Book Review of the Month
Chez é-sham...e-Zine® [Vol:6~Sept:04]
"For People Who Make Mistakes and Willing To Learn" ...
A la table du Grand Turc
Stéphane Yerasimos, illustrations by Belkis Taskeser
For five centuries, the secrets of the imperial cuisine of Ottoman Turkey escaped the curiosity of scholars. The reason ? They were hidden away un a neglected fifteenth-century manuscript whose real value had been underestimated. Careful reading of the document - wrongly believed to be a mere translation of the celebrated thirteenth-century Arab cookery manual Kitâb al-Tabkh by al-Baghdadi - brought to light as many as 82 recipes. The first part of the manuscript dœs in fact consist of a translation from Arabic to Turkish of the recipes of al-Baghdadi, but the ones from no. 74 onward are the personal contribution of the translator turned author, Mehmed bin Mahmoud of Azerbaijan. This part of the document thus bridges gaps in documents on the cooking of the Ottoman empire in its period of greatest splendor. The royal palace administrators would take note of all the ingredients that used in the dishes prepared in their kitchens, but failed to provide information cooking about procedures and methods. Furthermore, the first books of Ottoman recipes date from the late eighteenth century when tastes and eating habits were beginning to change following to the introduction of produce from the Americas -tomatoes, peppers, beans - and opening out to western gastronomic fashions.
A la table du Grand Turc
Stéphane Yerasimos, a historian, and Belkis Taskeser, a painter, put on their cook’s aprons to test 40 of the recipes from the manuscript: apples filled with meat and rice on a bed of raisins; egg pasta squares; mutton with prunes, honey, almonds, dried apricots, apples and pomegranate syrup; mutton with spinach, cumin seeds, coriander, mastic, pepper and cinnamon; leg of lamb with dates, almonds, red apples, saffron and rose water. But before actually getting down to work in the kitchen, the two had to polish off an enormous amount of archive research. First, it was necessary to verify the authenticity of the ‘Turkish’ recipes added at the end of the translation, comparing the names of the dishes and the ingredients cited with those mentioned in the accounting records of the kitchens of the Topkapi Palace, in which all the food purchased and consumed was recorded on a daily basis. Through these administrative documents and comparisons with recipes from the fifteenth and later centuries, Yerasimos was thus able to follow the evolution of tastes and eating habits of the sultans. He discovered, for example, that the flesh of the gazelle, the horse, the wild donkey-and the hare was progressively eliminated from menus, and that the choice of meat was reduced almost exclusively to mutton and chicken.
The book - which consists of an introduction about the history of Ottoman food and a selection of easy-to-reproduce recipes - is a treasure trove of curiosities. In Belkis Taskeser’s illustrations, redolent of Persian miniature painting and Balkan painting on glass, each image evokes a moment of quiet and ‘Oriental languor’.
Stéphane Yerasimos, a lecturer at the Paris-VIII University and author of numerous books on Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.
