[Sca-cooks] Musing on Mongol

[Lilinah]

Brighid ni Chiarain wrote:
>On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Lilinah <lilinah at earthlink.net> wrote:
>  > However, this makes me think that having a course of "fringe" foods might
>  > work, or one or two "fringe" dishes in each course - both purely Arabic and
>  > purely Chinese, and maybe a Turkish recipe or two - might help 
>diversify the
>  > food for non-meat eaters.
>
>It's 16th century, but the Ain i Akbari has recipes from Mughal India,
>including vegetarian recipes.
>http://persian.packhum.org/persian/pf?file=00702051&ct=0
>Book 1, Chapter 24.

Doh! How'd i forget? Thanks for the reminder. That would be a good 
"fringe" food to add to the Mongol feast. Yeah, wrong century, but 
what the heck, at least i can accommodate the vegetarians and add 
some vegetables into the feast for those of us who love them.

Plus in the Ain-i Akbari there are some Mongo-Turkic recipes related 
to recipes in the YSCY (the book featured in A Soup for the Qan), 
such as a version of shulen, a Mongol meat and grain porridge.

On another topic of interest to me, in the "A-i A" i discovered yet 
another recipe for the popular Ottoman dish Zerde, which is 
originally Persian. The name in the "A-i A" is Zard birinj - zard and 
zerde are cognates and mean "yellow", and birinj means "rice". It may 
not be exactly like the Ottoman version of the late 15th and the 16th 
centuries (for which we don't have a recipe), but at least it's a 
bona fide 16th c. recipe.

I just visually scanned a few pages (i saved the on-line version 
quite some time ago) and saw a few more dishes with names and basic 
ingredients matching late 15th and 16th C. Ottoman recipes, although 
i'm sure the seasoning is different.

And there are a number of recipes with purely Arabic names.

It's so cool to see Arabic, Persian, Turkic, and Mongol recipes side 
by side with South Asian recipes in one cookbook.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita

My LibraryThing
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