[Sca-cooks] Nuskha-e-Shajahani

[Sam Wallace]

Hello,

The comment concerning the translation and transcription is simply an
observation. I prefer to have at least a transcription facing the
translated text and have seen this as a standard in many other
publications. I look at Perry's work as following quite a high standard and
very much appreciate what he brings to the table (sorry!). This publication
has a lot of issues that should have been solved during the editing
process. While the original measures might have been left, the format is
certainly modern. I believe some of the ingredients have been listed as
what is typically used today versus what was used in the period of the
original text (e.g. pumpkin vs. ash gourd). My overall impression is that
the author wanted to make a cookbook that the general population would be
interested in rather than target the historical cooking community.

To follow up the issue of the units of measure, the modern equivalents
given in the book are not consistent. In one case, the UOM given in the
glossary isn't even used anywhere in the text. I did some digging so that I
would have at least a starting point and found the following

Weight

seer 637.74 gram
pao 159.44 gram
dam   20 gram
tank     5 gram
masha     1.5 gram
damri     1 gram

Measurements of volume were, from what I found in a couple of different
resources, just the amount of volume that the given weight of a particular
liquid would take up. It is not a similar question to liquid vs solid
ounces for example.

I hope this is useful.

Guillaume


Greetings:
>
> I've posted about this book here before - at least 10 years ago, tho, and
> maybe longer, so not very recently. It is from the 2nd quarter of the 17th
> c. For anyone studying SCA-period Persian cuisine, this is a useful to
> compare the rice pilaos of Shah Jahan with those from 1594 of chef to
> Safavid Shah Abbas I, published as "Dining at the Safavid Court: 16th
> Century Royal Persian Recipes" by M. R. Ghanoonparvar, Mazda Pub. (2017).
>
> "the original text is not given, neither in transcription" - the original
> text was written in Persian. We rarely get the original text of
> Arabic-language recipes and i rarely hear people asking for them. An
> exception is Perry's most recent work, which *does* have the Arabic on
> pages facing the English translation. I suspect even fewer of us can read
> late 16th/early 17th c. Farsi.
>
> When i first received it, i thought the recipes had been modernized. Then
> i got onto some Indian message boards where the book was being discussed.
> And it appeared that the recipes had not been extensively modernized, since
> there were so many comments about not understanding the measurements given
> and some of the procedures.
>
> I, too, wish the whole cookbook was translated.
>
> Urtatim al-Qurtubiyya
>