Food Resources and their Transformation - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 131

readily discernible among both the early
and the present-day Bedouin. Those Mus-
lims of today who are anxious to bring
their cooking partly into line with Euro-
pean taste condemn the excessive use of
fat meat in their dishes. The taste for
highly-spiced foods and for sweet things
appeared at a more advanced stage of
Muslim civilization; it was simply a con-
tinuation of the tastes of classical antiquity
(against which Sophon and Damoxenos
waged a vain campaign in the 4th century
B.C.), as were some more specific tastes
which have now become disagreeable to
us, such as that of rue ( saāb ), or that of
products which have a very strong smell.
The art of cooking consists in preparing
and combining the basic elements in such
a way as to produce a pleasant flavour.
The combinations take into account the
distinction between the sensory qualities,
mentioned above, which are attributed to
the foods, and the compatability (with a
hierarchy of degrees of compatibility) and
incompatibility of ingredients, whether
used together or eaten following each
other. Europeans have often remarked
on the use in Muslim cooking of combi-
nations in one dish of foods not in accor-
dance with their own taste, for example
that of highly-spiced with sweet and bland
ingredients, without a sauce of interme-
diate flavour to lessen the contrast; there
have even been drawn from this deduc-
tions, not beyond dispute, on collective
psychology. In fact these combinations are
not confined to Muslim cooking; they are
found in European and American cook-
ing, and were used in the past even more
than today. Much use is made of sauces
for combining ingredients, as was done
in the Middle Ages. Present-day Turk-
ish cooking seeks to avoid having in one
dish the taste of meat (roasted or grilled)
and that of cooked vegetables. Vegetables
cooked in oil are often eaten cold in the

Middle East. As among the Romans, meat
in the mediaeval Muslim world was usu-
ally boiled before being baked or roasted,
and for some meat this was a necessity,
either because of tradition or in order to
make it tender.
At the more elegant levels of society
there has developed, following the tradi-
tion of the Ancient World, a custom of
serving at one meal a succession of dishes
of varying flavours. It was introduced
in Cordova in the 3rd/9th century by
the Badādī Ziryāb. This arrangement
seems to have been less generally adopted
in the East than in the West.
It is natural that some preferences and
abstentions which have a national or reli-
gious origin or are the result of an arbi-
trary social tradition should sometimes be
justified also by aesthetic arguments. The
preferring of mutton to beef is perhaps an
example of this.
Aesthetic considerations which have
nothing to do with taste are also impor-
tant. Among them is the visual appeal of
dishes, to which there are many references
in the mediaeval culinary treatises. Great
care is always taken over how a dish is
served, and saffron, for example, is often
used more for its “rich” golden colour
than for its flavour. Also with the aim of
delighting or surprising the beholder there
were evolved an increasing number of the
“disguises” (to use a term from ancient
cookery) which were so popular also in
Europe in the Middle Ages. Hence dishes
with such significant names as muzawwar ( a )
“counterfeit”, manū “artificial”, etc., and
recipes such as those for “mock brain” or
omelette in a bottle, or the dish composed
of 5 animals each inside the other which
was devised for Abu 'l-Ulā, the governor
of Ceuta and brother of the Almohad
caliph Yūsuf I. Nowadays, on the con-
trary, names of this sort are given rather
to economical dishes which are imitations