( ar, أبو محمد المظفر بن نصر ابن سيار الوراق) was an Arab author from
Baghdad
Baghdad (; ar, بَغْدَاد , ) is the capital of Iraq and the second-largest city in the Arab world after Cairo. It is located on the Tigris near the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon and the Sassanid Persian capital of Ctesiphon ...
. He was the compiler of a tenth-century
cookbook
A cookbook or cookery book is a kitchen reference containing recipes.
Cookbooks may be general, or may specialize in a particular cuisine or category of food.
Recipes in cookbooks are organized in various ways: by course (appetizer, first cour ...
, the ( ar, links=no, كتاب الطبيخ, ''The Book of Dishes''). This is the earliest known Arabic cookbook. It contains over 600 recipes, divided into 132 chapters.
The is the oldest surviving Arabic cookbook, written by al-Warraq in the 10th century. It is compiled from the recipes of the 8th and 9th century courts of the
Abbasid Caliphate
The Abbasid Caliphate ( or ; ar, الْخِلَافَةُ الْعَبَّاسِيَّة, ') was the third caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It was founded by a dynasty descended from Muhammad's uncle, Abbas ibn Abdul-Muttal ...
in Baghdad. Some scholars speculate that al-Warraq may have prepared the manuscript on behalf of a patron, the
Hamdanid prince
Sayf al-Dawla, who sought to improve the cultural prestige of his own court in Aleppo as the court in Baghdad had started to decline.
Some recipes in the book, like (date-sweetened porridge), come from the relatively simple cuisine of the
Arabian peninsula
The Arabian Peninsula, (; ar, شِبْهُ الْجَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَبِيَّة, , "Arabian Peninsula" or , , "Island of the Arabs") or Arabia, is a peninsula of Western Asia, situated northeast of Africa on the Arabian Plat ...
, but the book also contains recipes for fancy stews with
Persian names. There is also an entire chapter about , hearty stews of
'Nabataean' (Iraqi) origin.
[
Several partial or full translations in European languages are available:
* Nawal Nasrallah, annotated translation
* Lilia Zaouali, selection of two dozen recipes][
* Sabrina Favaro's Italian translation][Sabrina Favaro, ''Il simposio dei sultani: Dal più antico Trattato di cucina arabo-musulmano'', 2015 ]
* David Waines, selection of recipes[David Waines, ''In a Caliph's Kitchen'', 1995 ]
See also
* Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi, author of a 13th-century Arabic cookbook by the same name
References
Further reading
* Kaj Öhrnberg and Sahban Mroueh, eds., ''Kitab al-tabikh'' Studia orientalia 60, Finnish Oriental Society, 1987.
* Charles Perry, "Cooking with the Caliphs", ''Saudi Aramco World'' 57:4 (July/August 2006
full text
10th-century writers
Iraqi writers
Arab cuisine
Writers from Baghdad
Cookbook writers of the medieval Islamic world
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