Early Arab Cooking and Cookery Manuscripts

Claudia Roden, author of A Book of Middle Eastern Food, was led in her researches for it to examine the surviving evidence about Arab cooking in the pre-Islamic period and the era of the Moslem Empire. Learned articles by Professor A.J. Arberry and Professor Maxime Rodinson formed a basis on which she prepared a talk delivered to the Symposium on Cookery Books held at Saint Antony's College, Oxford, on 31 May 1980. Professor Arberry's article 'A Baghdad Cookery Book', published in Islamic Culture 13 (1939) includes a translation of a manuscript cookery book of 1226. In 1949 the eminent French orientalist Professor Maxime Rodinson published 'Recherches sur les Documents Arabes Relatifs ala Cuisine' in the Revue des Etudes Islamiques. In this sociological study of the history of food in the Arab world, he discusses early culinary literature, analyses cookery manuals and describes the court cuisine of the 12th and 13th centuries. Professor Rodinson later contributed to the first symposium of the 'Accademia Italiana Della Cucina,' in Venice in 1967, an essay on 'The Spice Trade and the Oriental influence on European Cooking'. The novel perspectives revealed to Claudia Roden's audience at Oxford aroused great interest and a keen demand for 'the text'. However, like the early scribes whose work she cited, she had only a manuscript. The present essay is a slightly elaborated version of that manuscript. We print it in the belief that it is an important contribution to an area of research in which much work remains to be done - work which can be expected to cast fresh light on the origins of European cuisines of the Renaissance and later.