SC - Persion cooking

[david friedman]

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/