[Sca-cooks] Persian

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Gwen Cat wrote:
> looking for resources for Period Persian. Most specifically, I have been told there are 
> standard(ish) spice blends... like the  Persian versions of poudre douce and poudre forte; one 
> primarily for sweet, one for savory.

I am always looking for SCA-period food references, so i'm wondering where this information came from? 

There are references to food in SCA-period Persian literature of various sorts over many centuries, such as the Shah-nameh, numerous poems, the 14th c. "Gorby and the Rats" which is political satire, and the 15th c. works of Bushaq - but he's a satirist, so i wonder if some of the foods he mentions might not be parodic.

There are only two cookbooks known from SCA-period, both from 16th c. Safavid, one dated 1521 for a Persian prince, the other from 1594 for Shah 'Abbas I. Neither has been fully translated into any other language. Austrian scholar Bert Fragner translated parts of the later one into German, for rice polavs: 37 simple, 17 sour, and 10 sweet (some of which contain meat). I translated them into English and i have cooked several of these recipes in classes i have taught at Pennsic and at several of the West Coast Culinary Symposia, where they were served at dinner. There are no such spice blends mentioned among those recipes. The earlier cookbook is twice as large as the later one and according to Fragner gives more detailed recipes, so maybe they are mentioned there.

I have a photocopy of the transcription of the two Persian cookbooks by Iraj Afshar in 1941, and reprinted in  Iran in the early 1980s. Once i get done with my translation of Shirvani's Ottoman recipes from the 2nd quarter of the 15th c., i plan to work on translating the Persian. I showed them to an Iranian of my acquaintance and she said she could read most of it, although some words were archaic, so i have my hopes up that it's doable.

There are modern somewhat standardized spice blends. Perhaps someone assumed that Persian cuisine hasn't changed much in 500 years, a topic Fragner addresses in several of his essays on Iranian food - in which he points out important and wide-ranging changes.

Urtatim