X. Cookbooks of the Abbasid Era

All this interest in and attention to food and eating inevitably gave rise to the trend of writing cookbooks and manuals, especially when papermaking and stationery became significant businesses in Baghdad around the ninth century. Cookbooks and gastronomic guides and manuals in particular were in great demand at the time. Professionally, training chefs in the culinary arts was done by apprenticeship aided by cookbooks. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d.1111), for instance, in his section on bakers, cooks, and butchers, recommends that they consult Kushajim’s cookbooks if they want to learn the trade (Sirr al-‘Aalamayn).