[Sca-cooks] seljuk-era rice dish

[Jim and Andi]

I would love to know exactly what the word translated as "peas" was!

Madhavi

-----Original Message-----
From: Sca-cooks
[mailto:sca-cooks-bounces+jimandandi=cox.net at lists.ansteorra.org] On Behalf
Of Ursula Georges
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2014 10:21 PM
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
Subject: [Sca-cooks] seljuk-era rice dish

Recently, we discussed Middle Eastern rice dishes in period.  I just got a
copy of a translation of Nizam al-Mulk's Seljuk-era Book of Government, and
one of the stories involves a dish made of rice and peas.  The setup is that
Zaid ibn Aslam told a story in which the Commander of the Faithful finds a
poor woman boiling a cauldron full of water for her children in the middle
of a field:

"He ran all the way to the woman and put the bags down in front of her; one
of them was full of flour and the other full of rice, fat, and peas. 
  He said to me, 'O Zaid, go into the fields, collect all the sticks and
straws you can find and bring them quickly.'  I went to look for firewood.
Then `Umar took a ewer and fetched some water; he washed the rice and peas,
put them in the cauldron and threw in a lump of fat; meanwhile the woman
made a large flat round of bread, weeping all the time for joy.  I brought
the firewood; and with his own hands `Umar heated the cauldron and put the
bread under the fire."

--Ursula Georges.
_______________________________________________
Sca-cooks mailing list
Sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
http://lists.ansteorra.org/listinfo.cgi/sca-cooks-ansteorra.org