Food Resources and their Transformation - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 161

and cheese stand for the fare of simple
folk. Bread continues to be the staple of
the peasants and the urban poor in the
arid and semi-arid interior, while rice is
consumed by everyone in areas where
it is cultivated, especially along the Cas-
pian Sea. Elsewhere, rice is often still a
luxury food, eaten on special occasions
and offered to guests. With rising living
standards, rice has become more com-
mon. Meat, formerly a food reserved
for special occasion, has become much
more standard as well, and traditionally
vegetarian dishes such as ūri are now
often served with meat. Beef has made
inroads, necessitating its importation in
large quantities and at great cost. The
inhabitants of the Caspian provinces, and
especially Gīlān, still enjoy a different diet.
They eat rice, mostly in the form of katih ,
quickly prepared rice with clarified butter,
with every meal, and as recently as the
1970s rice constituted from 45% to 65%
of the daily diet of males in central Gīlān.
They also like beef, and bread used to
be unknown or at least spurned by them
until quite recently.
The growing Western influence in the
second half of the 20th century has led
to the introduction of a number of new
foods, most of them pale renderings of
originally Western food. Often consumed
as tokens of modernity, these include sau-
sages, kalba s—until the Islamic Revolution
prepared with pork—hamburgers and piz-
zas. During the reign of Muammad Riā
āh Pahlavī, Iranians also took to eating
frozen meat imported from Australia and
New Zealand, and processed “Danish”
cheese. The American-style “fastfood”
restaurant, serving sandwiches, pizzas,
hamburgers, and fried chicken, made its
appearance in the late 1960s, followed
by a variety of ethnic restaurants in the
next decade. Soft drinks began to replace
traditional juice beverages in the same
period. The period following the Islamic

Revolution did not fundamentally change
this process. Hamburgers, pizza and hot
dogs are now consumed by people from
all classes in restaurants and pizzerias that
imitate Western models. A new devel-
opment is the appearance of self-styled
“traditional” ( sunnātī ) restaurants and cof-
feehouses where waiters in “authentically
Iranian” dress serve the customers.
Other changes have occurred as well.
Many traditional dishes, time-consuming
to make, are no longer prepared on a
regular basis, and traditional cookbooks, a
few of which are known from the āār
period, were replaced in the 20th century
by modern ones, the use of which remains
unclear in a country where most women
still learn the art of cooking from their
mothers and grandmothers.

(R. Matthee)

4. In Mual India
It is not easy to determine to what extent
the Mual commissariat perpetuated
earlier Indian models: consistent informa-
tion comes only from the times of Akbar
and his successors, and although there are
copious references to banquets from ear-
lier reigns, and some allusions to favourite
articles of food, there is almost nothing
recorded about kitchen organisation.
Under Akbar, the Imperial kitchen,
maba (called in Humāyūn's time bāwarčī-
āna ), including its dependent branches
of ābdār-āna (the court water-supply),
mēwa-āna (supply of fruits both fresh and
dried) and rikāb-āna (pantry, specially
where bread is prepared), was one divi-
sion of the imperial household under the
control of the ān-i Sāmān. The kitchen
itself was controlled by a mīr bakāwal , on
whose staff were several assistant bakāwal s,
a treasurer and his assistants—for the
kitchen estimates and accounts were kept
separately—clerks, marketers, a large reti-
nue of cooks “from all countries”, food-