Description

This is a translation of the Kitab al Tabikh, composed by a thirteenth-century scribe we usually call al-Baghdadi. It was long the only medieval Arabic cookery book known to the English-speaking world, thanks to A.J.Arberry's path-breaking 1939 translation as 'A Baghdad Cookery Book' (reissued by Prospect Books in 2001 in Medieval Arab Cookery). For centuries, it had been the favourite Arabic cookery book of the Turks. The original manuscript, formerly held in the library of the Aya Sofya Mosque, is still in Istanbul; it is now MS Ayasofya 3710 in the Suleymaniye Library. At some point a Turkish sultan commissioned very a handsome copy, now MS Oriental 5099 in the British Library in London. At a still later time, a total of about 260 recipes were added to Kitab al Tabikh's original 160 and the expanded edition was retitled Kitab Wasf al-Atima al-Mutada (Charles Perry's translation of it also appears in Medieval Arab Cookery); three currently known copies of K.Wasf survive, all in Turkey - two of them in the library of the Topkapi Palace, showing the Turks' high regard for this book. Finally, in the late fifteenth century Sirvani made a Turkish translation of Kitab al Tabikh, to which he added some recipes current in his own day, making this the first Turkish-language cookery book.