Best of Delectable Foods and Dishes from Al-Andalus and Al-Maghrib (paperback)

This is a translation of a cookbook which presents the cooking of 13th-century Muslim-ruled Andalusia as well as Tunis, where the book’s author relocated with the waning of Muslim power in Spain.

Ibn Razin al-Tujibi was known in his lifetime as a scholar and poet, but only this work of his survives. Two partial manuscripts in Berlin and Madrid were recently joined by the discovery of a third in the British Library which contained all the incomplete sections of the book.

A renowned scholar of Arab culinary culture and history, Nwal Nasrallah has compiled this first complete translation of al-Tujibi’s work by drawing on all three manuscripts. She has supplemented the author’s 475 recipes with a thorough introduction, a glossary, extensive notes, and illustrations from other period sources.

Nasrallah brings scholarly and culinary expertise to this 884-page book, illuminating the author’s character and motivations, explaining her interpretations of the differences between the text of  the three source manuscripts, contrasting al-Tujibi’s recipes with those found in other relevant works of the era, and characterizing the many ingredients according to how they were grown and prepared at the time.

The recipes themselves span beads, soups, and pastries, methods for cooking various animals, including chapters on offal as well as fat turtledoves, starlings, and sparrows; ten chapters on vegetables; three chapters on beans and lentils; seven chapters on confectionary; twelve on pickles and condiments; and even recipes for locust and handwashing compounds.

This is an enlightening perspective on a sophisticated work.

Paperback. Color illustrations throughout.

We have a limited supply of copies of this book which, due to a printing error, reproduce all the illustrations in black-and-white.