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Kitab al-Wuslah ila l-habib

Kitab al-Wuslah ila l-habib () is a Syrian cookbook from the 13th century. It contains 635 recipes and was authored or compiled by an anonymous author who, in some cases, is identified as the historian Ibn al-Adim from Aleppo. The book provides a picture of what people ate in the Middle East over 700 years ago and is one of the earliest known examples of cookbooks.

Several hand-written copies of the book were found in the Levant and Iraq, one scroll was attributed to Ibn al-Adim, with another in Mosul attributed to "al-Jazzar".

The book contains a recipe attributed to the authors uncle, Ayyubid Emir Al-Ashraf Musa ibn Adil, which suggests that the author may have been a member of the Ayyubid dynasty.

Contents

The book contained many recipes that are believed to have influenced modern-day dishes:

  • One of the first known recipes for hummus.
  • A recipe for a dish very similar to modern-day Syrian makdous.
  • A recipe resembling modern-day Egyptian hawawshi.
  • A recipe describing minced meat spread on thin dough and baked in a brick oven (furn), which is identified by historian Nawal Nasrallah as possibly the earliest recipe for lahmacun.

The book contained 75 recipes containing chicken, most of which instruct the cook to use sugar, the book contains no recipes that require the use of fresh fish, which is attributed to it being written in a landlocked region.

Editions

In 1986, the University of Aleppo released an Arabic-language edition in print form, which was attributed to Ibn al-Adim.

It was translated into English by Charles Perry in 2017. Perry noted that the recipes shifted from instructions given in second-person narration to descriptions given in third-person, which suggests that the recipes where read out loud to the cooks.

See also

References

External links