I. Jams

Mankind has never been short of ways and means for dealing with surplus produce. From Assyrian cuneiform texts dealing with the medicinal powers of plants, we learn that some fruits like quinces, figs, prunes, and cherries were made into a kind of conserve by keeping them in honey. There was a suggestion, too, for how to serve them. They were to be eaten with butter (Thompson, The Assyrian Herbal).

In the extant Arabic medieval cookbooks, we have enough jam recipes to reassure us that not much is new under the sun in the realm of jam-making, except that while today we enjoy them for sheer delight, our ancestors, ancient and medieval, found them useful as medicine by mixing them with spices and herbs.