Muhammad b.al-Hasan b.Muhammad b.al-Karîm, Charles Perry [1](tr.)
ISBN-10 1-903018-42-0 ISBN-13 978-1-903018-42-2 Published Dec 2005 127 pages; 187×138 mm; paperback; illustrations
Kitâb al Tabîkh, composed by a thirteenth-century scribe we usually call al-Baghdadi, 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 Süleymaniye 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 Kitâb al Tabîkh's original 160 and the expanded edition was retitled Kitâb Wasf al-Atima al-Mutada (my 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 Sirvâni made a Turkish translation of Kitâb al Tabîkh, to which he added some recipes current in his own day, the first Turkish cookery book.
Perry was born in Los Angeles, California in 1941 and attended public schools. From 1959 to 1961, he majored in Middle Eastern studies at Princeton University. In 1961, he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1962 he spent a year at the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies in Shemlan, Lebanon, where he earned the British Foreign Office’s higher standard interpretership certificate. He graduated from Berkeley in 1964.
In his senior year, one of his roommates was the future “LSD millionaire” Owsley Stanley; as a result of their friendship, Perry was present for most of the great events of the San Francisco psychedelic scene of the mid-1960s. In 1968, he started working at Rolling Stone and was the first editorial employee who lasted more than a few weeks. He remained at Rolling Stone as an editor and staff writer until 1976, when he left to write The Haight-Ashbury: A History for Random House.
While working on the book, he moved back to Los Angeles to pursue a new career as a freelance food writer in 1978. His business card read “My pledge: never to use the words ‘eminently,’ ‘delectable’ or ‘morsel’”. In 1980, he spent two months in Egypt, Syria and England collecting medieval Arabic cookery manuscripts and subsequently added more from Turkey and elsewhere. In 1981, he attended the first full Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. In the 1980s he became one of the major contributors to Symposium co-founder Alan Davidson’s Petits Propos Culinaires and to The Oxford Companion to Food. He later served as a trustee of the Symposium from 2004 to 2008.
In 1990, he became a staff writer for the food section of the Los Angeles Times, where he remained until 2008. In 1995, he co-founded the Culinary Historians of Southern California and has served as its president since that time.
Perry’s grandmother was pioneer Hollywood screenwriter and film editor Kate Alaska Corbaley and his younger sister was the volleyball star and Olympic athlete Mary Perry. He lives in the Los Angeles area and continues to contribute scholarly and popular articles about food to such publications as Saudi Aramco World and the Istanbul-based Cornucopia. He has contributed papers to most Oxford Symposiums since 1981 and lectures about food history in the U.S. and Turkey.
Publications
Scents And Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook (Editor and
translator) New York University Press, 2017
A Baghdad Cookery Book Newly Translated, Prospect
Books, 2005; Kitâbu’t-Tabih of Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi Turkish
translation by Nazlı Piskin, published by Kitap yayınevi, Istanbul, 2009.
“Middle Eastern Food History,” in Food in Time and
Place: The American Historical Association Companion to Food History
(University of California, Berkeley, 2014).
The Haight-Ashbury: A History, Straight Arrow/Random
House, 1984, reissued 2005 by WennerBooks
Totally Hot! The Complete Hot Pepper Cookbook,
Doubleday, 1985 (co-author)
Spuds, Truffles and Wild Gnocchi: The Patina
Cookbook, Collins, 1995 (co-author with Joachim Splichal)
Medieval Arab Cookery, essays and translations by
A.J. Arberry, Maxime Rodinson and Charles Perry. (Prospect Books, Totnes; 2000)
Scents and Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook, an edition and translation of the 13th-century Kitāb al-Wuṣlah ilā l-Ḥabīb. (New York University Press, New York/Abu Dhabi, 2017)
[2] Muḥammad bin al-Ḥasan bin Muḥammad bin al-Karīm al-Baghdadi, usually called al-Baghdadi (d. 1239 AD), was the compiler of an early Arabic cookbook of the Abbasid period, كتابالطبيخ Kitab al-Ṭabīḫ (The Book of Dishes), written in 1226.
The original book contained 160 recipes, and 260 recipes were later added.
Manuscripts and Turkish translations
The only original
manuscript of Al-Baghdadi's book survives at Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul,
Turkey, and according to Charles Perry, "for centuries, it had been the
favorite cook-book of the Turks". Further recipes had been added to the
original by Turkish compilers at an unknown date and retitled as
Kitâbü’l-Vasfi’l-Et‘ime el-Mu‘tâde, with two of its known three copies found at
the Topkapı Palace Library. At the request of Sultan Murad II, Muhammad ibn
Mahmud al-Shirwani, his physician, prepared a translation in Eski Osmanli
Türkçesi of the book, adding around 87 contemporary recipes.