Medieval Arab Cookery : Papers By Maxine Rodinson & Charles Perry With a Reprint of a Baghdad Cookery

Readers of Claudia Roden's masterworks have long been aware of the continuities in Middle Eastern cookery, others have been tantalized by the influence of Islamic cooking on the medieval West, all will rejoice in this new gathering of papers and documents relating to medieval Arab food and cookery.
The French scholar, Maxime Rodinson's contributions are legendary, yet have only been seen in translation in Petits Propos Culinaires. We include those already published there, together with the text of his longest paper, 'Recherches sur les documents Arabes relatifs a la cuisine', translated by Barbara Yeomans. The American scholar Charles Perry has been entertaining participants at the Oxford Symposium with regular gleanings from his researches into medieval Arab cookery, and several of his papers are gathered here, together with a new study of fish recipes, and other items previously published in PPC. Subjects include grain foods of the early Turks, rotted condiments, cooking pots, and Kitab al-Tibakhah, a 15th-century cookery book.

English study of the subject was first encouraged by Professor Arberry's translation of the 13th-century cookery book Kitab al-Tabikh, published in 1939 in the periodical Islamic Culture. Readers will be pleased to have this more accessible copy, together with an introductory note and revision by Charles Perry.

The book is ornamented by a foreword from Claudia Rosen.

Charles Perry is well known as a translator of Arab cookery
texts. He has travelled to Egypt and Syria to research the manuscripts from
centuries past. Charles Perry was born in California and became a linguist,
studying languages with his collection of dictionaries and grammars from over
200 languages. He studied Near Eastern Languages at Princeton University, and
then worked as a journalist, becoming a food columnist and restaurant reviewer.
He became interested in historical recipes, attending food symposiums including
the Oxford Symposium on Food, and also started translating ancient texts from
the Persian.