Food Resources and their Transformation - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 135

effect of lowering the temperature of water
by a few degrees), it was possible, even at
the height of summer to buy snow, which
was one of the most expensive products.
The caliph Mahdī even ordered a supply
of snow to be brought to him at the time
of his pilgrimage. The vendors of snow
( allāūn ), in Badād for example, had
their own storehouses which were filled
with snow often brought from afar. Water
mixed with a small quantity of snow ( mā
mualla ) was such a “rarity” that it was
preferred to lemonade. One of the doc-
tors of law even went so far as to write a
short treatise on the question of whether
it was permitted occasionally to distrib-
ute water mixed with snow to less afflu-
ent people and to the poor. It is thus that
social stratification and its problems are
reflected in the domain of marūbāt .

show a fairly profound knowledge of the
secrets of medicine (or of popular medi-
cine), including for example al-āi in
his epistle concerning drinks; in another
mediaeval literary work, written in collo-
quial or quasi-colloquial Arabic, a drink
made from jujubes is found in the shop
of a popular perfumer-pharmacist There
is a certain continuity with a whole range
of mediaeval drinks, extending into the
contemporary period, where fresh or cold
drinks are still sold in the streets, often by
itinerant traders, such as, e.g., tamarind
drink ( tamr hindī) and liquorice drink ( sūs) ,
which are very popular; and the drink
made from dried grapes ( zebeeb accord-
ing to Lane, zabīb or zbīb in colloquial
speech), allāb (which was known to the
mediaeval world). These recipes are not
always based on dried grapes and the
drink is most often non-alcoholic, but,
even today, some devout Muslims abstain
from consuming this drink made from
dried grapes when it is prepared by non-
Muslims, since it is feared that over-long
soaking of the fruit produces alcohol. Also
worthy of mention here is the boza of the
Ottomans (whence būza in the Egyptian
dialect) but it is necessary to distinguish
this term from boza, būza “ice cream” in
some dialects of colloquial Arabic, which
must rather be derived from Turkish buz
“ice”. This may contain alcohol but soft
varieties of boza/būza are known.

vi. Fruit-flavoured water,
juices and other fresh drinks
Typical examples of the great variety
of drinks based on fruits (or pure juice,
or mixtures of juice with spices and other
ingredients) emerge clearly from topics of
culinary recipes, including, for example:
lemonades and a drink made from ginger;
lemonade, orangeade, drinks flavoured
with sumac; a variety of soft drinks,
sugared and flavoured with fruits, flow-
ers, vegetables, spices etc., e.g. jujubes,
apples, lemons, tamarinds, pomegranates
and violets. A luxury drink was often a
combination of one of these kinds of min-
eral waters with, in addition, fua and a
little snow.
Since certain of these drinks were con-
sidered to be medicines or tonics, some of
them may be encountered in medical lit-
erature, often in a chapter entitled ariba
“drinks” and there even exist independent
medical treatises on this subject, but this
topic is beyond the scope of the present
article. However, some literary works

( J. Sadan)

Wine

The Arabic word khamr , although very
common in early Arabic poetry, is probably
a loan-word from Aramaic. The Hebrew
yayn has in Arabic ( wayn ) the meaning of
black grapes.