IX. Gastronomes of the Abbasid Era

Wealth and prosperity brought to the region during the Abbasid era created prosperous, leisured classes who demanded the best money could offer. This naturally included gourmet cuisine. Indulging in luxuriously prepared foods, cooking, reading and writing about food in prose and poetry, and even arranging for cooking contests were commendable pastimes that the ruling dynasties and the affluent enjoyed, sometimes to a fault. For instance, the grandson of Harun al-Rasheed, al-Wathiq (d.847), was known for his weakness for food, especially eggplant. He was known as al-Akoul ‘the glutton’. He used to eat forty cooked eggplants in a single sitting (Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi, Al-‘Iqd al-Fareed). From medieval history books, we learn of the lavish feasts held by the caliphs and the affluent, and of the public feasts they occasionally provided on certain religious and political occasions. On one such memorable public event, one thousand tables were set. On each table were put ten dishes of each of the following: thareed (a famous dish of lamb and bread soaked in rich flavorful broth), grilled meat, and fish. The waiters went around serving drinks of honeyed water (sherbet) and laban (diluted yogurt). Of the caliphs’ menus, it was said they were composed of no less than 300 different dishes per meal. Such flights of extravagance were not always allowed to pass uncriticized. A case in point is the famous platter of delicate and delectable qarees, an aspic dish of fish tongues, 150 of them, which Ibn al-Mahdi offered to his half-brother Harun al-Rasheed, who chided him because he said no dish was worth such outrageous expense. It went down in history as ‘the fish dish that cost one thousand dirhams’ (al-Mas’udi, Murouj alDhahab, p.510). However, despite all the food varieties and luxuries available at the time, the basic dietary ingredients of dates, butter, and bread remained favorites for everybody. One of the Abbasid caliphs was reputed to have said that the beauty of a dinner table was determined by how much bread was put on it.