SC - Fat tailed sheep

[Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir]

Phlip wrote:

Anybody have any references,
>whether to recipes, commentary, or other references?

There is a very interesting three-page article, "The Fate of the Tail" by
Charles Perry in "Disappearing Foods", the 1994 Oxford Symposium papers.
Basically, he says that in the 9th century Kitâb al-Tabib only half a dozen
recipes call for tail fat, but says "the reason may simply be that tail fat
was out of favor at the court of the Caliphs". Most later Arab cookbooks
call for tail fat (al-Baghdadi is "saturated with tail fat", Perry says).
But he does point out that in later versions of al-Baghdadi, there are
several added recipes and they do not usually call for tail fat so its use
may have declined.

"The most popular cookbook of the Arab Middle Ages, to judge from the number
of manuscripts that have survived, was Kitâb al-Wusla al-Habib. Tail fat has
a prominent place in the book. Recipes for rendering it constitute the
fourth chapter. Alya is expicitly called for in 34 recipes, and the "fat"
referred to in 18 more recipes was almost certainly from the tail, judging
on the basis of similarities in wording or the very quantity of fat called
for. The fat has two principal uses. Boiled meat is typically pounded and
then fried in tail fat before adding to a stew, and in starchy dishes such
as pilaf and lentils, tail fat is for flavoring, commonly poured in shortly
before the dish is done often together with as honey, vinegar, sugar syrup
or spices (even, in some cases, other fats such as sesame oil, olive oil
and/or clarified butter)."

There is also a very interesting one-page article on fat-tailed sheep in The
Oxford Companion to Food.

Nanna

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