SC - Persion cooking

[david friedman]

At 10:33 AM -0500 12/1/00, Tara Sersen wrote:
>  >This actually makes a fair amount of sense when you consider that at one
>>time India and Persia were, effectively, one country.
>
>The Persia-India connection rings a bell, but I had forgotten about 
>that.  Thank
>you!  That makes other things clearer, too.  Many of the dishes look 
>like Indian
>dishes.  For instance, the previously-mentioned chicken fesenjoon is chunks
>of chicken in a thick sauce, spooned over rice.  And they made 
>ground-meat kabobs,
>a style I've only seen in Indian restaurants before.  I noticed 
>those similarities,
>but didn't make the actual connection.

It probably runs both ways. Islamic cuisine apparently got the 
eggplant from India--and it became the most common vegetable, at 
least in the cookbooks. And parts of Northern India were ruled for a 
long time by Muslim dynasties, culminating with the Moghuls.

The _Ain I Akbari_ (16th c. Mughal) has ingredient lists (with 
quantities, without instructions) for thirty dishes, some of which 
pretty clearly correspond, in name and ingredients, with things you 
also find in the Andalusian cookbook.

It goes even farther. As _A Soup for the Qan_ makes clear, Islamic 
cooking ended up being done (in somewhat modified form) in China, 
thanks to the Mongol connection between Ilkhanid Persia and China 
under the descendants of Kubilai Khan.
- -- 
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/