[Sca-cooks] Hais report

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Stefan wrote:
>Maybe. Or they might have actually preferred butter, but as someone
>pointed out, this is a desert food or at least a food meant to keep
>for awhile. Butter will go bad quicker than sesame oil will.

Actually, it's quite clear from reading SCA-period Arabic language 
cookbooks that sesame oil is the preferred oil/fat in much cooking, 
other than fat-tailed sheep tail fat for cooking meat. Olive oil was 
for the poor who could not afford sesame oil. When oil is specified, 
it is sesame oil - otherwise, the text may say "good oil". Sesame oil 
is used in cooking meats, vegetables, and sweets.

It has little to do with "desert". Again, this is falling into the 
trap of stereotypes about the Near and Middle East. The 
desertification of much of the Near and Middle East is primarily due 
to human activities - agriculture and the destruction of native 
plants. This began back 2,000 BCE by the Akkadians and Assyrian 
Mesopotamian cultures' vast irrigation projects and the deforestation 
of the Levant by Canaanites and Phoenicians cutting down the cedars 
to sell them to Egypt, among other things.

But while much of the area may be arid, it isn't all desert. For 
example, much of Texas and much of California is arid, but this 
doesn't make these areas deserts. And there are even some humid, 
almost tropical regions on the coast of the Arabian Peninsula.

Butter shows up in recipes on rare occasions. To make butter you need 
a milk in which the fat particles are larger and separate from the 
liquid easily, like cow's milk. But sheep and goats are the more 
typical dairy animals in the region, and sheep and goat milk are more 
naturally homogenized than cow milk, so it would have been harder to 
make butter from their milk.

Also, these cookbooks come from the highest, most SOPHISTICATED 
levels of URBAN societies, and do not generally represent the foods 
of the huddled masses or the desert nomads. This is HAUTE CUISINE. 
These are GOURMET recipes. There were even ice store houses to keep 
foods cool in the summer in Baghdad for the elite.

Hais may be mentioned as food for travel, but travel was difficult 
even for the wealthy elite, and one needed to bring much with one for 
times when one is not in a city where there were many cookshops.

The people who wrote and used these cookbooks were quite unlike those 
who wrote surviving European cookbooks. These books were often 
compiled by or written for a class of gourmands and gourmets who 
spent evenings dining on fine foods and composing poetry about food. 
One very famous cookbook from the 9th century was written by the 
half-brother of a Caliph, who became a Caliph himself for a brief 
period (he was known as the Anti-Caliph).

These are not the recipes of simple crude pastoralists wandering the 
desert. These are cookbooks of  wealthy, important, educated, 
powerful, elite, urbane, urban sophisticates.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita