[Sca-cooks] Odd Question

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

JIMCHEVAL at aol.com wrote:
> I think that's a bit exaggerated.

Not much. Did you read Perry's article or listen to his talk? Because he knows his stuff, since he has translated a number of medieval Arabic language cookbooks.

> The  earlier quotes I provided are richly annotated:
>
>http://books.google.com/books?id=NXa7TXBBsfwC&lpg=PA86&dq=inauthor%3Aburton%
>20nights%20taste&pg=PA70#v=onepage&q&f=false
>
>Meat  pudding is indexed here to "harisah", as it is in the next work as  
>well:
>
>"1 "Harisah" = meat-pudding. In A1-Hariri (Ass. xix.) where he  enumerates 
>the several kinds of dishes with their metonomies it is called the "Mother 
>of Strengthening" (or Restoration) because it contains wheat?" the  
>Strengthener" (as opposed to barley and holcus). So the "Mother of Hospitality" is 
>the Sikbaj, the Persian Sikba, so entitled because it is the principal dish 
> set before guests and was held to be royal food. (Chenery, pp. 218, 457). 
>For the latter see infra."
>
>http://books.google.com/books?id=W5IWAAAAYAAJ&dq=inauthor%3Aburton%20nights%
>20meat&pg=PA159#v=onepage&q&f=false

"Rich" annotations do not guarantee *accurate* descriptions.

I "like" the reference to mushrooms, since they rarely show up in dishes of Harun al-Rashid's period.

As for translators who made stuff up, i gave the example of the two different attempts to figure out how to describe fistikiyya - one as lamb fattened on pistachios, which is isn't, and the other as chicken stuffed with pistachios, which it isn't, as lovely as that sounds.

> They  may, like any translator, have gone astray, but not for wont of 
> seriously trying to identify what they were translating. They certainly weren't 
> just "making stuff up"/

Yes, most of them were making stuff up. They were not being malicious, or desirous of misrepresenting the cultures. No, it was from lack of knowledge, since until 1939 no medieval Arabic language cookbook had been translated into a Western European language. And so, to fill in the gaps, and to make the food sound exotic and rich, because they could not describe the actual dishes, they made stuff up. No, really. I'm sure they'd have liked to have known what was described in the text, but, as i said before, for the most part they had to invent dishes.

They went astray because they had no idea what most of those food words meant. A few items are still made, even today, such as harisa, but i certainly would not call it a "meat pudding".

Burton was in a slightly better position than most of the other translators. He'd lived in the Middle East, often disguised as a Muslim of some sort. He would have been familiar with the dishes cooked in the Middle East in his day - the 19th century. And he had some familiarity with other literary references to food. But he was not familiar with the medieval recipes, so he'd know the names, but not the ingredients. Thus his food translations are not reliable for what was eaten in the 8th and 9th centuries in Baghdad, either.

In fact, not until Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq's massive compendium was published in English a few years ago did we know what was being cooked in the 9th and 10th centuries. It's nothing like food of the Arabic speaking world of the 19th or the 20th centuries.

This is a discussion that scholars of Ottoman food have had until recently. Merserem? No one knew what it was or what was in it, since the name is not at all descriptive of the dish. Same goes for Mersmuye. They were among the dishes listed in Ottoman "menus" in the 15th and 16th centuries. But what was in them was not known. Not until Stephane/Stefanos Yerasimos translated the Eski Osmanli into French and modern Turkish earlier in this millennium.

Back to Arabic recipes, while some dishes have names that at least refer to an ingredient -- such as Limuwiya/Limuniyya, so we know it has lemon in it... but not any other ingredients -- this is not enough to fully describe the dish. And therefore translators of these stories -- including Burton -- really had little to no idea what the dishes in the tales were. That's why there are so many "lamb stews" or "mutton ragouts" without making clear what distinguished one from another.

Burton knew that Sikbaj was "Queen of Dishes" but he didn't really know what was in it or how it was served. I'm sure he did his best, because he was personally invested in the culture. But even he hadn't read Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq's cookbook to know what REALLY was cooked in 9th c. Baghdad.

You really need to attend to Charles Perry...

Urtatim