[Sca-cooks] Tapas

[Antonia Calvo]

lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:

>I know the word "Mezze" from modern Syrian and Lebanese cookbooks. But i have not seen in it an SCA-period book. Good translators included special words in Arabic (in transliteration) in their translations, such as those by Charles Perry and Nahwal Nasrallah. It's possible that a translator neglected to mention it. However, cold dishes in Arabic cookbooks are Bawarid (pl.), Barida (sing.). Doesn't look much like mezze or mazza.
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>So i suspect this is a modern interpolation.
>-- Hey, Medieval Muslims ate cold dishes after Ramadan.
>-- Really? They do that now in Lebanon and Syria and call them mezze.
>-- Wow, that means they ate mezze in Medieval la-Andalus!
>Unless there's a passage in Andalusian Arabic that specifically says "mazza"...
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<snip!>

>OK, just scanned through the article, and it looks to me as if the author never says the medieval Muslims of al-Andalus called the dishes mezze, just that they had dishes that were served rather like mezze are today. And, well, tapas are like mezze, so tapas must by from medieval Muslims. Kinda like my fantasy conversation, only with less drama :-)
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I think the word mezze is a later borrowing from Turkish.


-- 
Antonia di Benedetto Calvo

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Habeo metrum - musicamque,
hominem meam. Expectat alium quid?
-Georgeus Gershwinus
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