[Sca-cooks] New cookbook? Has anyone seen this???

[Lilinah]

Kiri wrote:
>It appears that Jessica Biscuit is selling what they tout as a new
>compendium of ME cookery,
>
>*Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World, A Concise History with
>174 Recipes
><http://www.ecookbooks.com/p-20614-medieval-cuisine-of-the-islamic-world.aspx>.
>*The book is by Lilia Zaouaili, trans. by M. B. DeBevois.
>
>Has anyone seen this book?  If so, how good is it.  It's a hardcover
>book that they're selling for $16.46.  Whaddya think?

Well, Charles Perry wrote the introductory matter for it, but he 
expressed some disappointment with the book to me in private e-mail.

However, i'm planning to get it. I'm a "more is more" kind of person, 
and when i can afford it, a completist, so i like to have books on 
particular topics even when they have problems. Plus, what is a 
disappointment to him, as a scholar and a specialist, may still be 
very helpful to us SCAdians as amateurs and practical cooks.

-----

There's a university press bookstore near the UC-Berkeley campus, and 
i expect they'll have it there. I'll try to look at it this week and 
report back. Still, it's quite affordable.

I'm also *very excited* about the publication this month of :
Annals of the Caliphs' Kitchens : Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq's 
Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook
English Translation with Introduction and Glossary by Nawal Nasrallah
http://www.brill.nl/product_id24049.htm

It's a very substantial book, around 900 pages, but it is up in the 
"A Soup for the Qan" price range. Brill is an excellent scholarly 
press and most of their books, being highly specialized, are 
expensive - i've purchased other Brill books and they've always been 
in the $100 range. Now that the US dollar is tanking drastically vs. 
the Euro, this makes European books even more expensive.

Still, i'm definitely getting it, if i have to eat nothing but rice 
and lentils for a couple weeks this month. So few recipes from it 
have been published in English, mostly in David Waines' "In a 
Caliph's Kitchen", although Charles Perry published some modernized 
versions in a recent SaudiAramco magazine.

-----

I treated myself to two "new" books in November:

1)
The Illuminated Table, the Prosperous House
Edited by Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann
Wuerzburg: Orient-Institut der DMG, 2003

I ordered this book from Germany, where it is published. It's a 
collection of scholarly essays by academic specialists about food, 
cooking and eating equipment, kitchens, and homes in the Ottoman 
Empire, concentrating on the 16th-18th centuries, although there are 
a few essays that go into the 19th C. It is mostly in English, with 
some material in modern Turkish. I have found it very revelatory. It 
doesn't really have recipes, but i knew that before i bought it - 
well, one essay does reproduce about 7 recipes from a 15th C. medical 
book, and they are all dishes one could eat at the dining table.

Reading old cookbooks, such as Shirvani, and reading essays as in 
"Illuminated Table..." which cover the development of Ottoman cuisine 
over more than 300 years, makes one very aware of how different 
current "traditional" dishes are from those of the past, even of 200 
years ago.

2)
500 Years of Ottoman Cuisine
Marianna Yerasimos (trans. Sally Bradbrook)
Istanbul: Boyut - Yayin Grubu, 2005

This book, which i ordered from a Turkish vendor, is both a joy and a 
frustration.

The book contains very helpful introductory information, including a 
list of all historical cookbooks and other source books on food from 
the Ottoman period, covering 500 years from the 15th through the 19th 
centuries. It is filled with beautiful color pictures taken from 
sources from the 16th through 19th centuries. And in each recipe 
section, such as Soups, Meats, Vegetables, etc., she includes a list 
of all the dishes she found mentioned, organized by century.

Frustratingly, she gives recipes only for a small, very small, 
selection of  them. And what is even more frustrating is that she 
does not include the originals of the 99 recipes in the book. There 
are only her modernized versions, although she mentions her original 
source for each.

Additionally she only rarely discusses how recipes for a dish with a 
particular name changed over the centuries. Most of the time she only 
vaguely alludes to the differences, without explicitly describing 
them. Sigh.

Also, although Stefanos/Stephane Yerasimos' book "Sultan Sofralari" 
(published as "A la table du Grand Turc", in French) is mentioned 
somewhere in the book, Stefanos Yerasimos (who died in the summer of 
2005) is not one of the people she thanks for helping with 
translations and other work, so perhaps they were not related or they 
were estranged.

I think this book is an interesting book for those us involved in 
historical cooking. But it is lacks information most of us would 
want, i.e., the original recipes.

Naturally the originals are only available in some form of Turkish, 
from the Eski Osmanli of Shirvani's late 15th C. cookbook, to the 
19th C. Turkish of the Tanzamat reforms. She also cites some other 
scholarly books, some in languages that are more accessible to many 
of us, being in modern German and modern French. So i have to add 
modern Turkish to my list of languages to learn - since some of the 
old books were translated into modern Turkish and published within 
the past 30 years.

-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita