The Sultan’s Feast: A Fifteenth-Century Egyptian Cookbook

Winner of Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2021The Arabic culinary tradition burst onto the scene in the middle of the tenth century when al-Warrāq compiled The Book of Dishes, containing over six hundred recipes. It would take another three centuries for cookery books to be produced in Christian Europe. Until then, gastronomic writing remained the sole preserve of the Arab-Muslim world with cooking manuals and recipe books being written from Baghdad, Aleppo and Egypt in the East, to Muslim Spain and North Africa in the West.Nine complete cookery books have survived from this time, containing around four thousand recipes. The Sultan’s Feast by the Egyptian scholar Ibn Mubārak Shāh features more than 330 recipes, from bread-making and savoury stews,...