi al-Zaman al-Hamadhani (Beirut: Dar al-Mashriq, 1973), 61.
9. D. S. Richards, trans., The Annals of the Saljuq Turks: Selections from the al-Kamil fil-Tarıkh of Izz al-Din ibn al-Athir (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 40.
10. Manuela Marin and David Waines, eds., The “Treasury of Benefits”:Kanz al-Fawaid (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993). Erfurt, Forschungsund Landesbibliothek Gotha, MS Orient., A1344.

By Charles Perry in "Food in Time and Place", editted by Paul Freedman,Joyce E. Chaplin,and Ken Albala, University of California Press,Oakland, California USA, 2014, excerpts pp.107-119. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa