Medieval Arab Cookery (2001)

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MEDIEVAL ARAB COOKERY
essays and translations by
Maxime Rodinson
A. J. Arberry &
Charles Perry
With a foreword by Claudia Roden
527 pages, hardcover, $55
Prospect Books, Devon
2001

   I went to the Russian Embassy on 91st Street to get a Russian Visa.  (The line was so long I left--what a country!)  I then headed over to that wonderful bookstore, Kitchen Arts & Letters, next to the 92nd Street Y on Lexington.  This book had just arrived there.
   It is the best book ever published on this topic.  The Arabic etymologies are in easy-to-read English.
   "Couscous and its Cousins" is on pages 235-238.
   "_Buran_: Eleven Hundred Years in the History of a Dish" is another chapter.
   There is the full text of _A Baghdad Cookery Book_.
   All the dishes from a fifteenth-century cookbook are included.
   "Hummus" is on pages 339 and 383.
   "Tahineh" is on 14 pages.
   An "Index of Foreign Words" is on pages 503-515.
   And, yes, the food of _The Arabian Nights_ is described in one chapter.
   There are about a hundred entries that begin with the letter "m."  OED may choose to reject all Arabic sources, but they now know about this book so they have a choice.