MEDIEVAL CUISINE OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD

Islam has the richest medieval food literature in the world—there are more cookbooks in Arabic from before 1400 than in the rest of the world’s languages put together, making possible the wide scope of this volume.In most cultures throughout history, cooking has been taught by apprenticeship, either at one’s mother’s knee, in the case of home cooks, or in a professional kitchen, for chefs. The medieval Arabs were peculiar in writing recipes down, compiling them into cookbooks, and cooking from them.

This practice seems to have been a legacy of ancient Persia. When the Arabian armies conquered Iran in the seventh century, they found the Sasanian court full of connoisseurs. Someone there had actually written a tale that was in effect a handy list of sophisticated gourmet opinions so the reader wouldn’t make a fool of himself when mingling with the upper crust.

The tale was translated into Arabic, of course. The caliphs of Baghdad followed Persian court practice in many things, and above all where food was concerned. The Persian kings had organized cooking contests among their boon companions? So would the caliphs. They fattened chickens on hempseed before slaughtering them? Likewise in Baghdad.

The Persian aristocrats had saved their favorite recipes in personal cookbooks (not that they necessarily did any cooking themselves),and Baghdad followed this custom as well. The oldest surviving Arabic cookbook, Kitab al-tabikh, was compiled in the tenth century by a scribe named Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq from the recipe collections of eighth- and ninth-century caliphs and members of their courts.

Ibn Sayyar’s patron, as he mentions in his dedication, had assigned him to collect the dishes of kings and caliphs and other important figures. The unnamed patron was probably the Hamdanid prince Saif al-Daula,who was eager to add a cultural sheen to his upstart provincial court in Aleppo. One sign of this connection is that Ibn Sayyar includes ten poems by Kushajim, a member of Saif al-Daula’s circle,and refers to learning several of them from the poet himself—which suggests that Ibn Sayyar had left Baghdad, already beginning its slow decline, and relocated to up-and-coming Aleppo.

Scribes plundered his book many times—Ibn Sayyar’s recipes show up in a number of later cookbooks. Very likely it was this glamorous association of written recipes with the caliphs of Baghdad’s golden age, together with the fact that their private physicians had testified to the healthful quality of many of these dishes, that accustomed the Arab world to the idea of writing cookbooks.

Ibn Sayyar’s book includes a number of aristocratic stews with Persian names,and even a couple of recipes that claim to have been translated from Persian (they are certainly written in rather clumsy Arabic). The Arabs had also brought a few dishes from their peninsula’s rather humble cuisine,such as porridge sweetened with dates—but not the humblest ones,such as dates kneaded with locusts ( ghathima). In Baghdad, there was a growing category of new dishes that had been invented by professional chefs. This sort of dish, typically given a name ending in the Arabic suffix -iyya, would predominate in later books.

The Arabs had also learned a great deal from the Nabataeans, as they called the Aramaic-speaking Christians of Iraq and Syria. The Arabic words for cheese, wine, and oil, like the names of many fruits and vegetables,come from Aramaic.They’d learned to appreciate some of the Nabataeans’ hearty dishes, and Ibn Sayyar devotes a chapter to stews called nabatiyyat. A couple of Nabataean dishes are still made, such as harisa: whole grain stewed with meat until done, and then beaten to a smooth, savory paste.

The caliphs employed Christian physicians who were learned in the Greek school of medicine, and they introduced the idea of serving vegetarian dishes to invalids. In Islam, there is no religious requirement to abstain from meat on any occasion, and this surely explains why meatless dishes were called muzawwaj (“counterfeit”). The concept that “genuine” dishes contain meat is still alive—the Turkish word for vegetables stuffed with rice instead of meat is yalanci, which also means “counterfeit.”

Several condiments may have originated in the Nabataean area—or at least, to judge by their names, somewhere exposed to both Persian and Greek influence. The basis of most of them was bunn (Persian bun, “foundation”), which was made by wrapping lumps of raw barley dough with fresh fig leaves and storing them in a loosely lidded container, typically for forty days. Mold spores on the leaves would infect the barley, mottling it black, white, charcoal, and several shades of green and giving it the aroma of rotting leaves.

When the barley was thoroughly rotted and had dried out, it would be ground up and one part salt added for three parts grain, along with enough water to give it a porridge-like consistency. After another forty days or so of aging, with more water added as needed, a salty liquid called murri (from Greek halmuris, “salty thing,” or Latin muria, “brine,” probably by way of Aramaic murya) would be squeezed out. It tastes like soy sauce.

If, on the other hand, milk was added instead of water, molds of the genus Penicillium would rush to the front of the line. The resulting condiment, which has a Persian name, kamakh ahmar, smells like blue cheese; in effect, it’s a salty blue cheese spread, reddish-brown in color, with a grainy texture. Nothing could be done about its proverbially loathsome appearance, which rather suggests horse droppings, but flavorings such as herbs, spices, or rose petals were often added to it.

Another condiment, kamakh rijal, was made without any rotted barley, simply by keeping strongly salted yogurt in an open vessel for several weeks and topping it up with fresh milk as needed. It develops the aroma of ordinary cheese, which is produced by slow-growing bacteria naturally found in milk; in effect, kamakh rijal is a sharp, salty, semiliquid cheese with a hint of rancidity (since butterfat oxidizes more rapidly in the presence of salt).The rancidity might have been something appreciated by connoisseurs, as it is in the modern Moroccan aged butter called sman. To keep other microbes from consuming the milk before the cheese bacteria can do their job, cheesemakers curdle milk and press out most of the moisture. Kamakh rijal protected the cheese bacteria by a different technique, relying on the acidity of yogurt and a high level of salt.

The caliphs of Baghdad belonged to the ^Abbasid dynasty, which had come to power in 747 by overthrowing the Umayyads of Damascus. One Umayyad prince escaped to Spain, where his part-Berber ancestry helped him cement a power base of his own. As a result, the Arab world split in half. For the next eight centuries, the eastern and western Arabs would be ruled by rival empires separated by the no-man’s-land of Libya. Inevitably, easterners and westerners began to cook differently. The two cookbooks from Moorish Spain and Morocco show influence from the local cuisines,Berber and Spanish (an example of the latter is fulyatil, a primitive sort of puff pastry; the name literally means “leafy” in medieval Spanish).

As in Baghdad, novel dishes developed in the courts and large cities of Spain and North Africa. Tunisia and the Mediterranean coast of Spain are far richer in fish than anywhere in the eastern Arab countries, and they developed a wide repertoire of dishes based on fresh seafood (in the east, fish was often salted and dried). The rancidity might have been something appreciated by connoisseurs, as it is in the modern Moroccan aged butter called sman. To keep other microbes from consuming the milk before the cheese bacteria can do their job, cheesemakers curdle milk and press out most of the moisture. Kamakh rijal protected the cheese bacteria by a different technique, relying on the acidity of yogurt and a high level of salt.

The caliphs of Baghdad belonged to the ^Abbasid dynasty, which had come to power in 747 by overthrowing the Umayyads of Damascus. One Umayyad prince escaped to Spain, where his part-Berber ancestry helped him cement a power base of his own. As a result, the Arab world split in half. For the next eight centuries, the eastern and western Arabs would be ruled by rival empires separated by the no-man’s-land of Libya. Inevitably, easterners and westerners began to cook differently. The two cookbooks from Moorish Spain and Morocco show influence from the local cuisines,Berber and Spanish (an example of the latter is fulyatil, a primitive sort of puff pastry; the name literally means “leafy” in medieval Spanish).

As in Baghdad, novel dishes developed in the courts and large cities of Spain and North Africa. Tunisia and the Mediterranean coast of Spain are far richer in fish than anywhere in the eastern Arab countries, and they developed a wide repertoire of dishes based on fresh seafood (in the east, fish was often salted and dried).

Easterners and westerners were aware of each other’s food, to a degree. In the early ninth century, a Persian connoisseur named Ziryab left the Abbasid court and brought the latest Baghdad dishes to Córdoba, and a number of eastern dishes show up in the thirteenth-century cookbooks of North Africa and Moorish Spain. The easterners were not quite so interested in Maghrebi cuisine, but thirteenth-century eastern cookbooks often gave the North African recipe for murri. All murri was spiced.The Baghdadis flavored their soy sauce mildly, often with nothing but fennel and nigella, but the North Africans were famous for “infused” soy sauce (murri naqi ), which contained many more spices and other flavorings such as carob, citron leaves, orange wood, and pine cones.

The eastern books also gave recipes for North African couscous. Before the twelfth century, the Arabs had cooked grain in two basic ways (not counting sweets and baked goods): as porridges and as pasta. There were two main kinds of pasta—itriya, of Greek origin, was a dry pasta always measured by the handful, and it may have been a short orzo-shaped pasta like the modern Egyptian treyya; and the Persian rishta (“thread”), which was fresh pasta cut into strips.

Another word for fresh pasta, lakhsha (“slippery thing”), was also Persian. In Ibn Sayyar’s book (the only one that mentions it), the recipe comes with a charmingly unlikely anecdote about how the Persian king Khosrau I offhandedly invented it on a hunting expedition. The name disappeared in the Middle East, but it gave the word for “noodle” in eastern Europe:Hungarian laska, Russian lapsha, Ukrainian lokshina (whence Yiddish lokshn), Lithuanian lakstiniai. In the thirteenth century and after,when the nomadic Turks began to influence the cuisine of the settled people of the Middle East, we find mentions of their traditional pastas, such as tutmaj, which may have been rolled thicker than rishta, because tutmaj dough was used for making stuffed pastas, which need to be sturdy; and salma, a coin-shaped pasta made by “stamping” lumps of dough with the finger.

But in the twelfth century, ways of cooking grain were developed simultaneously in North Africa and Iran that produced a nonmushy result. The Iranian invention was pilaf: rice scrupulously washed of all surface starch before boiling and given a final step of steaming so all the grains would cook up plump and separate. In North Africa, cooks devised the couscous technique of stirring a bowl of flour sprinkled with water to create dainty granules that could be steamed to make something supernaturally light and delicate. The eastern Arabs still make couscous—though nowhere as elegantly as the North Africans—and they call it moghrabiyyeh, “the North African dish.”

With its sophisticated cooking techniques and wide repertoire of dishes, medieval Arab cuisine was far more developed than European cuisine of the time. The Arabs were open to interesting dishes from Europe, notably sals: the concept of spicy prepared sauces for fish (the one area where Europeans may have been ahead was fish cookery, because of the Christian obligation of abstaining from meat on certain days). But to a far greater extent, where Muslims and Christians were in contact, such as in Moorish Spain or Sicily and the Crusader kingdoms of the Holy Land, it was the Europeans who borrowed dishes. For instance, one of the dishes the Arabs most esteemed was sikbaj, which consisted of meat stewed with a lot of vinegar and served cold. In the Arabic dialect of Spain, the name was pronounced skibaj, and it became the Spanish escabèche, a cold dish (usually of fish or vegetables) doused in vinegar.

But folk transmission wasn’t the only way Arab dishes influenced Europe. In the twelfth century, Europeans began learning Arabic so they could study books not available in Latin, above all works of philosophy and medicine. As it happened,Arab medical writers often discussed recipes in their books. A famous Baghdad physician named Ibn Jazla compiled an encyclopedia of substances that were considered to have medicinal value, and he included several dozen recipes. They were popular in the Arab world because they were carefully written (being, in effect, prescriptions) and included reassuring medical information. Scribes soon excerpted these recipes from Ibn Jazla’s Minhaj al-bayan to make a recipe collection, and other scribes shamelessly included many of his recipes in their own cookbooks. In the fourteenth century, his recipes were translated into Latin and later even into German.

His was only one of a number of Arabic medical texts that came with recipes. The Italian scholar Anna Martellotti suggests that the dish sikbaj entered European cuisine twice, once on the folk level in Spain and again through one of these Latin translations. The name of the dish was usually written al-sikbaj, and translators struggling to render the Arabic words into Latin came up with spellings such as assicpicium. Martellotti thinks assicpicium gave us our word aspic. It’s certainly possible—if you make a medieval lamb sikbaj and let it cool, the meat juices do turn into a tart jelly just like aspic. (And it suggests why escabèche and all its descendants, from Italian scapece to Jamaican scoveitch, are cold dishes.) A number of other Arabic recipes have been traced in medieval European cookbooks, though, unlike aspic, none is still made.

The cuisine depicted in the medieval books was a rich one: a wide range of breads, preserves, and condiments; a repertoire of sweets that were almost identical throughout the Arab world; and above all, complex stews, fragrant with herbs, spices, nuts, fruits, and other flavorings such as rose water. We naturally wonder what the cuisines of the modern Arab world may have inherited from it.

But we have to be cautious. There’s an inevitable similarity between the medieval and modern cuisines just because so many ancient staple crops are still the foundation of the Arab diet. The question is, what degree of culinary continuity does a given similarity show? Newly created dishes would naturally tend to include familiar ingredients. In some cases we can see a continuity of technique, such as the practice of scrupulously removing the scum when boiling meat. Regrettably, this is far from proving the survival of particular dishes.

The real problem is in the nature of these cookbooks. Since they owe their ultimate inspiration to the recipe collections of the Persian court, they concentrate on refined, luxurious, special-occasion dishes (as nearly all cookbooks in the world did until rather recently). In other words, they mostly record fashionable dishes. By nature, fashionable dishes are highly susceptible to becoming unfashionable and forgotten.

In fact, it’s a good question how often most people ate these specific recipes. The closest thing we have to a book of everyday dishes is Kitab altibakha (“The Book of Cookery”; or possibly Kitab al-tabbakha, “The Book of the Female Cook”), written by a fifteenth-century Damascus legal scholar named Ibn Mibrad.

Its forty-four dishes are written in a rather abrupt manner. A typical recipe reads,“Tuffahiyya. Put meat into the pot.Peel apples, cut them up and put them in it. Then sweeten it.” This concise, aide-mémoire style (most of the recipes don’t bother to say “and cook,” much less “add water”) probably accounts for the fact that only six of the recipes mention spices. They couldn’t have been omitted because the cook was saving money—a humble sausage recipe incorporates the expensive spice saffron. The writer must have presumed that the cook would add his or her usual spice mixture. At any rate, these very simple interpretations of classic dishes suggest how most people really cooked during the Middle Ages.

Some recipes in the tenth- and thirteenth-century books were really specialist dishes, particularly the candies and sweetmeats that were based on boiling sugar to high concentrations of syrup, such as the soft-ball or hardcrack stage. Such recipes were repeated word for word in cookbook after cookbook, strongly suggesting that they had once been jealously guarded professional secrets of Middle Eastern confectioners, who are even today proverbial for their reluctance to reveal their recipes. It is certainly suspicious that when Kitab al-tibakha gives recipes for the sweetmeats called halwa, they don’t call for concentrated sugar syrup—date molasses (dibs), honey sugar, or boiled-down fruit juice (rubb) are all as acceptable as sugar syrup, indicating a rather homey and unambitious product. The book’s favorite sweetening, in fact, is inexpensive date molasses.

In the modern world, not even the names of most medieval dishes have survived. The few that have are the sort that could serve as basic, everyday foods: aruzz mufalfal (pilaf ), kuskusu (couscous), rishta (noodles), hasu (grain soup), mujaddara (a porridge of lentils and rice), harisa (meat porridge), kammuniyya (fish cooked with cumin), and marwaziyya (lamb stewed with prunes, native to the Persian city of Merv but now best known as the muruziyya of modern Morocco),along with a handful of sweets: qataif (crepes), ma\muniyya (a rice pudding), asabi ^ Zainab (a sweet like cannoli, but filled with nuts).

Where the name survives, the recipe may have changed considerably.The medieval recipes for shorba are a lot thicker and starchier than the soups called shorba today. The modern muhallabiyya is a kind of elegant pudding; in the Middle Ages, it included meat.Fakhitiyya, a stew of lamb flavored with yogurt, sumac berries, and ground walnuts, took its name from the color (fakhita). In present-day Syria, fakhitiyya is an alternate name for arnabiyya, a stew flavored with sesame paste and pomegranate juice, though the color match is no longer so exact.

How recipes fare in food history tends to be more complicated—and really more interesting—than simple survival or disappearance. Take the case of buraniyya, a dish named for the Lady Buran, whose marriage to the ninth-century caliph al-Ma\mun was the most lavish wedding party of the Middle Ages (it went on for the better part of a month).Before her time, the Arabs had reviled eggplant for its bitterness: “Its color is like the scorpion’s belly,” went a saying, “and its taste is like the scorpion’s sting.” (Doctors went further and claimed it caused freckles, sore throat, and cancer.) But Ibn Sayyar gives two recipes for “Buran’s eggplant” (badhinjan buran), which contain the innovation that solved the problem of bitterness—the eggplant slices are salted before frying, drawing out the bitter juice. Now the Arabs could learn to appreciate its flavor, though doctors continued to disapprove: “The doctor makes ignorant fun of me for loving eggplant,” wrote the poet Kushajim, in probably the only racy poem ever written about eggplant,“but I will not give it up. Its flavor is like the saliva generously exchanged by lovers in kissing.”

By the thirteenth century, badhinjan buran had evolved into buraniyya, a dish of stewed meat mixed with fried eggplant. In North Africa, more elaborate buraniyyas were being made that included whole eggplants stuffed with meat and meatballs with chunks of eggplant in the middle. The basic idea of a stew flavored with fried eggplant survives in Morocco.

In the Arab East, however, the elaboration took a different turn. The thirteenth-century Syrian and Iraqi books show not only eggplant buraniyya but a version made with chunks of gourd, seasoned the same way as the current eggplant version, with onions, coriander, and saffron. Since that time, burani (as the name has come to be pronounced) has ramified into a category of dishes consisting of all sorts of vegetables cooked with meat and seasoned with coriander and garlic.

Meanwhile,all the Arab countries east of Morocco fell under the control of the Ottoman Empire, where a new cuisine evolved—the one that has influenced Greek and other Balkan cuisines as well as the cookery of its Arab subjects. Its new repertoire of dishes gradually abandoned the medieval stews and emphasized roasted meat, stuffed vegetables, and eggplant dishes. As a result, eggplant is now the most popular vegetable in the eastern Arab countries (in Morocco, it’s still mostly used in braniya); there are stuffed eggplant dishes, eggplant stews, eggplant casseroles such as musaqqa, and eggplant pickles (even dishes combining meat with pickled eggplants). Probably because of all this competition, the eggplant version of burani has died out and burani is now made with any vegetable except eggplant.

So in present-day Syria, the Lady Buran’s name has become a category of dishes in which nothing has survived from the ninth-century recipe of fried eggplant slices dressed with garlic, caraway, and soy sauce.We might think the garlic is a survival if it weren’t for the fact that it doesn’t appear in the thirteenth- and fifteenth-century recipes. (This is one more case in which food history benefits from the ringside seat provided by the medieval Arab cookery literature.)

Meanwhile, in Iran yogurt substitutes for meat, and in Turkish boranis grain tends to replace meat. Altogether, Buran’s dish has ramified into a wide range of dishes. There is a continuity between the modern versions and badhinjan buran, a linkage you can trace in its family tree, but no inherited similarity between the ninth-century and the modern dishes.

This sort of ceaseless, lurching, unpredictable change is typical of food history.We happen to be able to observe it in the case of buraniyya because the dish was born in the spotlight of celebrity and later versions were recorded in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. If a ninth-century recipe can become unrecognizable within a few centuries, we should not be surprised that the cuisine recorded on Babylonian tablets about 1500 b.c.e. looks totally alien to us, even when its recipes use ingredients that are still common.

It’s true that recipe features may survive without the name. In medieval Spain and North Africa, stews called tagines were typically finished off with an egg topping called takhmir and sent to the oven; this practice, but not the term, has survived only in Tunisia. On the other hand, the survival of a name need not indicate any continuity at all.Kamakh has been revived in recent centuries as a fancy word for vinegar pickles, with no awareness that it used to be a category of cheese-like condiments.

In fact, one of the main survivals of medieval cookery would not occur to most observers. Many Europeans and Americans are puzzled by the use of tomato juice in Arab stews, giving no more than a thin, tart tomato flavor. But this sort of tomato sauce is not a failed marinara—it’s a survival of the medieval practice of adding a sour fruit juice to stews. The thirteenth-century stews flavored with rhubarb juice, sour grape juice, sour apple juice, and so forth are gone, but their spirit lingers on in the form of an ingredient that arrived from the New World only in the sixteenth century.

Food history is fascinating. The world’s cuisines are merely the tips of so many icebergs, and for most of them we can only speculate unconvincingly about what lies outside our sight.We can all be glad that the medieval Arabs recorded so much about their cuisine.

By Charles Perry in the foreword of the book "Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World",by Lilia Zaouali, translated by M.B. DeBevoise, University of California, USA, 2007, excerpts pp.ix-xix. Digitized, adapted and illustrated by Leopoldo Costa.