Food Resources and their Transformation - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 193

Apple

the skins. The leaves, blossoms and twigs
are astringent, the unripe fruit more so
than the ripe ones. The juice squeezed
from the leaves is useful against poisons,
while the blossoms strengthen the brains
“in a miraculous way”.

Tuffā (A.) is the apple, Pyrus malus, Rosa-
ceae . It descends from the asiatic Pyrus spe-
cies and has spread in numerous varieties
and cultivated forms, which have their
centre of frequency in the Caucasus and
in Turkestan. Most authors name the Syr-
ian apples as the best ones, e.g. aālibī:
“To Syria's particularities belong the
apples. They are proverbial because of
their beauty and scent. Every year 3,000
crates of these apples are delivered to the
caliphs. It is said that those of Irā have a
stronger scent than those of Syria”.
The next-best varieties, according to
the geographers, were al-tuffā al-ifahānī,
al-ūfānī (from Bayt ūfā near Damascus,
and thus a variety of the Syrian apple),
then al-malaī, al-miskī, al-dāmānī (from
Dāmān in Mesopotamia). The last-men-
tioned variety is also praised by Yāūt:
it is said to be proverbial because of its
redness. Because of their long storage life,
these apples could be transported over
long distances. The fact that they were
given as valuable presents in Badād is
also an indication of their great value. It
is said that, at Iar, apples were grown
whose one half had a sweet taste, the
other a sour one.
In Egypt, on the other hand, the indig-
enous apples were said to be small and
bad, and to have been but little cultivated.
In former days, it must have been as it
is now: the Egyptian apples ripen early
and quickly and therefore are not tasty.
It seems, however, that the cultivation of
apples in Egypt was quite important in
the early Islamic period. In the fundu Dār
al-Tuffā of the fruit market in Cairo, the
imported apples were stored, auctioned
and resold.
In pharmacology, it was mainly the
skin that was used. The carrier of the
scent of ripe apples is the ethereal oil in

(A. Dietrich)

Orange

Nāran is an Arabised substantive bor-
rowed from the Persian narang (derived
from the Sanskrit, with the meaning of
“red”) and designating in a collective man-
ner, in parallel with laymūn , hesperideous
or aurantiaceous fruits, including oranges
and lemons (modern Arabic amiyyāt ).
The term nāran has passed, at a relatively
late stage, along with the introduction of
these fruits, into the majority of European
languages, sometimes with alterations (loss
of the initial n ). Thus, at the beginning of
the 14th century A.D., French adopted
the expression “la pomme d'orenge”,
while Spanish preserved the Arabic form
with naranja . Arabic dialects have also
retained nāran, but under the forms
naren, naner in Syria, Lebanon and Pal-
estine and laren, lāren in Morocco. It
is surprising that Ibn Manūr (7th/13th
century) made no mention of the term
nāran in his copious Lisān al-Arab. Fur-
thermore, it should be noted that in some
Arabic-speaking countries, nāran is not
the prevalent term for the designation of
hesperideous fruits; the names in usage
are those which refer to their far eastern
origin; thus in the Marib the expres-
sion letīna (“from China”, cf. German
Apfelsine ) may be heard. It is believed that
Arab caravan-traders would have been
responsible for introducing the orange to
the Near East and the Marib, while the
Portuguese would have brought it from