The Sultan's Feast

Book excerpt: The Arabic culinary tradition burst onto the scene in the middle of the tenth century, when al-Warrāq compiled a culinary treatise titled al-Kitab al-Tabikh (The Book of Dishes) containing over 600 recipes. It would take another three and half centuries for cookery books to be produced in the European continent. Until then, gastronomic writing remained the sole preserve of the Arab-Muslim world, with cooking manuals and recipe books being written from Baghdad, Aleppo and Egypt in the East, to Muslim Spain, Morocco and Tunisia in the West. A total of nine complete cookery books have survived from this time, containing nearly three thousand recipes. First published in the fifteenth century, The Sultan's Feast by the Egyptian Ibn Mubārak Shāh features more than 330 recipes, from bread-making and savoury stews, to sweets, pickling and aromatics, as well as tips on a range of topics. This culinary treatise reveals the history of gastronomy in Arab culture. Available in English for the first time, this critical bilingual volume offers a unique insight into the world of medieval Arabic gastronomic writing.