A gallery talk at a BM Open Evening on the general theme of 'Feasts and Festivals'.
Food and drink are life essentials and abundance symbolises wealth and generosity. Under royal or imperial patronage, eating and drinking are elevated to the higher arts, creating a distinction between high and low cuisine. Ferdowsi's 'Shah-Nameh' lists wine drinking, feasting and hunting among royal pursuits of Ardashir (Levy ed., XXII,255), and pleasure is defined as "wine, music and players" (XXII, 256). The celebrated medieval "Baghdad Cookery Book" cites eating as the highest of the six pleasures, the others being drinking, clothes, sex, scent and sound.
Popular European concepts of Middle Eastern cookery are based on street food (eg kebabs and chicken) or exotic sweetmeats (eg Turkish Delight or baklava) but Oriental cuisine is far richer and deeply varied, anf had dramatic effects on medieval European dishes with the introduction of rosewater, orange blossom essence, tamarind and other spices, mince pies, Christmas pudding, marzipan, rice pudding, brown sauces and mint sauce!
This talk looked at the types of evidence for reconstructing ancient food and drink at different periods in Iran. Excavated environmental evidence offer the raw ingredients. Food processing equipment shows how it was prepared. Ovens and other fire installations suggest how bread was baked but they also were used in stewing, steaming and grilling judging by medieval accounts. Pottery is sadly rarely informative in detail although organic residue analyses might throw some light in some cases. However, almost all pottery vessels were intended to hold or serve food or drink, and some were specialised such as churns, colanders, pilgrim flasks and rhyta. Relevant written sources from Iran date from the Achaemenid period onwards, especially contemporary Greek accounts of life at the Persian Court or ration lists from Persepolis. Middle Persian ostraca, the later 'Shah Nameh' and early Islamic cookery books offer rich evidence, and the preponderance of dishes with Persian names in the Baghdad Cookery Book is instructive. Sadly much more is lost and the Baghdadi author al-Nadim mentions as many as eleven 8th-10th century "Books Composed about Cooked Food", none of which survive. Finally, representations - whether on Persepolis reliefs or Sasanian silverwares - show how vessels were carried or sometimes used.
Writing about the Persians, Herodotus stated that their "main dishes are few, but they have many sorts of dessert, the various courses being served separately. It is this custom that has made them say that the Greeks leave the table hungry, because we never have anything worth mentioning after the first course: they think that if we did, we should go on eating".
Recipes attributed to the Sasanian period include the "Dish for the King" (hot and cold meats, rice jelly, stuffed vine leaves, marinated chicken, sweet date puree); a "Khurasan Dish" (spit-grilled meat with meat fried in butter with a sauce); a "Greek Dish" (eggs, honey, milk, butter, rice and sugar, i.e. a type of rice pudding) and a "Dehkan's Dish" (slices of salted mutton with pomegranate juice, served with eggs). Young kid, beef served with spinach and vinegar, spit-grilled hens fed on chenevis (the lower part of the chicken's back, known today as the mother-in-law's morsel, was a delicacy), almond pastries, quince jam and dates stuffed with almonds and wanuts were also popular.
European Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies , 2017
Each society has a unique cuisine and taste which has been developed over time. Furthermore, each region and climate offer different options, health and life perception varies in each society. In the Arabian Peninsula where The Prophet Muhammad lived, cuisine was shaped according to the region, climate and life perception according to conditions of the era. Indeed, The Prophet Muhammad was a human being lived in Arabian region. He was in close relation with his own society's cuisine in terms of personal taste before he conveyed the Islamic religion. Islam as a religion has contributed to daily life of people in terms of different point of views beside perception about world blessings. In this text, variety of foods consumed in Arabian Peninsula, distribution of these according to types and variety of dishes, pots and pans that were used during The Prophet Muhammad era was mentioned. This study aimed to enlighten whether religion has an influence on cuisine and Islamic religion suggests a life devoid of food and drink. 1
Mention Persia (modern-day Iran) in everyday conversation, and you will likely evoke immediate images of Persia’s rich cultural heritage—ornate woven carpets or the elegant poetry of Rumi, for example. However, Iran also deserves to be known and celebrated for its rich and varied traditional cuisine. In the past, traditionally prepared items that featured raw milk and bone broth were commonplace in the animal-fat-rich Iranian diet. These included Lighvan, a semihard cheese made from raw sheep’s milk (or a combination of raw sheep’s and goat’s milk), and Ab-goosht, a peasant stew that translates literally as “meat water” because it relies on the core ingredients of lamb shanks and neck bones to create a broth abundant in minerals, gelatin and collagen. Nowadays, unfortunately, the Iranian diet is much more likely to highlight cheap (in the short term) food industry standards such as vegetable oils, margarine, soy and sodas. Iran also has succumbed to Western fears about animal fats. As a result of this ongoing “nutrition transition,” diet-related chronic diseases are on the rise and are a leading cause of mortality.1
This article examines patterns of food consumption in early modern Iran from a historical perspective and in a global context. The discussion focuses on the period of the Safavid and the Qajar dynasties, or the early sixteenth to early twentieth centuries. The article first considers Iran's cultural linkage to the world between the seventh-century Arab invasion and the advent of modern communications in relatively recent times. It then looks at the origins and movement of food in Iran before analyzing the diet of Iranians, especially fresh fruit and vegetables. It also explores regional variations in food consumption patterns in Iran and concludes with an overview of the changes that have occurred in food consumption patterns in the country since the 1960s.