Bananas (was RE: SC - Hummus and Other Questionably Period Foods)

[david friedman]

At 11:20 AM +0200 7/5/99, ana l. valdes wrote:
>Sorry to disagree with you. My sources are "Classic Turkish Cooking", by
>Ghillie Basan and "Classical Turkish Cooking", by Ayla Algar. They have
>recipes for hummus and other chickpeas dishes, as manti and leblebi.

"Classic" doesnt' imply "pre-1600." Do they have period sources for those
recipes? If not, what reason do you have to assume they are period, rather
than (say) 18th century? If they do cite period sources, perhaps you could
post them; I don't know of any pre-1600 Turkish cookbooks, and if there is
one I could add it to my list of cookbooks looking for translators.

One way of checking just what the authors mean by "classic" (assuming they
don't specify it in detail) is to look for New World ingredients--tomatoes,
potatoes, capsicum peppers, etc. If they give recipes including such, that
is evidence that their definition of classic includes stuff later than our
definition of period.

Incidentally, the argument is not over the use of chickpeas--they are
reasonably common in period Islamic cooking. The question is whether they
were used to make Hummus bi Tahini--for which, so far as I know, there are
no surviving period recipes.

(from another post)

>PS: By the way I find natural the Romans, the Greeks and the Arabs,
>Turks, Perses and Egyptians, people which shared the same environement,
>the Mediterranean, use the food in similar ways and influated each
>other. Honey and carrots should be a common recipe for the whole
>Mediterranean area.

Maybe, maybe not. Greek cooking, Italian cooking, Spanish cooking, and
North African cooking at present are all rather different, although they
are all on the Mediterranean. Persia isn't on the Mediterranean. I don't
think you can jump from the use of a recipe in Rome in 300 A.D. to the
conclusion that the same recipe was used in Persia in (say) 1300.

And from a third post:

>I en bok av L. Benavides Barajas, called "Kindoms of Taifa, Nord Africa,
>Jews, Mores and Mudejares" I find a recipe to humus taken from Yemen,
>but widespread in the whole area. In this recipe they used chickpeas and
>sesame seeds.

Taken from Yemen when? I don't know of any period cookbooks from Yemen--do
they suggest that they do?

>He quotates "Kitab al Tabib fi-Magabrid wasal-Andalus" and "Ibn Razin
>al-Tujibi", by Fadhalar Al-Hiwan.

What are the dates of those sources? Is what he quotes a recipe for hummus
bi tahini, or a reference to hummus (identified how?), or what?

and a fourth post:

> As
>I said before, if you are not a sholar comparing manuscripts and corpus
>its very difficult to judge their accuracy.

There are two separate questions here:

1. Do your secondary sources say that the recipes they give are pre-1600?
So far, it sounds as though they simply describe them as classical, with no
dates given. So the issue isn't one of whether the sources are accurate but
of what they say.

2. Suppose the source did say that a particular recipe was (say) 13th
century. The first step is simply to determine, from the source, how they
know--what do they cite? If the source says "this recipe is found in the
13th century collection  compiled by al-Baghdadi and translated by
Arberry," with suitable footnote, then you have good reason to believe they
have a period source. The remaining issue is to determine whether their
worked out recipe corresponds accurately to al-Baghdadi's original--and
only at that point do you need access to the source. My own rule is to be
suspicious of any secondary source that gives a worked out recipe without
also giving the original it is based on--precisely because if they don't
give the original, it is hard to check whether the two recipes really
correspond.

One further point ...  . Even if the secondary source gives a worked out
recipe and cites a source, you have to make sure the author is claiming
that that worked out recipe corresponds to the recipe in the source.
Claudia Roden, for example, in her middle eastern cookbook, mentions that
Rishta has been made for a long time, gives a rishta recipe, and cites the
rishta recipe in al Baghdadi. But she doesn't say that they are the
same--and they aren't. She is giving a modern recipe for the dish, and
citing the old recipe as evidence that a version of the dish existed in the
13th century--but not that it was the same as the modern version.


David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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