A Baghdad Cookery Book
By (author) Muhammad bin al-Hasan al-Baghdadi Translated by Charles Perry
Paperback (Published)
(December 2005)
ISBN: 9781903018422
5.47 x 7.36 inches
Price: $20.00
In stock
This is a translation of the Kitab al Tabikh, composed by a thirteenth-century scribe we usually call al-Baghdadi. It was long the only medieval Arabic cookery book known to the English-speaking world, thanks to A.J.Arberry’s path-breaking 1939 translation as ‘A Baghdad Cookery Book’ (reissued by Prospect Books in 2001 in Medieval Arab Cookery). For centuries, it had been the favourite Arabic cookery book of the Turks. The original manuscript, formerly held in the library of the Aya Sofya Mosque, is still in Istanbul; it is now MS Ayasofya 3710 in the Suleymaniye Library. At some point a Turkish sultan commissioned very a handsome copy, now MS Oriental 5099 in the British Library in London. At a still later time, a total of about 260 recipes were added to Kitab al Tabikh’s original 160 and the expanded edition was retitled Kitab Wasf al-Atima al-Mutada (Charles Perry’s translation of it also appears in Medieval Arab Cookery); three currently known copies of K.Wasf survive, all in Turkey – two of them in the library of the Topkapi Palace, showing the Turks’ high regard for this book. Finally, in the late fifteenth century Sirvani made a Turkish translation of Kitab al Tabikh, to which he added some recipes current in his own day, making this the first Turkish-language cookery book.
Muḥammad bin al-Ḥasan bin Muḥammad bin al-Karīm al-Baghdādī lived in the Abbasid period and died in 1239. It was highly influential but little is known of the author himself but his work is a fine reflection of the opulence of Abbasid-era Baghdad.
The Translator, Charles Perry, is a food historian specializing in medieval Arabic food writing, In 1960/1970s he worked for Rolling Stone covering the heyday of West Coast hippie culture. This led to a book on that scene entitled The Haight-Ashbury: A History. Subequently he worked for the LA Times on their food column and in 1995 co-founded the Culinary Historians of Southern California and has served as President since then. He is also the editor and/or translator of, among others, Scents And Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook (Editor and translator) New York University Press, 2017 and Medieval Arab Cookery, essays and translations by A.J. Arberry, Maxime Rodinson and Charles Perry. (Prospect Books, Totnes; 2000)
- By (author) Muhammad bin al-Hasan al-Baghdadi
- Translated by Charles Perry
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