Wines in the Koran

Sally Mustoe, ed.
TURKISH COOKERY 200pp.
Saqi £24.99
0 86356 072 5

Najmieh Batmanglij, with Dick Davis and Burke Owens
FROM PERSIA TO NAPA: WINE AT THE PERSIAN TABLE
256pp. Mage Publishers, Washington, DC; distributed by Gazelle Book Services. £43.50
1 933823 00 3

Muhammad ibn al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn al-Karim, the scribe of Baghdad
A BAGHDAD COOKERY BOOK
Translated by Charles Perry
128pp Prospect Books. £10.00
1903018420

Joyce Westrip
FIRE AND SPICE: PARSEE COOKERY
202pp. Serif. £9.99
1 897959 41 9

Cecil Hourani
JORDAN: THE LAND & THE TABLE
144pp. Elliott & Thompson £9.99
1 904027 27 X 
 
“On days when my lord growth listless, what does he need? Rahadlakum.” When, in the 1955 film version of Kismet, Dolores Gray, as Lalume, the wife of the wicked vizier, sings about her power to soothe her frustrated and restless husband by offering him rahadlakum (“His handmaiden hath what he lacketh”), many in the audience must have understood her to be singing in scarcely veiled terms about sex. So it is a bit of a comedown when one realizes that rahahdlakum (or, more correctly, rahat lokum) is merely the Turkish for Turkish delight, for this is the kind of exotic confection that drives her husband “out of his Mesopotamian mind”.

The novelist C. S. Lewis (who went on to pillory Islam in The Horse and His Boy) had already conferred notoriety on Turkish delight, in the first of the Narnia novels, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950): “The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle on to the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very centre and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious. He was quite warm now”. For the promise of a room full of this alien fare, Edmund betrays the Faun, his sisters and his brother to the White Witch who calls herself the Queen of Narnia. Since sweet rationing in Britain was only to be abolished in February 1953, the novel’s first readers must have found the seductions of Turkish delight all the stronger and Edmund’s fall into temptation the more comprehensible. Subsequently the confection gained yet more réclame thanks to a series of television advertisements for Fry’s Turkish Delight in the 1980s. The slow and sensuous awakening of a beautiful, diaphanously clad young woman was followed by the entry of a handsome Bedouin into the tent. A scimitar flashed down, but the lady’s head stayed on her shoulders, as it was the chocolate-coated bar of Turkish delight that was the scimitar’s target. “Full of Eastern Promise” was the slogan of this orientalist cameo.

Turkish Cookery, a collection of recipes and discursive, agreeably miscellaneous essays, edited by Sally Mustoe, not only contains a recipe for Turkish delight taken from one of Gary Rhodes’s cookery books, but also has a very brief history of the sweet, provided by the journalist Victoria Combe. It was invented in 1777 by Bekir Effendi, a man from the Anatolian countryside who made his fortune in Constantinople and who became the Palace’s chief confectioner. Turkish Cookery contains contributions by such well-known names as Nevin Halici, Ainsley Harriott, Nigella Lawson, Anton Mosimann, Claudia Roden, Antony Worrall Thompson and Sami Zubeida. The centrality of the Ottoman palace in the history of Turkish cooking is one of the leading themes to emerge from the book. The palace, whose kitchens were divided into highly specialized departments, employed over a thousand cooks. Baklava first made its appearance in history in the kitchen records of Mehmed II’s palace. The demands made by the palace kitchens were an important part of the background to the production of the magnificent Iznik ware that today have become museum pieces.

Turkish court culture was to a large degree modelled on the Persianate culture of the Timurid courts of Samarkand, Bokhara and Herat. Medieval Turkish and Persian princes made a cult of getting drunk. Ibn Arabshah described Timur (or Tamerlane) shortly before his death roaring drunk and dancing “before he slept away his drunkenness and presently returned to his own vomit”. Ulugh-Beg, a fifteenth-century ruler of Samarkand, celebrated the circumcision of his son with a feast and wine. On being attacked by a pious elder for “destroying the faith of Muhammad and introducing the customs of infidels”, Ulugh-Beg calmly responded that the old man apparently wished to gain martyrdom through rude words, but that his wish was not to be granted. Another prince, when similarly reproached by a Sufi sheikh, replied that he would only abstain from wine-drinking when it became the greatest of his remaining sins. The issue of the Islamic prohibition of wine-drinking and the widespread disregard of this prohibition among Muslims looms large in Najmieh Batmanglij’s From Persia to Napa: Wine at the Persian table, a lavishly illustrated book which presents a history of wine-drinking in pre-Islamic and Islamic Persia, followed by an account of the Darioush winery’s current production of Shiraz and other wines in California’s Napa Valley, while a third section provides a selection of recipes chosen to go with particular wines.

One verse in the Koran appears to approve of wine: “We give you the fruit of the palm and the vine from which you derive intoxicants and wholesome food” (sura 16:69). However, the orthodox Muslim view is that this verse was abrogated by other Koranic verses. But heavy drinking had been an important part of the court culture of Sassanid Persia prior to the Islamic conquest, and the aristocracy went on drinking in Muslim Iran. Kaikakavus, a Persian prince from Gurgan, wrote a guide to aristocratic conduct which contained the following advice: “Wine drinking is a transgression; if you wish to commit a transgression it should at least not be a flavourless one. If you drink wine, let it be the finest – so that even though you may be convicted of sin in the next world, you will at any rate not be branded a fool in this”. There is, moreover, a remarkably rich body of wine poetry in Persian, as well as in Turkish and Arabic literature.

As Batmanglij notes, Muslims who wished to drink alcohol gave a variety of excuses. Wine was being drunk as a medicine. It was alleged that the Koran only forbade over-indulgence in wine. Wine that was diluted or boiled was acceptable. The ban applied only to wine and not to arak, beer, or fermented mare’s milk. Dick Davis, the eminent translator of classic Persian texts, has contributed an excellent chapter on “Wine and Persian Poetry” in From Persia to Napa in which he points out that the heroes of Firdawsi’s great epic, the Shahnama, drank heroically. He also discusses the metaphorical employment of “wine” in Persian Sufi poetry to signify ecstasy. Though many Sufi poems have survived in which this is indeed the case, Davis is rightly doubtful about the automatic translation of wine as some figurative reference to a spiritual experience. “Sometimes, and perhaps usually, a cigar is just a cigar – and wine just wine” according to Davis, paraphrasing Freud. In particular, Davis is sceptical about the wholesale assimilation of the fourteenth-century poetry of Hafiz of Shiraz into the mystical canon: “My own feeling is that he is almost always writing about what he says he is writing about, wine and carnal love, and that his occasional hankerings for a more secure and spiritual world safe from the vicissitudes of earthly life, are just that – occasional hankerings”. Wine and feasting feature prominently in the Arabian Nights, though the most famous of all the stories’ meals, the Barmecide feast in “The Barber’s Tale of His Sixth Brother”, was a decidedly notional one. The barber’s impoverished brother goes to dine with a member of the wealthy Barmecide clan. However, the wine and food offered by his host are invisible and impalpable. As the barber’s brother rises to leave, he strikes his host on the neck, before apologizing and claiming that he is drunk from having imbibed so much excellent wine. The host, in turn apologetic and amused, now provides him with a real meal. Zirbajah was another dish immortalized by literature, as it features in “The Reeve’s Tale” in the Nights. In this story, which is told by the controller of the King of China’s kitchen, a man turns up at a feast, but when presented with a dish of zirbajah, he vehemently refuses to eat it. On being pressed to reveal why, he shows that his thumbs have been cut off. His story is that he was on the verge of marrying a beautiful handmaiden of the caliph Harun al-Rashid. But while waiting to be admitted to the bedroom, he ate some zirbajah and forgot to wash his hands afterwards. When his bride-to-be discovered this, she was so enraged that she had his thumbs cut off.

Although zirbajah is customarily translated as a “stew with cumin seeds”, the thirteenth-century Kitab al-Tabikh (“The Book of Dishes”) by Muhammad Al-Baghdadi gives a recipe for it, which specifies chicken and chickpeas and quite a range of flavourings, including cinnamon, salt, vinegar, sugar, sweet almonds, saffron and rosewater, but not cumin. This text was first translated by the Cambridge academic, A. J. Arberry, in the 1930s. It has now been retranslated and edited by Charles Perry, the food editor of the Los Angeles Times, under the title A Baghdad Cookery Book. The retranslation is decidedly necessary, for Arberry was a prolific and often careless translator of Arabic texts and, though some of his translations, such as his version of the Koran, were excellent, others, such as his selection of stories from the Arabian Nights and his translation of the Kitab al-Tabikh, were very poor indeed. The errors Perry has had to correct are numerous and not all of them are minor.

The recipes are strikingly simple and mostly use a limited range of ingredients. Persian vocabulary features prominently in both the recipes and ingredients of the Baghdad Cookery Book and, for example, the Arabic asfanakh and the English “spinach” derive from the old Persian aspanakh. According to Perry, the book was for centuries the favourite recipe book of the Turks. His version of it provides an excellent guide to antiquarian dining.

Persian Magians, or Zoroastrians, feature as sinister figures in the Arabian Nights. Besides worshipping fire, they practised sorcery and cannibalism in its stories. But there are no recipes for cooking people in Joyce Westrip’s Fire and Spice: Parsi cookery. Parsis are Zoroastrians who left Persia in the seventh and eighth centuries to settle in India, mostly in Gujarat, and introduced Persian cooking to the Indian subcontinent. A second wave of Persian culture and cuisine came with the Mughal conquest of northern India in the sixteenth century. Dhansak, lamb or chicken, cooked in a thick lentil and vegetable puree, served with caramelized brown rice, is by far and away the best-known of Parsi dishes. More generally, meat and fruit dishes and the combination of sweet and sour flavours are characteristic of Parsi recipes. From the eighteenth century onwards, many Parsis found work with the East India Company and later with the Raj, and thus their cuisine absorbed such Western things as Worcester sauce, hard cheese and custards. As Davis observes in From Persia to Napa, Zoroastrians regard eating and the other pleasures of life entirely favourably; and since grief is a product of Ahriman, the evil spirit of the universe, it is religiously beneficial to engage in pleasurable activities like drinking and feasting.

According to Cecil Hourani, “the food of the people is one of the best roads to the discovery of a country’s identity”. The recipes given in his Jordan: The land and the table, a book about food and culture which mingles personal anecdotes with cooking instructions, suggest that that identity is precarious and complex indeed. Some of the recipes are traditional Jordanian Bedouin recipes, such as jameed, a flavouring made from buttermilk (and declared by US customs to be “unfit for human consumption”), or masnaf, a fairly simple dish of lamb cooked in water with onions, yogurt and jameed. Others, such as shipswabasta (chicken, walnuts and dumplings) and miramisa (maize flour, onions, potatoes and butter) are Circassian. These recipes were first developed in the Caucasian highlands. Large numbers of Circassians were settled in Jordan by the Ottoman authorities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Circassian chicken has also become part of Istanbul’s repertoire.) Other recipes were imported by a later wave of immigrants, the Palestinians. Hourani remarks, en passant, that there is only one Palestinian cookery book. I guess that this must be Christiane Dabdoub Nasser’s Classic Palestinian Cookery (2001). Finally, many “Jordanian” dishes are really Lebanese, and Hourani describes Lebanese cookery as the “cucina franca” of the Middle East.

To return to the Bedouin, camel milk is one of their most important sources of nourishment. Camel milk has three times as much vitamin C as cow’s milk and ten times as much iron. But Hourani warns that “when fresh and warm it is said to be highly laxative”. He reports that the underpad of the camel’s foot is reputed to be especially tasty, but he could not find a recipe for cooking camel. Readers frustrated in this respect are urged to consult T. Coraghessan Boyle’s novel Water Music (1982), which provided a time-consuming but essentially simple recipe for baked camel (stuffed), the ingredients for which are as follows: 500 dates, 200 plovers’ eggs, twenty 2lb carp, four bustards, cleaned and plucked, two sheep, one large camel and seasonings. In an interview, the novelist additionally suggested horseradish sauce as the appropriate condiment.

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Robert Irwin's For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their enemies was published last year. He is the Middle East editor of the TLS.