[Sca-cooks] Shirvani translation update

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

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