[Sca-cooks] Hulwa? Related Sweets?

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Mike C. Baker
SCA: al-Sayyid Amr ibn Majid al-Bakri al-Amra
wrote:
>Having been introduced to this confection today by HL Saqra al-Kudsi, in her
>kitchen as part of advanced preparation for Lindenwood Midsummer Masked Ball
>this year, I am looking for more information about the origins, variations,
>and related developments that may exist out there.  (For those who may be as
>new to this concept as I was, hulwa [hul-wah?] might be considered an
>ancestor or parallel development of divinity and similar boiled-sugar
>candies...)

There is a confectioner's manual included in the 14th century "The 
Book of the Description of Familiar Foods" with MASSIVE amounts of 
cooked sugar recipes.

This book is included in "Medieval  Arab Cookery", published by 
Prospect Books, translated by Charles Perry. I HIGHLY recommend 
purchasing this book if you enjoy Near and Middle Eastern cooking. It 
includes al-Baghdadi's cookbook - with updated and expanded footnotes 
by Charles Perry that correct errors in the Arberry translation and a 
great deal of much needed additional information. And a couple other 
cookbooks, excerpts from cook books, and wonderful essays by Charles 
Perry.

I've never made any of the cooked sugar recipes because i don't much 
care for sweets.

>Along similar lines, what about variations on the theme such as a softer
>delicacy I grew up enjoying in central Oklahoma, probably originating from a
>_Grit_ or _Capper's Weekly_ recipe:  Date-Nut Log

There are certainly modern (19th and early 20th) c. recipes for 
date-nut confections in the Near and Middle Eastern corpus. There 
could be some in the Medieval Arabic language cookbooks that i 
haven't noticed

al-Sayyida Urtatim al-Qurtubiyya bint 'abd al-Karim al-hakam al-Fassi
-- 

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