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Arabesque: a taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon PDF

304 Pages·2006·5.25 MB·English
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Preview Arabesque: a taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon

ALSO BY CLAUDIA RODEN The New Book of Middle Eastern Food The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York Coffee: A Connoisseur's Companion Mediterranean Cookery The Good Food of Italy—Region by Region Everything Tastes Better Outdoors A Book of Middle Eastern Food For my children, Simon, Nadia, and Anna; my grandchildren, Cesar, Peter, Sarah, Ruby, and Nell; and also for Clive and Ros Contents Introduction Morocco Introduction Starters and Kemia Main Courses Desserts Turkey Introduction Starters and Meze Main Courses Desserts Lebanon Introduction Starters and Mezze Main Courses Desserts Acknowledgments Introduction Three great cuisines—of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon—developed around the Mediterranean where the Occident meets the Orient and where, long ago, medieval jihadis and crusaders clashed. The three are part of the Mediterranean culinary culture that the West has come to love and also share legacies from the Islamic world, with echoes of ancient Persia and medieval Baghdad, Moorish Spain and the Ottoman Empire. The three countries have been centers of empire (Lebanon as part of historic Syria) with imperial capitals where high culinary styles developed. Damascus was the first capital of the Islamic Arab Empire during the Umayyad dynasty from the seventh to the eighth century when the empire spread all the way to Spain. Morocco was the center of the Almoravide and Almohad dynasties that ruled over Spain and North Africa from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. And Istanbul was, for more than 400 years, the glittering capital city of the huge Ottoman Empire. Empires have a way of drawing in culinary riches from distant lands, and court kitchens are places of creativity and refinement. Something of the old grandeur and sophistication of their golden ages has passed down into the kitchens of today. The cuisines, especially Moroccan cooking, are known for their aromatic flavorings, for the subtlety of combinations and the harmonious equilibrium. Since early times, the countries were transit areas on the spice routes between the Far East, Central Africa, the Spice Islands, and Europe. (My ancestors were involved in the camel-caravan trade through Aleppo.) Today, practically every main town has its spice shops in the souk or bazaar and each country has its own characteristic spices and aromatics. If you traveled with your eyes closed, you could know where you were by the taste of the food. Lately there has been a renaissance of interest in the culinary past. Restaurants in Istanbul are re-creating Ottoman cuisine, Fez recently had a festival dedicated to medieval dishes from a thirteenth-century manuscript, and Lebanese gastronomes regularly quote medieval Arab recipes. And at the same time, in each of these countries, the rural regional cuisines have become immensely popular. There have been great social and technological changes that have affected the way people cook and eat. Until not very long ago, most cooked on braziers and Primus stoves and in outside clay ovens, or they sent dishes to the public oven to

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.