Eating to Remember
From Persia to Casablanca: the culinary traditions of the
Middle East
By Robert Irwin
The Times Literary Supplement, London
March 31, 2000
In 1980, Terence O'Donnell published Garden of the Brave in War, a volume
of reminiscences of his time as farmer in the 1960s and 70s in the province
of Fars in Iran. The "Garden of the Brave in War" (the name of
his farm) produced pomegranates, apples, sour cherries, quinces, sheep,
chicken and bees. O'Donnell's Pickwickian memoir of outings, scrapes and
parties is full of evocations of great meals, such as the picnic which
preceded and almost superseded a hunting expedition and which consisted
of "gazelle, lamb and chicken, two kinds of pilau, spinach cakes,
wild rhubarb, yoghurt and herbs, whiskey, brandy and the local date spirits".
O'Donnell's book is filled with a nostalgia for a douceur de vivre which
the Iranian revolution of 1978-9 has probably placed beyond recovery.
Najmieh K. Batmanglij is an Iranian who lives in the United States,
and her cookery book, A
Taste of Persia, is suffused with a similar food-laden nostalgia. In
a prelude to a recipe for dill rice with fava beans, she recalls the old
family retainer who would appear shortly before the Persian New Year bearing
a wicker basket edged with violets and narcissi and containing Seville
oranges and smoked whitefish. When Batmanglij sets out a recipe for rice
with tart cherries, she notes that such cherries are hard to find these
days, and that "they always bring back memories". She remembers
waiting as a child for the crates of cherries, which "were placed
in the garden by the stone fountain and gently sprinkled with water to
wash off the dust". She and her sisters "soaked all our senses
in sour cherries". A discussion of khoresh, or braise, summons up
the memory of her mother chopping herbs: "I can see and smell and
hear it still: the various greens of the herbs, the sharp steel of the
cleaver with droplets of herb juice on it, the lovely aroma, the faraway
trancelike concentration on my mother's angelic face she never wore rings
when she cooked - the even quick blows of the cleaver."
Batmanglij stresses the pre-Islamic continuity of Iranian cuisine, and
relays the Assyrian Ashurnisapal II's boast that he had given a ten-day
feast, including thousands of cattle, calves, sheep, lambs, ducks, geese,
doves, stags and gazelles, as well as fruit, vegetables, cheese and nuts,
for 47,074 people. (However, Batmanglij's own recipes only cater for eight
people at most and usually only for four.) It was under the Sasanian dynasty
(third to seventh century AD) that a culture of the dinner table and the
drinking bout developed, which combined gastronomic and oenological expertise
with a broader grounding in etiquette and the elements of table talk. Much
of this culture of the table was passed on to the Arabs in the form of
adab (on which see below). The Persians cultivated and disseminated to
the rest of the world "the walnut, pistachio, pomegranate, cucumber,
broad bean and pea . . . as well as basil, coriander and sesame".
In "A Dictionary of Persian Cooking" at the back of the book,
Batmanglij makes similar claims for almonds, fenugreek, quince and saffron.
Some readers may well be suspicious of such broad claims to Persian priority,
which might be thought to smack of gastronomic imperialism. However, the
Larousse gastronomique and Alan Davidson's recent Oxford Companion to Food
not only support most of these claims, but they even add to the list. It
also seems to me likely that Turkish haute cuisine, as it evolved at the
Ottoman court, was modelled on that of the Timurids in Persia and Transoxiana
in the fifteenth century, when the latter dynasty was at the height of
its cultural prestige and an "International Timurid court style"
prevailed in other Islamic art forms.
Aline Benayoun, who is of Sephardic Jewish descent, grew up in the pied-noir
community of Casablanca, but now lives in London, and her book, Casablanca
Cuisine, is also, in part, an exercise in pious memory. Paradoxically,
what she recalls are the days when women did not use recipe books or cook
"by numbers". Recipes were memorized and orally transmitted,
and meals were based on the best that was available in the market on a
particular day, rather than on textual prescriptions. Her cookery book
is also in part a guide to how to shop in a traditional North African market.
She recalls how her mother used to patrol all the stalls, without at first
committing herself. Then having noted the freshest foods, she would feign
indifference, as she sat down to haggle over their purchase. She used to
inspect the length of a chicken's claws to determine its age, and she would
inspect its gullet in order to determine whether it had been corn-fed.
She chose those fish that had the clearest eyes and the reddest gills.
Like A
Taste of Persia, Casablanca Cuisine summons up child's-eye visions
of mother in the kitchen and of leisurely family feasts. A recipe for an
aniseed-flavoured loaf, le pain courant, is preceded by the remark that
the pieds noirs who now live in France "bake this bread, like the
other dishes which we brought with us from North Africa, as a way of holding
on to our past". Pied-noir cookery obviously owes much to the Arabs,
but it also draws heavily on Jewish culinary tradition. (In pre-independence
Algeria, for example, Jews constituted one fifth of the non-Muslim population.)
Pied-noir cooks, like Persian cooks and, for that matter, like medieval
English cooks, were particularly fond of combining meats with fruits.
In 1968, Claudia Roden published A Book of Middle Eastern Food. This
ground-breaking work swiftly established itself as a culinary classic.
(A heavily revised second edition appeared in 1985, which, to some extent,
drew on feedback from enthusiastic readers.) In the introduction to the
first edition, she described how as a schoolgirl in Paris, homesick for
Egypt, she would meet up with her relatives every Sunday to eat ful medames:
"This meal became a ritual. Considered in Egypt to be a poor man's
dish, in Paris the little brown beans became invested with all the glories
and warmth of Cairo, our home town, and the embodiment of all that for
which we were homesick." Roden's family, like Benayoun's were Sephardic
Jews. As well as recipes which were mostly unfamiliar to an English readership,
A Book of Middle Eastern Food offered glimpses of an old-fashioned Levantine
community in which Arab, Turk, Copt, Armenian, Greek and Jew lived cheek
by jowl and borrowed from each other's kitchens.
Claudia Roden's new book, Tamarind and Saffron, takes some of its recipes
t from her first book, but the recipes are often pared down and simplified,
and the ingredients specified seem to cater for a more health-conscious
audience. Roden's favourite recipes are very different from the numerous
heavy, greasy dishes I remember having eaten in Turkey and Algeria. She
notes in her introduction that Middle Eastern hosts have traditionally
favoured elaborate recipes that show one has worked hard for one's guests.
However, whereas Benayoun's book emphasizes and reproduces the elaborate,
slow pace of pied-noir cooking, Tamarind and Saffron's recipes are swift
and extremely simple. The instruction for making walnut and pomegranate
paste consists of one short sentence. Those of the book's recipes that
I have tried are excellent. Following the directions for making spiced
saffron rice, I managed to cook the best rice my wife and I have ever eaten
in our lives. It is a measure of the earlier success that Roden in her
new book is increasingly confident that exotic Middle Eastern ingredients
can be purchased in local stores in Britain. Tamarind and Saffron is lavishly
illustrated, but I preferred Roden's spare prose to the images of over-lit,
strangely glowing foods. (Batmanglij's photographer has succeeded in producing
more naturalistic, mouth-watering pictures.) Geert Jan Van Gelder is Laudian
Professor of Arabic at Oxford. His Of Dishes and Discourse traces the numerous
and complex interrelations between food on the one hand and medieval Arabic
poetry and belles-lettres on the other. "Literature in any case remains
the starting point and focus of this book . . . for the purpose of this
study culinary history is considered merely as one of the tools for the
understanding, interpretation and appreciation of literary texts."
Although there are hardly any recipes in what is essentially a study
of literary etiquette, symbols, metaphors, similes, satires and parodies,
Van Gelder does discuss cookery books. Normally the only literary feature
of medieval cookery books is their titles, such as, for example, al-Wusla
ila l-habib ("Arrival at the Beloved"), "the recipes themselves
being written in a factual and unliterary style". There is, however,
one exception, the tenth-century Kitab al-Tabikh by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq.
In this case, the title, "The Book of Cooking", is perfectly
prosaic, but the recipes are interleaved with numerous poems which Van
Gelder implausibly suggests "are perhaps the equivalent of the luscious
colour photographs of modern cookery books". Although much of the
poetry is ecphrastic, some of the poems are actual versified recipes, and,
in such cases, it seems probable that the poetry is being offered as an
aide-mémoire for the cook. Van Gelder has translated some of the
recipe-poems, in which the crisp imperatives that are the common feature
of all cookery books are softened and broken up by flowery similes. Thus,
halfway through a poem on a meat and narcissus dish, the reader-cook is
exhorted by Ibn Sayyar:
Then break an egg on it, like eyes,
Like shining stars of firmament,
Or round narcissus flowers ....
This sort of thing is no longer favoured by the compilers of cookery
books.
In A
Taste of Persia, Batmanglij refers to the tenth-century Persian epic
poet, Firdawsi, as despising the Arabs who conquered Iran for Islam as
rough men who "fed on camel's milk and ate lizards". Naturally,
Van Gelder offers a discussion of lizard-eating in its literary context.
Poets who were of Persian origin but who wrote in Arabic, such as Bashshar
ibn Burd and Abu Nuwas, were particularly inclined to mock the whole Arab
race as the eaters of lizards, hedgehogs or locusts. This was a stock literary
insult. Strictly speaking, however, it was only the nomadic Arabs who genuinely
delighted in eating lizards and locusts. A swarm of locusts, though it
spelled disaster for farmers, might be welcomed by the nomads as a delicacy
on the wing. "The locusts devour the Bedouin and the Bedouin devours
the locusts", as a popular saying had it. The slaughter and cooking
of camels is also discussed in Of Dishes and Discourse. In the pre-Islamic
qasidas devoted to the themes of the deserted carnp sites, lost loves and
journeys to an uncertain future, camels appeared not only as a mode of
transport, but also as a food. The preparation of camel's meat features
in what is perhaps the most famous of all Arabic poems, the intensely erotic
sixth-century qasida by Imru' al-Qays, in which .. . . the virgin of the
tribe went on tossing its hacked flesh about and the frilly fat like
fringes of twisted silk.
It is a little disappointing that there is no discussion of geophagy
in Van Gelder's wide-ranging book (but then he is generally more interested
in cooked food than in raw comestibles). There is a well-known reference
to earth-eating in al-Tha'alibi's tenth-century belles-lettres work, al-Lata'if
al-Ma'arif, "Curious and Entertaining Information", which, as
its title suggests, was a compendium of curiosities of all kinds. When
the author came to discuss the distinctive products of Nishapur in Iran,
he commended the city for its edible earth, "whose like is found nowhere
else in the world". It was indeed one of the place's chief exports.
The estimable Berthold Laufer (1874-1934) produced monographs on such recondite
matters as The Bird Chariot, History of the Finger-print System, The Application
of the Tibetan Sexagenary Cycle, Three Tokhavian Bagatelles, The Eskimo
Screw as a CultureHistorical Problem, Ostrich Egg-shell Cups of Mesopotamia
and the Ostrich in Ancient and Modern Times and Insect Musicians and Cricket
Champions of China. It was probably inevitable then that Laufer should
also write on eartheating. Laufer's Geophagy was published by the Field
Museum of Natural History, Chicago, in 1930. In it, Laufer drew together
the various references in medieval Arabic literature to earth-eating for
medicinal or epicurean purposes. He also drew attention to the persistence
of the practice in his own time among what were mostly working-class women
in Iran. "The clay fiends are characterised by leanness and sallow
earth-like complexions." Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, the brutal political
hatchet man of the Umayyad Caliphs, fluent orator and reformer of Arab
orthography, was probably the most notorious of the medieval clay-fiends.
This brutal man was reputed to have been addicted to earth-eating, and,
though he struggled to break the habit, he is reported to have died of
it in 714.
Al-Hajjaj does feature in Van Gelder's book, but only as the man who
carried out a poll among his followers to find out what their favourite
food was. Dates and butter won easily the most votes (and butter seems
to have been a favourite subject among poets). Although Of Dishes and Discourse
does discuss various forms of rough eating, Van Gelder notes that "Bedouin
dishes do not readily lend themselves to lyrical effusions", and it
is natural then that he Caliphs, courtiers and literati. The longest of
the book's chapters is devoted to "The Text as Banquet", in which
medieval Arab deipnosophists are shown playing with food and words, improvising
epicurean poems, indulging in flights of gastronomic oratory and citing
old Bedouin lore about food. Van Gelder has more than enough material to
deal with here, yet it is curious, as he notes, that there is far more
medieval Arab poetry about wine than there is about food. The impossibility
of living on words alone was a familiar literary theme and was put into
fictional form in the Thousand and One Nights, where, in the Hunchback
cycle stories, the Barber's sixth brother is welcomed to a "Barmecide
feasf' that is, he is urged by a superficially hospitable miser to help
himself to as much as he likes of invisible and wholly imaginary foods.
There is more of interest in this book than can even be signalled here,
though it is tempting to linger on Van Gelder's discussions of, among other
things, coprophagy, anti-vegetarian polemic, edible architecture, the competitive
slaughtering of camels, the foods of paradise, the sexual symbolism of
the fig and the pumpkin and that curious fantasy, "The War between
King Mutton and King Honey". It is important to emphasize, however,
that this not primarily a book about eating, but about the nature of literature,
and most specifically about adab. Adab has no exact parallel in English,
but it can be variously defined as "good breeding", "refinement",
"belles-lettres" and simply as "literature". It was
customary in medieval adab to mingle the comic and the serious (al-hazl
wa'j jidd). Geert Van Gelder has obviously enjoyed the medieval books and
manuscripts he has been reading, and his prose is strikingly stylish and
lively. Of Dishes and Discourse, a learned work of adab in English, is
a pleasure to read, especially since it also includes quite a few very
old (but still good) jokes.
Robert Irwin's most recent book is, Night and Houses and the
Desert: An anthology of classical Arabic literature.
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