Middle Eastern Cooking (was Re: SC - Theme Menus)
lilinah at earthlink.net
lilinah at earthlink.net
Fri Feb 9 20:02:49 PST 2001
Quite a few period Near and Middle Eastern cookbooks and recipes are
available in English.
Lord Cariadoc's two volume collection of recipes has a number of
actual Near and Middle Eastern cookbooks and recipes. I consider this
collection an essential for the historic cook's library. For the most
part the books are reproductions of originals, so there are few
worked out recipes. But they cover about 600 years of cooking and
cover the Near and Middle East, Iceland, as well as most of Europe.
I also have a photocopy of Waine's book "In a Caliph's Kitchen" (out
of print). It contains the author's often questionable redactions (in
big type on the left hand page), but there are translations of the
original recipes from several books focusing on Baghdad (in small
type under the color photos on the right hand page). Waine's book has
an excellent historical introduction and his recipes come from a
number of different Middle Eastern sources. Unfortunately, i cannot
read the originals in their original language in order to verify how
accurately the translated original recipes are. Comparing Waine's
worked out recipes with the originals as reproduced in the book,
however, shows great differences. If you find this book, don't use
his recipes. Work up your own from the translations.
However, it's harder to find translated in English recipes from
farther East - Lord Cariadoc has some from India on his website
http://www.daviddfriedman.com
Adamantius is working on period Chinese recipes.
And the book "A Soup for the Qan" is available (for US$125 !!) with
some period Mongol food.
If anyone knows of other good resources, i'd be glad to hear - not
that i've cooked everything in Lord Cariadoc's collection yet :-)
Anahita
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