Anwāʿ al-ṣaydala fī alwān al-aṭʿima is a diamond that has been in the rough for too long. The edited Arabic text, first published in 1961–1962, was based on a single title-less manuscript that suffered from damage and misplaced folios. This inevitably resulted in numerous misreadings and structural chaos, and the haphazard arrangement of the recipes, some of which did not make culinary sense, has been criticized ever since. There have been some sad attempts to rectify the text by dissecting it and bending it to fit some familiar conventional rules. The book did not fare significantly better even when a new manuscript was discovered and published in 2003, that was in good condition, came with its own title, Anwāʿ al-ṣaydala fī alwān al-aṭʿima, and had its folios bound correctly. This was due to the fact that this new edition still, and frustratingly so, largely followed the 1961–1962 edition, with most of its misreadings and even its misplaced folios ‘preserved.’
In this new translation, Anwāʿ al-ṣaydala is in the rough no more. I relied on the two manuscripts available to us, and the structural sequence it follows is based on a solid scheme that is carefully considered. I can hereby state with reasonable confidence that this new translation and the text it represents—for the first time in any language—is the closest to the original that the author/compiler intended.
The translation is principally based on the second discovered manuscript, which as I mentioned is in good condition and does not suffer from misplaced folios. The few textual shifts I made were strictly based on internal evidence, resulting in a comprehensive and meaningful text that preserves the integrity of the original as much as possible and does not re-construct it as we think it should have been. Shedding light on what has caused the considerable confusion about its structure will indeed enable us to better appreciate the wonderful culinary repertoire it represents.
My choice of the term smorgasbords for the title reflects the segments into which I chose to arrange the book’s material, each of which resembles a buffet spread or a feast or meals, with some recurrent dishes offering other varieties of similar categories, as our author/compiler found them in the culinary sources available to him. In the translated text, I refer to these smorgasbords as parts and sections.
With a remarkable collection of more than 460 recipes, this thirteenth-century cookbook has survived from when al-Andalus was still under Muslim rule and represents the culinary landscape of the western region—a tangible testimony to its richness and sophistication. Furthermore, its diversity reflects a pluralistic society of ethnic and religious communities that found in food a viable common ground for a vibrant collective culture. Unique among its contemporaries, it also displays an openness to various culinary practices and eating habits in the other parts of the Muslim world. The manner in which the author/compiler embraces them shows respect and acceptance of others, as he chose to describe rather than judge them. In addition to the recipes, anecdotes and allusions to the rich and famous are interspersed throughout and enliven the world of Anwāʿ al-ṣaydala.
With its relaxed tempo the book further reflects, with extraordinary inclusivity, a diverse society of people from different walks of life. It is only in this cookbook, for instance, that no less than six Andalusi Jewish dishes are provided, in addition to Christian ones and typical Maghribi dishes, let alone those catering to its readers’ health and well-being, which indeed justifies the title chosen for the book, Anwāʿ al-ṣaydala fī alwān al-aṭʿima (The Salutary Benefits of Arrays of Dishes). It is also the only cookbook that survived from the medieval Arab Muslim era that preserved recipes for dishes cooked with wine, four in all, not as a mere flavoring agent but the main liquid for cooking the dish. This might sound unusual in a cookbook written during the rule of the Muslim Almohads, who were known for their religious strictness. Be that as it may, the presence of such recipes does point to the possibility that the social sphere in which the book orbited seemed to have represented a culinary culture that allowed it to impact the foods and culinary practices of its time.
Besides the inclusion of elitist dishes and those allegedly prepared by gastronomes like Ibrāhīm b. al-Mahdī, the half-brother of Abbasid Caliph Harūn al-Rashīd, we have an insider’s look into the cookshops where master chefs prepared popular market-foods like sausages—interestingly reminiscent of today’s coveted restaurateurs’ recipes. A glimpse into the house kitchens further shows how an oven-baked casserole was prepared for the domestic servants. While it was not a lavish dish, being principally made with organ meat, it must have tasted truly appetizing given the way it is described in the recipe. On top of this, where else would we find a recipe for making edible bracelets to keep the household’s children busily entertained? There is indeed something for everyone in this book.
It is not only the diversity of the recipes that sets this book apart from its peers but also the richness of the regional vocabulary it displays, which is often unique to it, and the material culture it represents. In some cases I had to rely on my own devices to render the vocabulary so as to suitably reflect the original text. It is thus that we come across items like bayḍa, which literally is an egg but in the context was meant to be a ‘steel egg,’ the steelyard weight; or mirʾāt Hindiyya, literally Indian mirror, which was not a mirror at all but a kind of nonstick steel pan with a polished surface; or the flared glazed pottery vessel farṭūn, whose etymology is nowhere explained, but my guess was that it was an Andalusi Romance term (ʿAjamiyya), ultimately related to the Latin patera, a flared glazed pottery vessel. It is only in this cookbook that a duck variety called nāshiq is used, which according to my etymological investigation is the mallard. Also unique to it is the inclusion of zebrabāda (recipes 279–80), which I translated as a “rustic hasty dish,” based on lexical clues in a Moroccan dictionary.
Or take an expression like ka-tashbīk al-tuffāḥ (
Anwāʿ al-ṣaydala is equally unique for some of the culinary practices and ingredients used for making the dishes. When preparing birds known for their tough meat, the recipes emphasize the practice of leaving them hanging overnight, with their feathers on, after slaughtering them. Also, among its peers it is the only cookbook to include the male organs of sheep and young goats in no less than four recipes. It further offers a wonderful variety of savory double-crusted pies, said to be suitable as travelers’ provisions, with crusts and fillings that could be enjoyed. One of them is shaped like the whole fish inside it, while another uses turtle meat. The rest of Europe had to wait until the fourteenth century to have its first documented pie recipe, and the crusts, called coffyns, were not even edible yet.
And as I did with my previous three volumes of translated medieval Arabic cookbooks, I supplemented the translated text with an extensive introduction and a thorough glossary to acquaint the reader with the world of Anwāʿ al-ṣaydala. It is further adorned and enlivened with a generous number of illustrations depicting medieval ways of life, ingredients, artifacts, and more. It is hoped that the modernized recipes appended to the book will encourage further experimentations with this superb cookbook.