Ṣalṣ

Ṣalṣ an interesting Arabic culinary term which seems not to have been used since the 13th century, but which, by its use in that period, raises interesting questions about the culinary interchanges which took place between the Crusaders and their Arab adversaries.

Historians who study these interchanges look principally to Muslim Spain where Christians and Moors knew each other over a longer period and more peaceably than in the conflicts brought about by the Crusades. It is also commonly held, and correctly, that culinary influences passed from the Arab world to Europe, rather than in the other direction. However, Maxime Rodinson (1949) drew attention to a recipe in the 13th-century Arabic cookbook The Link to the Beloved for ‘a bread which the Franks and Armenians make, which is called aflāghūn’, and remarked that despite its Armenian name it resembled pain d’épices (see gingerbread). In the same book there is a recipe called ‘Frankish roast’ (al-shiwāʾ al faranji). In this dish lamb is basted with the usual Saracen combination of sesame oil and rosewater, and the Frankishness of it seems to reside in the idea of spitting the animal whole, rather than cut up into small pieces in the Near Eastern fashion.