[Sca-cooks] Plantains: Period for Old World?

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Cariadoc wrote:
>  I don't believe I have seen any period recipes using plantains.
>  Al-Warraq has a banana recipe that I'm tempted to try at our next
>  cooking workshop, and it's conceivable that he might use the same
>  word for  bananas and plantains--it's a dessert, bananas layered with
>  thin flatbread and sugar, drenched with rosewater, and baked
>  underneath a chicken (to get the drippings).

I don't think of it as a dessert, but a delicious delicacy.

It can be made similarly without using bananas,
but putting fanid, taffy, between the sheets of bread;
or putting lauzinaj between the sheets of bread;
or putting khabisa (semolina pudding) between the sheets of bread;
or, IIRC, putting chopped nuts and sugar between the sheets of bread.

And one eats it along *with* the chicken, not separately from it.

There are humorous stories about sly manipulators getting someone to 
buy Judhaba for them in the market, then running off with it.

There are multiple recipes for it in the much later Book of the 
Description of Familiar Foods, in M*A*C (Medieval Arab Cookery).
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita