Grocery Shopping in Medieval Baghdad

During the flourishing Abbasid period, Baghdad became an international open market for merchandise from all over the world, in addition to its own vast local repertoire. In the Arabian Nights story of ‘The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,’ this economic aspect of the city is well illustrated:

The porter was asked by a lady shopper to take his crate and follow her. She first knocks at the door of a Christian, who sells her strained wine as clear as olive oil. She then goes to the fruit-shop and buys Syrian apples, Osmani (Ottoman) quinces, Omani peaches, cucumbers of the Nile, Egyptian limes, Sultani oranges, and citrons. The same shop offers flowers and aromatic herbs, as well. So she buys some Aleppan jasmine, scented myrtle berries, chamomile, violets, eglantine, narcissus, and pomegranate blooms. She stops at the butcher’s booth and buys 10 pounds/4.5 kg of mutton, and has it wrapped in banana leaves. She also buys some coal. Their next stop is the grocer’s, where the lady buys all kinds of naql (snack foods eaten in drinking sessions), such as salted and cured sparrows (‘usfour malih), bruised and cured olives (zaytoun mukallas), tarragon (tarkhoun), yogurt cream cheese (qanbarees), Syrian cheese, and pickles – sweetened and unsweetened. She also buys shelled pistachios and hazelnuts, roasted chickpeas, Iraqi sugar-cane reeds, malban (chewy starch pudding, the Levantine name for today’s Turkish delight), and Tihami raisins.