[Sca-cooks] Shirvani translation update

[Jim and Andi Houston]

Urtatim-

I am really excited about this!! Especially the sweet dishes... I would love
to do a Turkish dessert board. 

Madhavi

-----Original Message-----
From: sca-cooks-bounces at lists.ansteorra.org
[mailto:sca-cooks-bounces at lists.ansteorra.org] On Behalf Of
lilinah at earthlink.net
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2013 5:32 PM
To: SCA-Cooks
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Shirvani translation update

I'm very excited that i am nearly done translating all the recipes that
Mahmed Shirvani added to his translation of al-Baghdadi's early 13th
cookbook into Eski Osmanli in the mid-15th c., which he made at the request
of the sultan he served, Murad II.

It turns out there are 84 recipes.
--- 34 savory dishes - although two are bread-based and include no meat;
--- 5 dishes of meat with grain and a lot of sweetener, although two are
nearly identical;
--- 32 sweets (these were eaten during a mean and not as dessert) (9 to
translate);
--- 3 condiments & pickles (1 to translate);
--- 3 fermented beverages (3 to translate);
--- 8 drugs/medicaments (4 to translate).
Stephane Yerasimos, in A la table du Grand Turc, provides evidence that
nearly all these were actually cooked and served in the Palace (other than
the drugs), at least at circumcision festivals for the sons of the Sultans
through the 16th c.

The range of spices used in the foods is surprisingly quite limited. Clearly
the Ottomans had access to more, since others appear in the medicinal
recipes, but they used far fewer in their cooking. I have counted all of
them in the savory recipes - including sweeteners and souring agents - and
have constructed a webpage i will be putting up soon, so we can compare them
to what was used in al-Baghdadi and the 13th c. anonymous Andalusian
cookbook - already on my website. I'll let the list know when it's up.


I will go through the recipes originally from al-Baghdadi, since it is clear
that Shirvani intentionally altered some (if not many) in his translations.
So far in the few i've examined he has changed ingredients or added details
to the cooking. Then i will go through my translation of Yerasimos's book to
see which were actually cooked in royal feasts - definitely not all were.

There is enough information about daily menus to know that even the Sultans
tended to eat many of the same few dishes over and over - the two daily
meals in the palace were very circumscribed. In fact, the Sultan's company
of Pages ate the nearly same thing every night in their evening meal:
*always* roast chicken and rice, although the one accompanying dish might
vary with the seasons.

While Arabic-language recipes may indicate cooking meat with one fruit,
quite a few Ottoman recipes include multiple fruits. There are no purely
vegetable dishes.

In Arabic cuisine the sole fruit used in sweets is the date, and then only
in a limited number of recipes. However we have extensive lists of sweet
fruit dishes surviving from many Ottoman circumcision festivals, although
Shirvani included only a few recipes for sweets with fruit. Nuts were often
included in sweets, as well as savory dishes. But the only spice used in
Ottoman and in Arabic sweets recipes is saffron; other flavorings include
rosewater and musk, and sometimes camphor. There is no cinnamon as we often
use, however - cinnamon is for meat.

Urtatim (that's oor-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita
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