Summary
With a foreword by Claudia Roden. Readers of Claudia Roden'smasterworks have long been aware of the continuities in Middle Easterncookery, others have been tantalized by the influence of Islamic cooking onthe medieval West, all will rejoice in this new gathering of papers anddocuments relating to medieval Arab food and cookery. The French scholar,Maxime Rodinson's contributions are legendary, yet have only been seen intranslation in Petits Propos Culinaires . We include those already published there, together with thetext of his longest paper, 'Recherches sur les documents Arabes relatifs a la cuisine', translated byBarbara Yeomans. The American scholar Charles Perry has been entertainingparticipants at the Oxford Symposium with regular gleanings from hisresearches into medieval Arab cookery, and several of his papers are gatheredhere, together with a new study of fish recipes, and other items previouslypublished in PPC. Subjects include grain foods of the early Turks, rottedcondiments, cooking pots, and Kitabal-Tibakhah , a 15th-century cookery book. Englishstudy of the subject was first encouraged by Professor Arberry's translationof the 13th-century cookery book Kitab al-Tabikh, published in 1939 in theperiodical Islamic Culture . Readers will be pleased to have this more accessible copy,together with an introductory note and revision by Charles Perry.
Charles Perry is well known as a translator of Arab cookerytexts. He has travelled to Egypt and Syria to research the manuscripts fromcenturies past. Charles Perry was born in California and became a linguist,studying languages with his collection of dictionaries and grammars from over200 languages. He studied Near Eastern Languages at Princeton University, andthen worked as a journalist, becoming a food columnist and restaurant reviewer.He became interested in historical recipes, attending food symposiums includingthe Oxford Symposium on Food, and also started translating ancient texts fromthe Persian.
