Historical Islamic Cooking: Andalusian and Baghdadi Recipes

When studying history, we often look for literature, archeology, events, and the like. Seldom do we consider food and recipes to be a topic of history.

However, there are several sites that have recipes from olden days. Some of them have a nice collection of recipes from Islamic countries, most notably Iraq and Andalusia.

These recipes go back all the way to the 10th century, when Baghdad was the seat of the Islamic Caliphate, in the Golden Age of Islam in the East. The Andalusian recipes go further into the 15th century, just before the fall of Granada.

The recipes themselves can be found here, by David Friedman, and they contain many interesting recipes:

• Islamic recipes with vegetables.
• Islamic recipes without much vegetables.
• Selected recipes from the above two sources.
• Some more recipes such as a Fish recipe, Moorish Chicken, (Portuguese), desserts, such as Khushkananaj, Murakkaba/Kutamiyya, Barad, Sukkariyya, Makshufa , and various drinks.
• Some more recipes of al-Andalus.

There is also the following:

• Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook, as published by Charles Perry, on David Friedman's web site. It is one of the sources for Greg Lindahl's aforementioned site(s).

David Friedman mentions the following sources for his recipes

• Al-Baghdadi, A Baghdad Cookery Book (1226 A.D./623 A.H.), A.J. Arberry, tr., Islamic Culture 1939.
• Kitab al Tibakhah كتاب الطباخة: A Fifteenth-Century Cookbook,*Charles Perry, tr. The translation was published in Petits Propos Culinaires #21(note 1). The original author is Ibn al-Mabrad or Ibn al-Mubarrad.
• Kitab al-Tabikh wa-islah al-Aghdiyah al-Ma'kulat كتاب الطبيخ و إصلاح الأغذية و المأكولاتby Abu Muhammad al-Muzaffar ibn Nasr ibn Sayyar al-Warraq. This is a tenth century collection of cookbooks; the Arabic original has been published in Studia Orientalia vol. 60, ed. Kaj Ohrnberg and Sahban Mroueh. Charles Perry has translated a few recipes from it, only one of which has been published (the Badinjan Muhassa, in Symposium Fare, recipes from the 1981 Oxford Symposium).
• La Cocina Arabigoandaluza, translated from Arabic into Spanish by Fernando de la Granja Santamaria and from Spanish into English by Melody Asplund-Faith. This consists of selections from a much longer Arabic original. It is referred to as "al-Andalusi."
• An Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook of the Thirteenth Century, a translation by Charles Perry of the Arabic edition of Ambrosio Huici Miranda with the assistance of an English translation by Elise Fleming, Stephen Bloch, Habib ibn al-Andalusi and Janet Hinson of the Spanish translation by Ambrosio Huici Miranda, published in full in the 5th edition of volume II of the cookbook collection. Referred to as "Andalusian." The entire Andalusian Cookbook can be found on David Friedman's web site.

Edit: fixed attribution from Greg Lindhal to David Friedman, as per comment below.