[Sca-cooks] I'm the Sweets of Araby...

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Are there any *real* reviews of the following book?

The Sweets of Araby: Enchanting Recipes from the Tales of the 1,001 Arabian Nights
by Muna Salloum and Leila Salloum Elias
Countryman Press, $21.95 (128 pp.)
ISBN 9780881509298

The authors, sisters and scholars in fact, teaching at two different US universities, have sought to present recipes - from medieval Arabic language sources with their own interpretations into modern form - for some of the sweets mentioned in A Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa Laylah), and apparently include their own translations into English of 25 of the tales.

I found a number of mentions on the web by standard book reviewers who are unfamiliar with existing translations of medieval Arabic-language cookbooks (Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly). Some of them were not even really reviews, just gushing about how pretty the book was.

For example, the authors interpret Faludhaj (actually a dish for which there are many very different recipes) as a porridge made of cornstarch (!!!), when until not all that long ago (perhaps midway through the 20th c.) it was made of wheat starch, which i have found inexpensively enough in halal and Middle Eastern markets.

We already have pretty much all their recipes in English (for example, in "Medieval Arabic Cookery" and "Annals of the Caliphs' Kitchens"). And when we make interpretations, we avoid - i hope - such obviously modern ingredients as cornstarch.

And Charles Perry has an essay in "Medieval Arab Cookery" called "A Thousand and One Arabian Fritters", in which he points out that previous translations - most made without knowledge of actual medieval Arabic-language cookbooks because they hadn't yet been translated - completely invented their own dishes because they did not know what the dishes mentioned in Sheharazade's tales really were and leaving in the original Arabic names would not be evocative for European readers. In fact, few if any are actually fritters, and many are just unexotic sweet porridges and related dishes.

So i wonder if anyone has seen this book or a review of good quality, rather than the fluff that i found. Clearly, it is meant to be something of a "popular" work, but still, i wonder if any scholar of medieval Arabic/Middle Eastern history/cookery has reviewed it.

Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)