Bubble and Squeak (OOP) Was Re: SC - Boxing Day Recipes?
Bonne of Traquair
oftraquair at hotmail.com
Fri Dec 1 11:24:09 PST 2000
At 9:27 AM -0500 12/1/00, Tara Sersen wrote:
>My dear, picky husband and I have found a new (well, to us) cuisine
>that we both
>can love. We're becoming regulars at a Persian restaurant. I think chicken
>fesenjoon may have taken my place in his heart.
>
>So, last night I had the most wonderful baklava.
You might also want to try baklava in a Turkish restaurant, if you
have the opportunity. Long ago I concluded that Turkish baklava was a
considerable improvement on Greek--crisper and less sticky.
>Second question: Does anybody (Ras?) know much about period Persian cooking,
>and how it relates to modern Persian cooking?
So far as I know, there are no surviving period Persian cookbooks.
There is supposed to be a period book of poetry about food, but I
don't know where you would find it or whether it has been translated.
But a lot of the material in the surviving sources for period Islamic
cooking is said, by people who know more about the subject than I do,
to show Persian influence. One of the books in the (untranslated)
10th century collection is credited to one of the Barmakids, a family
of Persian origin who were Viziers for al-Rashid. You might want to
look through the Andalusian cookbook (the translation is on my site)
and al-Baghdadi (in Volume I of my collection), checking the
footnotes for references to Persian cooking.
>None of the ingredients or methods
>that we encountered at the restaurant were distinctly "modern", so I wouldn't
>be surprised to learn that it's similar to what would have been eaten 500 or
>1000 years ago. But, I know better than to make assumptions!
>
>The only ingredient that I would question off-hand was the rice,
>which was served
>with everything. First of all, it was Indian basmati rice. This, I guess,
>is a modern affectation. If they have traditionally used rice, wouldn't it
>have been a local variety instead of an import? But, would they
>have used much
>rice at all in period?
Rice is common enough in medieval Islamic recipes.
>Most middle-eastern cooking seems to focus much more
>on wheat, with cous-cous, bulgar, breads like matzoh. The middle-east doesn't
>seem well suited to rice paddies. On the other hand, the only wheat product
>they offered was pita bread. They didn't have anything like
>tabouleh, cous-cous
>or other "middle-eastern staples".
I think of cous-cous as North African, not middle eastern. It shows
up in the Andalusian cookbook; I don't remember seeing it in
al-Baghdadi or Ibn al Mubarrad, although I haven't actually looked
for it in either.
- --
David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr at best.com
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
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