With a reprint of 'A BAGHDAD COOKERY BOOK' 
by the late Professor A.J. Arberry 
and a foreword by Claudia Roden

527pp; 152x230mm; hardcover;

ISBN 0907325 912 £40.00

Foreword
 Claudia Roden 11

A Baghdad Cookery Book (Kitab al-tabikh)
 A.J. Arberry 19

Studies in Arabic Manuscripts Relating to Cookery
 Maxime Rodinson 91

Roman’a and other Arabic Words in Italian
 Maxime Rodinson 165

Ma'mnniyya East and West
 Maxime Rodinson 183

Venice, the Spice Trade and Eastern Influences on European Cooking
 Maxime Rodinson 199

What to Order in Ninth-Century Baghdad
 Charles Perry 217

Elements of Arab Feasting
 Charles Perry 225

Couscous and its Cousins
 Charles Perry 233

Buran: Eleven Hundred Years in the History of a Dish
 Charles Perry 239

Notes on Persian Pasta
 Charles Perry 251

Shorba: A Linguistico-Chemico-Culinary Enquiry
 Charles Perry 257

Isfidhabaj, Blancmanger and no Almonds
 Charles Perry 261

The Wine Maqama
 Charles Perry 267

The Description of Familiar Foods
 (Kitab wasf al-at'ima al-mu'tada)
 Charles Perry 273
 Introduction 275
 Concordance of recipes 289
 Text 301
 Appendix: The Ziyadat 451

Kitab al-Tibakha: A Fifteenth-Century Cookbook
 Charles Perry 467

Medieval Arab Fish: Fresh, Dried and Dyed
 Charles Perry 477

A Thousand and One 'Fritters': The Food of The Arabian Nights
 Charles Perry 487

The Sals of the Infidels
 Charles Perry 497

Index of Foreign Words 503

General Index 516
 

The French scholar, Maxime Rodinson's contributions are legendary, yet have only been seen in translation in Petits Propos Culinaires. We include those already published there, together with the text of his longest paper, 'Recherches sur les documents Arabes relatifs a la cuisine', translated by Barbara Yeomans. The American scholar Charles Perry has been entertaining participants at the Oxford Symposium with regular gleanings from his researches into medieval Arab cookery, and several of his papers are gathered here, together with a new study of fish recipes, and other items previously published in PPC. Subjects include grain foods of the early Turks, rotted condiments, cooking pots, and Kitab al-Tibakhah, a 15th-century cookery book. 

English study of the subject was first encouraged by Professor Arberry's translation of the 13th-century cookery book Kitab al-Tabikh, published in 1939 in the periodical Islamic Culture. Readers will be pleased to have this more accessible copy, together with an introductory note and revision by Charles Perry. 

The book is ornamented by a foreword from Claudia Rosen. 

There is something fascinating and moving about old historic recipes. They are an intimate link with the past, revealing the sensuous quality, the tastes and smells and feel of worlds gone by. And they also tell us much about the past. This book, which unites works by Maxime Rodinson, the late A.J. Arberry and Charles Perry, contains Arab recipes from various sources dating back as far as the tenth century ad. Each author brings an insight into the medieval Islamic world through recipes of the time and illuminates the development of Arab cuisines and individual dishes against a historical and sociological background. 

The publication of the book, which will be a resource of great importance to food historians, is especially exciting for me because I can trace this culmination of a major enterprise all the way back to a suggestion I made some twenty years ago. I was delivering a paper for the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 1981, which drew on Professor Maxime Rodinson’s work. It struck me then that it was a great pity that his important essays, which are essential reading for all students of early Arab cookery, were only available in French and were therefore relatively inaccessible to many such students. This idea eventually grew into the major work which is now in our hands. Twenty years may seem like a long time to wait, but the original idea has grown substantially through the delays. What we now have is a brilliant work of scholarship drawing not only on Maxime Rodinson’s and Professor Arberry’s pioneering work but also on that of Charles Perry. No one has seen Charles Perry’s new translations until now though some of his essays have appeared in the publication Petits Propos Culinaires (PPC) and a few have been given as lectures at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. 

The Islamic world in the early Middle Ages was the Golden Age of a civilization at its most glorious. It was more advanced and sophisticated than any European civilization at the time, and the food - at least of the upper classes - was immensely rich and refined. To contemporary palates, medieval Arab dishes are far tastier than medieval European ones, and they relate to Middle Eastern dishes today in a way that medieval European ones do not to the cooking of the Western world. You can recognize in the old Arab recipes the roots of modern Arab dishes from Iran and Iraq, to Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, North Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East. 

When I began researching Middle Eastern dishes in the early 1960s, there were no Egyptian cookery books and less than a handful from other Middle Eastern countries. When I asked the librarian at the British Library to help me to find something on Arab cooking, he produced a list which contained nothing modern, but everything relating to medieval Arab gastronomy. One work was a thirteenth-century culinary manual, the Kitab al-Tabikh, translated by Professor Arberry as ‘A Baghdad Cookery-Book’ in a 1939 issue of Islamic Culture. It was the first medieval Arab cookery manuscript ever to be translated into English and it was accompanied by a preface containing poems of the time alluding to food. Another was a study in a 1949 issue of the French Revue Islamique, entitled ‘Recherches sur les documents Arabes relatifs â la cuisine’ by Maxime Rodinson, which included a sociological analysis of another thirteenth-century culinary manuscript, but from Damascus, the Wusla ila l-habib fi wasf il-tayyibat wa-al-tib. I was enthralled. 

My excitement was partly due to a feeling of familiarity. I had been collecting Middle Eastern recipes from people for several years and many of the old recipes rang a bell. There were similar words, similar combinations of ingredients and flavourings, and similar descriptions of techniques to those I had been hearing. It was thrilling to trace the origins of dishes such as Tunisian and Moroccan ones to the Baghdad recipes translated by Arberry, and my own family’s home cooking to those in medieval Syria described by Rodinson. For months I cooked medieval dishes and entertained friends to medieval banquets on a long refectory table we had bought in Portugal. It was a very exciting time. Because no quantities are given in the old recipes, and it is not possible to know exactly what the dominant flavours and the exact proportions of ingredients were in the past, I interpreted them according to my own taste. In all traditional countries where recipes are passed down by word of mouth and where no one uses weighing machines, precise recipes are rarely given and people are accustomed to trusting their taste and using their common sense. In my original book I had included many of the recipes and I found, years later, that it had set a kind of fashion for medieval Arab banqueting in certain academic circles. 

I was especially fascinated with the way Maxime Rodinson, as a young communist activist and Marxist sociologist, had used recipes to analyse and explain a society that existed more than seven hundred years ago. (Anyone who knows my A New Book of Middle Eastern Food will have seen some of his work, as I have made heavy use of it in the introductory chapters.) Rodinson is a famous Orientalist and Islamist. One of the great old-guard, left-wing French intellectuals, he is at once philosopher, historian, sociologist, ethnographer, and linguist as well as a great wit. I first met him through my cousin, the journalist and diplomat, Eric Rouleau, and have seen him regularly in Paris over the years. He was born in 1915 of Russian Jewish parents who migrated to France. His father, a worker in a Paris raincoat factory, was a communist trade union leader. Both his parents were deported and died in Auschwitz. Maxime left school at fourteen and worked for three years as a delivery boy in a transport company, during which time he taught himself Latin and Greek. At seventeen he persuaded his parents to support him through three years of study and he applied to L’Ecole des Langues Orientales which was the only place that did not require the baccalauréat (school-leaving exams). In 1936 he acquired diplomas in classical Arabic, Turkish, Ethiopian and the Maghribi Arabic of Morocco. At the same time he studied history, philology and religions at L’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes; and ethnology with Marcel Maus (nephew and collaborator of Durkheim) at L’Ecole du Louvre. In 1937 he married, joined the communist party, and entered the CNRS (Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique). 

When the war broke out in 1939 he was conscripted and sent to the then French-colonized Syria and Lebanon. In 1940, when the colony sided with the Free-French Gaullistes and cut itself off from occupied France, he was demobilized but stayed in Beirut. His wife joined him, with their first baby, and two more children were born in Beirut. It was here, at the national library, that he found two old culinary manuscripts and decided to do a sociological analysis, because cooking was a subject that sociology had neglected. 

Much of the work of Maxime Rodinson that is available in English reflects his preoccupation with the Arab world and its political and historical development. The history of cookery is to that extent a sideline. Principal among his books that have been translated are his biography Muhammad (1961); the studies Islam and Capitalism (1966), Marxism and the Muslim World (1972) and The Arabs (1979); two books on Israel, Israel and the Arabs (1968) and Israel: A Settler-Colonial State (1973); and finally his study of European attitudes to the Middle East, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (1980). He has of course written countless articles and contributions to learned journals. 

I met the American Charles Perry in 1980 after one of his forays to Egypt and Syria where he studied yet more undiscovered culinary manuscripts. He is well known today, to those of the international gastronomic community interested in food history, as a regular at food conferences, particularly the Oxford Symposium, where his phenomenal esoteric knowledge is much admired. But, back then, he was a great surprise. Wearing a very traditional suit and exotic tie, he described his extraordinary findings among the archives, peppering his fascinating tirades with Arabic words. More recently, he explained to me that he started wearing strange neckties when he was a journalist and contributing editor at the magazine Rolling Stone. Rock musicians in the late ‘sixties suspected all journalists of working for the FBI or the CIA. He found that if he wore an exotic necktie, he could get his interview done as they puzzled over it. Charles Perry’s background is about as far from the Middle East as you can get. He was born in California, as were both his parents and all but one of his grandparents. His father was a salesman; his grandfather taught Latin at Los Angeles High School; his maternal grandmother, who died before he was born, was a script-writer who headed the script department at MGM in the 1930s. 

Charles is a linguist who possesses dictionaries and grammars of about 200 languages. His interest in linguistics, and especially the Arabic language, dates from his early teens. It was the richness of the language, which he started studying on his own when he was fifteen, that drew him to the Arab world. He attended Princeton University, then transferred to the University of California, in Berkeley, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in Near Eastern Languages. In 1962, under a programme of the Carnegie Foundation, he spent a year at the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies in Shimlan, Lebanon. This school (since relocated to Cairo) had been established in Jerusalem in the 1920s by the British Foreign Office at the urging of T.E. Lawrence to provide a place for Englishmen to study modern, as opposed to medieval, Arabic. That period was also his introduction to Lebanese food and the beginning of his interest in gastronomy. During his year in Lebanon, he visited Egypt, Syria and Jordan, and since then he has travelled regularly in the Middle East, also visiting Turkey, Morocco, Yemen and Uzbekistan to discover their food. 

Charles is particularly interested in the gastronomic aspect of the old recipes and cooks all the dishes to better understand them. He once brought a food to be tasted at the Oxford Symposium. It was kamakh rijal, a cheese-like condiment made by leaving salted yoghurt out in the sun for several months. I called him once when I was in Los Angeles and found him preparing an Abbasid banquet. This extensive hands-on experience is one of the foundation stones of his great success as a food columnist and restaurant reviewer in Los Angeles where, for many years, he has reviewed everything from tiny Vietnamese noodle shops and barbecues run by churches, to the grandest ‘California Cuisine’ restaurants. To place dishes in their context and follow their development, he is not shy of using other intellectual disciplines: linguistics or political history (since many dishes have connections with royal courts), as well economic history to track something through recorded trade contacts. 

I owe Professor Arberry a great and affectionate debt for his seminal work that inspired me in the early days of my research. But I never had the opportunity to meet him and have left it to Tom Jaine to write a piece about him. 

Middle Eastern food is now fashionable and popular in the West. Special ingredients and even ready-cooked dishes can be found in supermarkets. Ethnic restaurants are common in the cities while trendy chefs have integrated Levantine and North African dishes into their eclectic menus. Although the recipes in the book represent a kind of gastronomic archaeology, they are recipes you can cook from. Do try them and use your taste to interpret them. Knowing something about the ancient background of a dish adds to the pleasure of cooking and eating and is a thrilling way of understanding the world it comes from. 

Claudia Roden, London, 2001