Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? (2021)
nawalcooking.blogspot.com
nawalcooking.blogspot.com
…in al-Masʿūdī’s tenth-century Murūj al-Dhahab, a poem by the famous Abbasid poet of Baghdad Ibn al-Rūmī (d. 896) describes how to construct a sandwich, which he calls wasṭ (وسط), in which the stuffing is put between two layers of bread. Here is how he describes it:
You, seeker of delicious food, take a couple of fine breads, round and thick,
The likes of which no one has seen, Slice off the top crusts,
so that you make them thin.
Spread on one, finely minced grilled chicken, delectable and delicate,
which a mere puff would melt.
On this arrange lines of almond intersected with lines of walnut.
Let its dots be cheese and olive, and its vowels mint and tarragon,
Now take boiled eggs, and with their dirhams [egg white]
and dinars [egg yolk] the wasṭ adorn.
Give it a dusting of salt, but not much; just what it needs.
And inspect it with your eyes for a second or two,
for the eyes have a share in it, too.
Look at it appreciatively until your eyes have their fill,
then cover it with the other bread, and eat it with joy.If like me you're wondering about "dots" and "vowels", my best guess is that it's an allusion to arabic script. Some letters have dots above or below them, and short vowels are sometimes represented by a slash or loop above or below the preceding consonant.
So the recipe is using a metaphor to effectively say "sprinkle with cheese".
See e.g. https://arabic.fi/lessons/vowels
The dinar/dirham for egg yolk/white is interesting as well. I think it's another metaphor rather than a direct translation. Those word are both used in the currencies of various countries around the Mediterranean - dinar (yolk) was originally a gold coin whereas dirham (white) was silver.
This is history as written by Europeans*, don't forget.
So the question is: why do we refer to e.g. Newton writing in Latin as an English scientist (and not Christian, or Latin) but anyone who wrote in Arabic is either an Arab or Muslim scientist. Now this may have started due to lack of information (before Europeans came to fully survey "Middle East") but it persists to this day. One can speculate to the possible reasons, of course, but it suffices to point out the pheonomena.
* Ibn Khaldun, the famous Arab historian, for example, did not have this issue (to his lasting credit):
https://sonsofsunnah.com/2011/11/12/ibn-khaldun-on-the-persi...
“Greece” extended from Sicily to Afghanistan to Egypt. Hellenization incorporated a lot of different people. Then Islam incorporated a lot of different people.
Because you'll be bombed or shot or invaded if you try to assert the authenticity of non-Muslim, non-Arab identities being native to the Middle East and North Africa.
Lol tell it to the 20th century, bud. They were fine with not executing a cultural genocide only as long as they could hold it over other groups that "we brought you Islam". Once Islamic empire stops being the unifying political force, all of a sudden you get pan-Arabism: Kurds and Imazighen have their languages banned, Jews are thrown out of the country, etc.
wait so some arab currencies are actually translated as egg white and egg yolks? :o
For example, New York's definition includes a buttered bagel, hot dogs, gyros, and wraps. https://www.tax.ny.gov/pubs_and_bulls/tg_bulletins/st/sandwi...
By that definition, this medieval recipe, which uses thin flatbread, is a sandwich.
The Earl-of-Sandwich style sandwich requires sliced bread. The quote from the 1773 English cookbook even says "thin slices of bread."
The “sandwich” was “invented” by the Earl of Sandwich’s servants.
Erik the Red discovered Greenland (which is in North America) and Leif Erickson “discovered” Vinland and (I think) the American mainland.
You can only discover things which already exist. Otherwise it’s invention. It’s more right to state he accidentally discovered that you could sail west from Europe and hit landfall after crossing the open ocean. He defied almost all expectations.
I think most of the rest of the debate looks to diminish him due to his evils (and the evils that sprung from European colonisation in the modern period) rather than attempting to more accurately describe what he did.
Regardless, a group of intrepid people migrating across the Bering land bridge is a little different in terms of the risks faced by a man blindly sailing west when everyone rightly said he was mad.
He’s the first non-Pacific Islander to belong to the exclusive club of finding a route to land where he went through open ocean.
Leif Erickson did not discover Vinland. It was Bjarni Herjólfsson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarni_Herj%C3%B3lfsson . Leif Eriksson was the first to make landfall.
> He defied almost all expectations.
He followed the tradition that found the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. I think the Norse expectation was you could find new land going west, but it wasn't easy.
> He’s the first non-Pacific Islander to belong to the exclusive club of finding a route to land where he went through open ocean.
I don't see how early Norse trips to the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland don't count.
In any case, Madagascar was discovered before even Iceland.
> In any case, Madagascar was discovered before even Iceland.
The island of Flores is east of Wallace's line. Homo may have been doing this since before we were Homo spaiens. And Australia is east of Lydekker's line.
I guess it's possible they were journeyed to by sight (thus not open ocean).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam%27s_Bridge
How cool is that?
With regards to defying all expectations, Columbus was called mad in his time by everyone and anyone who was doing much ocean going seafearing. He believed that he was going to reach Asia because he erred in his estimation of the Earth's circumference. I think throwing our knowledge of Norse knowledge into the situation is presentism.
I take your points on Norse exploration history.
The fact he came back alive is in many ways an incredible stroke of luck.
> In either case, the first settlement would have occurred during an era of lowered sea levels, when there were more-coextensive land bridges between Asia and Australia. Watercraft must have been used for some passages, however, such as those between Bali and Lombok and between Timor and Greater Australia, because they entail distances greater than 120 miles (200 km). This is the earliest confirmed seafaring in the world.
From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061821...
> For all of hominin history the Australian continent has been separated by at least 70 km of water from other coastlines. Its colonisation about 50,000 years ago can therefore be considered the first true hominin ‘migration’ as opposed to the ‘dispersals’ that happened before it.\
"Wallace's line" is the faunal boundary line between Asia and Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Line
> However, with the rise of sea levels, both were split in two shelves. Consequently, for over 50 million years, deep water between those two large continental shelf areas created a barrier that kept the flora and fauna of Australia separated from those of Asia.
I went and found the link regarding visibility in the timor straight with lowered sea levels.
> These islands were directly visible from high points on the islands of Timor and Roti and as close as 87km.
https://theconversation.com/how-to-get-to-australia-more-tha...
Here's the direct link to the paper. It's from 2017.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02773...
The intuitive idea of inventors and originators is often wrong, and caused by narrow mindedness. Most inventuons are originated many times. I'm sure plenty of people raised a wolf puppy, just like lots of people find and raise wild pets today. Very few of these become a "domestication event."
For cuisine, the implication of "the earl of sandwich invented the sandwich" should be intuitively be a story about culinary fashions. The origin of the term "sandwich." How it became part of upper class cuisine. Why watercress sandwiches at high tea.
If you hear about prior art and react with "I thought England invented sandwiches! Lies!"... If that's the reaction, then your intuition needs refinement.
Every culture with bread will inevitably invent sandwiches. It might happen differently though. Maybe there is no name for it, and it's just what you do with bread and cheese. Maybe specific sandwiches (eg burger) have names... but there is no generic name. In that case, starting a sandwich shop and naming the nameless is "invention."
Most invention is conceptual. The sandwich will usually predate the idea of a sandwich.
And I hardly believe that no one in Europe (let alone the world) ever put a slice of meat in a bread before the 18th.
Those people were the first one to put it in the records that were not lost to the ages, so that's why we remember them.
Also I love how effusive the prose is describing these sandwiches - really reminds me of TV chefs nowadays. “First we’re going to start with the most beautiful fresh nice moist bread, then just - cut the crust off - there, leaving us with just the best parts for our sandwich. Next, smear it with the most delicious just - beautiful - egg yolks - and egg whites - just paint it - gorgeous - “
But the crust is the best part. No wonder I stopped watching TV almost 30 years ago. Nothing but clowns telling you what to think
Like most things, this depends. Crust can be delicious.
I might not be able to eat a very chewy crust if my jaw is hurting that day, though. Some crusts are going to be too hard to eat if I make cheese bread in the oven or a bit tough to chew through if I make a sandwich - and it might not do well in french toast if the middle falls apart in the custard mix before the edges get soft. I tend to throw out the crusts when I make bread crumbs, too.
And this isn't even getting into considerations about the taste. Not all crust tastes delicious (cheap, soft white bread and dinner rolls, for example). If you aren't cooking in a modern oven, your bread might have ash and a bit of dirt on it.
You might disagree with some of this stuff and not do it, but thinking everyone is just "telling you what to think" is a bit of a stretch too.
Bread is and has always been a non-sticky, non-greasy, and dry way of picking up food.
Why would you even bake Bread WITHOUT topping? Just doesn't make much sense, there is only so much gravy you could dunk plain bread in.
Similarly the Pizza-style dishes were continuously re-discovered (if you are baking loafs of bread in a wood-fired oven you need to gauge whether the oven has the right temperature, instead of charcoaling your large loafs of bread, you just use a small, flat piece of dough for that that quickly bakes. Since you don't throw away food, as a baker you'll eat it. And from there, its just a little step to add toppings on top. Cheese in the case of Pizza, Onions / Bacon in the case of Flammkuchen in Alsace, in Swabia similar thing is called dennede, Pide in Turkey, etc.
Talk about an oxymoron since the Middle Ages were actually the Islamic Golden Age.
See also the results of a Google Scholar search at https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Medieval+Arabs
"Religious influences on medieval Arabic philology"
"Mediterranean in the Works of the Early Medieval Arabic Geographers and Historians"
"Glaucoma in the Medieval Arabic World"
"Stars and Numbers: Astronomy and Mathematics in the Medieval Arab and Western Worlds"
EDIT: also Medieval Africa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Africa#Medieval_and... including Medieval Somalia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medieval_Somalia