Food Resources and their Transformation - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 111

were deprived of it. Mainly camel's milk
was drunk, also that of goats and sheep.
It could be drunk diluted with water, but
sour milk ( āzir ) was despised. Milk-prod-
ucts from it were: samn “clarified butter”
which was used for cooking and which
disgusted the Romans of Aelius Gallus
when they found it used instead of oil in
the iāz; ai “sour-milk cheese”; ubn ,
cheese of an unknown sort. Camels were
slaughtered only in cases of great neces-
sity. In general it was rare for meat to
be eaten, but this made it all the more
appreciated. They seem to have eaten
chiefly mutton, sometimes from sheep
kept near the house and specially fattened
for the table ( dāin ), of which the Prophet
preferred the shoulder and the fore-leg.
The Medinans were extremely fond of
the fat from its fat tail ( alya ) and of that
from the camel's hump, which they cut
from the living animal, a practice which
Muammad forbade. Specially prized
parts of the camel were the udder, the
liver, the foetus, etc. but the stomach and
the tail were the food of slaves. It seems
that it was not only in time of famine that
they ate blood drawn from the veins of a
living camel and allowed to coagulate or
put into pieces of gut and cooked. They
ate very little beef or goat meat. Pigs and
fowls seem to have been scarcely known,
although some adī s relate that the
Prophet ate the latter.
The agriculture of the oases provided
mainly dates, another basic food of the
Arabs. In the oases they were almost the
only food. “When the Prophet died, we
were nourished only by the two black
things: dates and water” For the inhabit-
ants of the Fertile Crescent, on the other
hand, the staple foods, even in the desert,
were bread and water. A scarcity of dates
is the equivalent of famine. They liked
to stress their therapeutic qualities and
they formed the stock provisions when

setting off on an expedition. They were
eaten also at festivals, such as the walīma
in honour of the marriage of Muammad
with afiyya. They were eaten dried
( tamr ), fresh ( ruab )—when they were espe-
cially relished (Muammad was particu-
larly fond of them eaten with cucumber,
uā , or when they were beginning to
ripen ( busr ). A special variety called awa
was particularly sought after (especially
those grown in the upper region of Med-
ina) and considered as a sovereign remedy
against poisons and sorcery.
Bread may not have been such an
aristocratic food as has been thought, for
barley bread at least was not uncommon
among the settled populations. All the
same, the Prophet and his family never
ate bread made from wheat flour three
days running during the period between
the Hira and his death. The only one of
his wedding feasts at which Muammad
offered his guests bread was that on the
occasion of his marriage with Zaynab.
The flour was not sifted—Muammad
had never seen a sieve—but simply blown
to separate it from any coarse residue of
husks. Among the nomads, however,
bread was very rare. Strabo, following
Aelius Gallus, speaks of a region of the
iāz where the only cereal is ζειά , per-
haps a sort of soft wheat.
Bread was eaten with a “condiment”
( udm, idām ) which was moreover singularly
meagre. Those who were able to season
their bread with vinegar or oil were not
considered as “living on dry bread” and
Muammad pronounced vinegar the best
of condiments. We also hear of his being
content with a date as flavouring for a
loaf of barley bread. According to a adī
attributed to Alī, the best accompaniment
was meat, the worst salt and the middle
place was given to samn or oil. But it is
possible that some at least of these adī s
were contaminated by later ascetic trends.