[Sca-cooks] Questions on coffee
Terry Decker
t.d.decker at att.net
Sat Jan 30 19:39:06 PST 2010
> Odd question does anyone know if coffee mentioned in "The 1001 Nights"? I
> understand that they date from period. I've a couple of the translations,
> Burton's is the most extensive, but have not waded through them.
>
> Daniel
I don't recall any references to coffee in the versions I've read, but that
has been some time.
The Thousand Nights and a Night are an accretion of stories that were first
compiled in book form around the 10th Century. The earliest manuscripts
that are available are 14th-15th Century, so we can't tell if coffee
appeared in the work prior to this time. There are differing versions of
the tales, having the same core of stories, but different peripheral
stories. There is also debate as to how much editting and revision have
been done in the early modern period. This means that references to coffee
in the stories may be modern rather than pre-1600 artifacts.
I am told that the Husain Haddawy translation from a modern Arabic
translation of the Medieval manuscript (Leiden text) in the Bibliotheque
Nationale is the closest to the original and would probably be the best
manuscript to search for references to coffee. Haddawy has also translated
a collection of stories not found in the Leiden manuscript.
Bear
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