[Sca-cooks] Shirvani translation update

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

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

I made four of them for an Ottoman feast i did some years ago. I have recipes on my website:
http://home.earthlink.net/~al-tabbakhah/2007_Feasts/Fall%20Investiture%20Feast/Dessert_Course.html

There are a couple big difference between the recipe for sheker borek - for which i relied on my translation of Stephane Yerasimos - and my recent translation.

In the recipe almonds are very finely crushed and mixed with sugar which has been reduced to "flour". Then some musk dissolved in rosewater is added - for another feast i experimented with dissolved Australian musk lifesavers, which worked pretty well - since edible musk from musk deer is not readily available, is extraordinarily expensive, and generally the result of animal torture.

I made a yeasted dough but apparently it doesn't have to be yeasted. Saffron added to the dough is optional. Pieces of dough are torn off and rolled into rounds with a rolling pin. The dough is not phyllo - yufka in Turkish - which is used for modern borek. Since yufka is mentioned in some of Shirvani's recipes, i think that if it was called for on this recipe it would have been named.

Then the almond-sugar is placed "in the middle" - i now think the dough was to be folded over the filling, although for the feast we put the almond-sugar on top of the dough rounds, because the recipe says they take the form of fritter. On them make ​​comb-shaped designes with a dimirle [pointed iron tool]. Butter or fat/oil is put in a baking pan (i recommend butter or ghee), the borek are placed in the pan, and they are baked. To avoid burning, do not bake too long, cook just until the face is golden brown. When they come out of the oven, dust with sugar and sprinkle with rose water, and eat.

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The Senbuse Mukallele - from Shirvani's translation of al-Baghdadi - were really delicious. I chose to use phyllo since the original directions for the dough weren't clear on just how fine it should be (they're in parentheses) - and we fried them in butter. O! M! G!

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The Muhallabi was quite good but it requires constant unfailing stirring - the giant pot we made for the feast took 45 minutes to cook and tired the arms of several cooks. A small batch i had made previously with just one friend - before i had translated Yerasimos into English, so i was working directly from his French - took nearly as long - my friend said it was so delicious she wanted to snorkel in it :-)

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Since no SCA-period Ottoman zerde recipe is known, but it was commonly served at feasts, i used one from Shah Jehan's cookbook. I was originally a little skeptical about the source, but have since become confident it is real, since i have found references to the original manuscript by a highly reputable source, scholar Bert Fragner. There are several quite inaccurate extant descriptions of zerde by European visitors to Constantinople who didn't know how it was made and misunderstood what they were seeing.

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The next year i made an extensive sweets table for Kamiilah, Princess of the Mists, who has a Middle Eastern persona. About half the recipes were from the anonymous Andalusian, and three of the peri-oid recipes were based on mentions of sweets in SCA-period literature.
http://home.earthlink.net/~al-tabbakhah/2008_Feasts/SpringInvestiture.html

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