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A Primer On Medieval Islamic Food

Part 5: Recipes For Home Cooking

[Image ID: Illustrated table filled with medieval Islamic dishes. For a detailed description, go to the References section, Full Image Descriptions subsection for Image 1. Illustration by rhipiduridae. /end ID]

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So you want to try cooking these dishes yourself. Fortunately many of the recipes are fairly clear and/or the translators did a decent job. Some even have measurements, though you’ll need to scale down from making banquet-sized meals.

This food is rich, fragrant, and visually pleasing. I’ve made a number of dishes, which will be posted in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here are some tips, tricks, and caveats to help you get the context for cooking medieval Islamic food.

Part 4: Typical Meals << Masterpost Index

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Tips and Tricks

Many of these recipes have a modern variant - the trick is knowing what it’s called. In addition to complete name changes, Arabic text doesn’t always require vowels to be specified*, as many of them are indicated through optional diacritics, which makes the romanization highly variable. For example, jute mallow stew (ملوخية‎) can be written as mulūkhiyya, mulukhiyah, molokhia, melokheya, etc. When searching for modern versions, look for similar combinations of ingredients along with the region the recipe came from. Or learn Arabic, like I am.

While some of these recipes will call for special ingredients, most should be readily accessible (at least in the US and I assume most of the western world). Look for Middle Eastern, Iranian, or Indian markets. I’ve also listed substitutes if you can’t quite find what you need.

Due to the toughness of most meats at the time, recipes often call for meat to be blanched (briefly boiled) before cooking via other methods. This also removes some of the gaminess from mutton or goat. Given that today’s meats are aged and are much more tender, this is not a necessary step and will in fact make the meat tougher. If you want to be super authentic and blanch meat anyway, put the meat in cold water and let it come to a boil, then skim off the surface scum and cook as usual.

I highly recommend Medieval cuisine of the Islamic World: a concise history with 174 recipes by Lilia Zaouali for an edited compilation of historical recipes, as well as modern-day interpretations of those recipes with clear measurements and steps.

* Please check the notes for this post for @rosycoconuts’ excellent info about harakāt (vowel diacritics) and their use in writing.

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Historical Cooking Limitations and Caveats

The surviving cookbooks were all written or commissioned by wealthy folks. Some recipes are intended to reflect what commoners would eat, but most recipes focus on the exclusive, the exotic, and the extravagant. As such, meat features very heavily while vegetarian dishes are mostly included for their perceived health benefits, when your typical commoner was unlikely to have meat in their daily diet. Similarly, a number of ingredients like spices would have been out of reach for most people save for special occasions.

The quantities of ingredients like spices or oils are extravagant by today’s standards. Some recipes call for an amount of saffron that terrifies even this “I buy spices as a hobby” tumblr user**. For that matter, since most of these recipes were meant for the house chef, the few cookbooks that give measurements are aimed at feeding a LOT of people. I know people like cookies but the Ibn Sayyār recipe for ka’k calls for 7.5 pounds of flour. For reference, 3 cups is about a pound. That’s… a LOT of ka’k.

Even the most meticulous of writers would gloss over things they would assume were common knowledge. Recipes will often call for ‘vinegar’ without specifying which type. An educated guess would be wine vinegar, or date vinegar to avoid the alcohol, but we don’t know for sure. Even worse, occasionally the writer will just say, “this dish is so common I’m not going to bother telling you how to make it.”

And finally, even with the most accurate of ingredients and cooking vessels, inevitably dishes won’t taste EXACTLY how the originals did. Much is made about terroir in wine, and it’s only amplified when you’re trying to recreate a dish thousands of miles away with plants and animals that have also evolved for over a thousand years.

That said? This food is still amazingly tasty. And there’s something very poignant about knowing cooks from a thousand years ago were reading the same text and making the same recipe you’re making now.

** At last count, I had 85 different types of spices and herbs. I think there’s more now. Help.

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Medieval Islamic Recipes

I will be adding links to the home-tested recipes on the masterpost, but will also add them here for posterity or if you want to track updates from here. Thanks for reading!

Sikbāj: Sweet and sour lamb stew

Tharīd: Chicken stew with bread

Fatīr: Thin flatbread

Mujabbana: Cheese fritters

Byzantine himmas kassā: Sweet hummus

Tabāhaja: Lamb with spiced sauce

Atrāf al-Tīb: Spice mix

Būrāniyya: Fried eggplant and lamb

Maqlūba: Meatballs

Bādhinjān Mahshī: Eggplant appetizer

Murakkaba: Layered date cake

Part 4: Typical Meals << Masterpost Index

MEDIEVAL FANTASY AU!!

Fantasy pixel art.

Old stone bridge, taken in York.

OMG I FOUND THE HOODIE HERE!!

HEY ARTISTS!

Do you design a lot of characters living in not-modern eras and you’re tired of combing through google for the perfect outfit references? Well I got good news for you kiddo, this website has you covered! Originally @modmad made a post about it, but her link stopped working and I managed to fix it, so here’s a new post. Basically, this is a costume rental website for plays and stage shows and what not, they have outfits for several different decades from medieval to the 1980s. LOOK AT THIS SELECTION:

OPEN ANY CATEGORY AND OH LORDY–

There’s a lot of really specific stuff in here, I design a lot of 1930s characters for my ask blog and with more chapters on the way for the game it belongs to I’m gonna be designing more, and this website is going to be an invaluable reference. I hope this can be useful to my other fellow artists as well! :)

Some folks from all corners of the GRRM’s known world! these are some ocs I have for other things that I just kinda turned into asoiaf ocs. So their names are not location-accurate  Either way hope you like them.

We have a  Dornishmen, Samuel, l who’s a craftsman’s apprentice in Planky Town.

Next a Naathi woman, Ida, dressed in naathi spun and woven silks and hand crafts that her people used to trade.

In the WesterLands in Lannisport, Tina, is a woman of the Lannette semi-noble family. though, she’s got more in common with wealthy trader families than her distant kin in house Lannister.

A Summer Islander bowmen, Audrey, who’s noble born but he’s got an older sister (who’s inheriting) so he’s training in the defense forces of his home in Last Lement.

The shadow like mage of Asshai, Mimi, offers protective tattoos for seafarers  going out to dangerous waters, for a price.

Last we a friend mine’s character, Ian, a cross-dressing theatre actor of Leng. He lives in the northern port city of Leng Yi as do most people of Leng who have yiti-ish decent.

2 Hour Challenge This was a challenge I did to see what kind of drawing I could make in 2 hours, this is what I came up with!