An early fourteenth-century Baghdadi cookbook, translated by Charles Perry as A Baghdad Cookery Book (Prospect Books, 2005), begins thus: “The pleasures of this world are six: food, drink, clothing, sex, scent, and sound. High cuisine could flourish in Golden Age Baghdad because Baghdadi culture embraced pleasure. The ancient, sophisticated culture of Persia, conveyed both through translated Persian texts and by the many Persians living in Baghdad, exerted particular influence on Golden Age Baghdadi culture, including Baghdad’s lush, fragrant, complex cuisine. Baghdad’s many achievements in philosophy, science, medicine, painting, poetry, and music are largely attributable to its openness to diverse sources of knowledge, symbolized by the famed House of Wisdom, a network of academies that translated all of the world’s known learned manuscripts-Indian, Persian, Syrian, Egyptian, and Greek-into Arabic. The Golden Age of medieval Islam was forged during the ninth and tenth centuries in Baghdad, seat of the third Islamic caliphate. The cooking of the medieval Islamic world still survives today, to varying degrees, in most cultures that medieval Islam touched, and the contemporary cooking of these cultures informs my interpretation of medieval European recipes.Īl-Wasiti, 13th century Baghdad library Muslim Heritage I was delighted by this guest’s comment, for I felt she had intuited my interpretation of the dishes of our dinner. As a guest at our dinner astutely commented, we have a greater openness to medieval European cuisines than did Americans in the past, for we are familiar with the headily spiced, subtly sweet cuisines of Thailand, India, Persia, Morocco, and Mexico-and we very much like them. Still, we can hope that the myth, at long last, may be slain. When a late fourteenth-century English manuscript cookbook known as Forme of Cury was first printed, in 1780, the myriad spices and the sugar with which its dishes are seasoned incited bafflement and revulsion in many readers-a reaction still echoed today in the seemingly unkillable myth that medieval spices served to camouflage the taste of rotten meat, as though the princes and wealthy merchants who, alone, were privileged to taste medieval haute cuisine had only rotten meat at their disposal. And as a casual reader of medieval history, I see much circumstantial evidence that corroborates my culinary intuitions. But, speaking as a cook, I taste the East and sense its technique in western medieval European cooking. In Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (Yale University Press, 2008), Paul Freedman footnotes two authorities, one who sees extensive eastern influence and one who proclaims that “medieval taste is not Arab.” I am not a medieval scholar. The extent of eastern influence on the cuisines of the medieval Christian West is controversial among medieval scholars. Mine are informed by reading I have done over the past few years about medieval Islamic culture, including its cuisine, and its impact on Europe. A cook can only “interpret” medieval recipes using his or her intuitions. The honest answer, of course, is that no cook can. People often ask how any cook today can presume to reproduce medieval food as it was made in its time since most medieval recipes omit quantities of ingredients and provide only sketchy instructions with regard to procedure. Recently, the Manuscript Cookbooks Survey hosted a medieval English dinner for a committee of medieval and Renaissance manuscript scholars associated with the Morgan Library and Museum, in New York City. MS Buhler 36, 15th century English cookbook, Morgan Library
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