[Sca-cooks] Help with planning Islamic feast (longish)

[david friedman]

"Many of the great figures and their companions order that the
separate dishes be placed on each table before the diners, one after
another; and by my life, this is more beautiful than putting an
uneaten mound all on the table, and it is more elegant, better-bred,
and modern; this has been the practice of the people of al-Andalus
and the West, of their rulers, great figures, and men of merit from
the days of 'Umar b. 'Abd al-'Aziz and the Banu Umayya to the
present."

One thing you might want to think about is whether to do the
sophisticated western Islamic style of feast or the eastern
islamic/unsophisticated western Islamic style.

The former is credited as one of Ziryab's innovations, and seems to
be basically what we think of as the standard approach to serving a
feast--a series of courses, with each dish served separately. So far
as I can tell, it never caught on in the eastern (i.e. middle east
and beyond) parts of the Islamic world.

The eastern style involves a tray piled with rice, with some of one
dish at one end, some of another at another, some of a third ...  .

When Elizabeth and I do an Islamic feast, we tend to go with the
latter style, both because it is easier to serve and because it is
more different from what people are used to. As far as I can make
out, it is appropriate for western Islamic as well as eastern,
provided you don't mind the snootier members of your audience passing
comments about how uncultured you are.

If you decide to do the easier version, you might also do more
research than I have to confirm my interpretation of what it was. I'm
going in part by the quote above, in part from a modern description
of a feast in a traditional part of the middle east.
--
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/