[Sca-cooks] OT: Rome and medieval Egypt
Sayyeda al-Kaslaania
samia at idlelion.net
Sat Jun 4 06:14:28 PDT 2011
Agreed. Aramco World is an awesome magazine. It's offered as a free
publication.
On Middle Ages Egyptian culture, the gal/guy could look up Abbasid,
Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk cultures. They all took turns controlling
Egypt. Research into the Cairo Geniza yields spectacular results on
these. (The Fatimids created Cairo next to Fustat).
As far as Egyptian food, there are at least two cookbooks from Egypt in
the period. AFAIK, neither has been translated in it's entirety into
English. Lilia Zaouli has a few of those recipes translated in /Medieval
Cuisine of the Islamic World,/ but it's good to know that these were
translated from Arabic to Italian (?) to English. Charles Perry did the
Forward for the English version, so it has some good kudos.
It's also important to know that in the Middle Ages there was a cultural
blanket on the Middle East/Islamic Mediterranean. Yedida Stillman calls
it the Pan-Islamic Culture. With minor territorial variations, the
culture is largely the same in the Middle Ages (specifically excluding
Persian) because of the strong trade. Knowing this, people can borrow
pretty confidently from al-Andalus, Baghdad, and Damascus to fill in
gaps of knowledge of Cairo/Fustat.
You could also direct the person to my blog:
http://idlelion.blogspot.com/
I'm slowly putting up recipes and redactions from my first feast this
past weekend.
Hope that helps,
Sayyeda al-Kaslaania
On 6/3/2011 10:12 PM, Daniel And elizabeth phelps wrote:
> Don't know if it would help but she could check the back issues of Saudi Aramco World on line and see if anything useful pops up.
>
> Daniel
>
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