[Sca-cooks] taro

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

I wrote:
> > You have some of his recipes in the Florilegium under the Spanish spelling 
> > "Tugibi", in which "fat" is translated as *lard*, something no Muslim would ever 
> > touch.

Suey replied: 
> Oh! Is this in some of the Spanish manuscripts? If so, was it known in Spain or 
> were they just talking about it being cooked in other cultures? Is the translation 
> wrong to call it "lard" or is the original Spanish(?) wrong?

Since the original of the Fadalat al-Khiwan was in ARABIC, there is NO Spanish original, only Spanish translations. I am working with Manuela Marin's complete translation of the entire Fadalat al-Khiwan. And i am also working with a complete translation of the book into French written by two Moroccans, and comparing the two translations.

The word "manteca" appears in Marin's translation. "Manteca" means "fat", sometimes "butter", but it does not mean "lard" unless it is qualified as "manteca de cerdo" or the context makes it clear that pig fat is intended.

In English "lard" specifically means a particular type of pig fat, and not fat from any other animal. No Muslim would use pig fat, and pigs are not mentioned in the Fadalat at all in the recipes for quadrupeds, which is only to be expected since pigs are haram - forbidden to Muslims.

Additionally, because the Fadalat al-Khiwan was originally written in ARABIC, the author's name has to be transliterated into the Roman alphabet. Because Roman letters can represent different sounds in different European languages, and all other languages using the Roman alphabet (modern Turkish, Vietnamese, etc.), there are different conventions for transliterating in different languages.

In English we generally use the letter "j" to represent the Arabic letter that we write as "jim" or "jeem". This is how i was taught in my Arabic classes. However since the letter "j" has a very different sound in Spanish, Spanish uses the letter "g", or "g" with a breve over it, to represent that sound. Since the translation in the Florilegium is into English, it would made sense to use English conventions rather than Spanish conventions for transliterating the Arabic.

English speakers who do not know the author's name or the transliterating conventions would tend to pronounce the name written with a hard "g" as in "gorilla", a sound that does not exist in Arabic generally speaking (altho it does in Egyptian Arabic). So in English his name should be Romanized/transliterated as "al-Tujibi".

Urtatim