Illustration of a Seventeenth Century Egyptian Village (17th century)RAWI Publishing
An Ode to Food
Al-Shirbini, the author of this satirical ode to food from the 17th c., was a minor religious scholar, occasional preacher, and one-time weaver. He is an obscure character who lived and worked in Damietta, one of the main cities of the Egyptian Delta, during the second half of the 17th c. He also lived in Cairo for some years where he studied at the school/mosque of al-Azhar. Little is known about him and his main claim on the historical record is the book Brains Confounded By the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded. It was probably written in the 1680s and describes a wide variety of food items, ingredients, and dishes in both the countryside and the city.
Ottoman-era Snobbery
Al-Shirbini divides the population of Egypt as follows: The inhabitants of the cities, especially Cairo, are most genteel and refined, with excellent food. The rural population is divided into inhabitants of the larger villages directly bordering the Nile, who are accorded some respect in terms of lifestyle and taste. The lowest category are the peasants of the hamlets bordering small tributaries and river marshes. Abu Shaduf, the fictional character, belongs to this last group. Al-Shirbini reserves particular ire and contempt for the rural religious functionaries and Sufi dervishes and sheikhs, who are depicted as ignorant, superstitious, and avaricious.
A Kitchen Comparison
Throughout the verses, the author comments on the crudity, dirt, and unhygienic nature of the peasant dishes. He then goes on to contrast them with the more refined urban versions of those foods, providing the reader with a glimpse into the kitchens of the upper classes as well as into those of the rural peasants he despised.
Bisara
Bisar (a dish made of cooked, mashed and seasoned fava beans known today as bisara), as eaten in rural areas, gives the author another opportunity to ridicule the peasant: ‘… then the peasant ends up looking like a swollen water-skin’, he and his wife go to bed on top of the oven, ‘… and the flatulence goes around and around in their bellies and erupts like a hurricane, and this serves as their incense all night long’.
Fava Beans
Al-Shirbini describes the typical pot for cooking fava beans, the pot-bellied fawwala with its narrow mouth that can easily be sealed with a cloth or fibres. He goes on to depict the clean beans, the pure water poured over them, and the pot placed in an overnight oven with water added when necessary. The end product has the colour and consistency of ‘pressed dates’ and is eaten by the city folk dressed with butter, olive oil, or clotted cream, sometimes with the addition of lime juice or vinegar and chopped green leeks. This is similar to the more sumptuous styles of current eating, with the exception of clotted cream, which has seemingly fallen out of fashion. Predictably, al-Shirbini’s peasant cooking of those beans is far inferior in quality and only dressed with onions and linseed oil for the better off (still widely used today).
Kishk
Kishk is a common Middle Eastern dish of grain or flour soaked with fermented milk, buttermilk, or yoghurt, formed into cakes, and dried. Al-Shirbini describes the way the dried kishk is cooked in different places. The people of the villages cook it with rice and fatty meats and sometimes with chicken or other fowl. In Damietta, they cook it with fat mullet. The refined people make it into soup with rice, a garnish of fried greens and butter, and sometimes with mutton. In the poorer hamlets, their inferior kishk is cooked with dried fava beans. Barley bread and onions are added, and the dish is eaten hot in the morning then cold and dry at night. Al-Shirbini laments how unhealthy this is and how it leads to flatulence and worse!
For a more pleasurable eating experience, check out this story on the 'sukurdan' tray.
Images:
17th-c. views of an Egyptian village. M. Jomard, Basse Égypte. Vue d'un village situé sur le Nil près de Damiette, Description de l'Egypte, 1809–1828. ©The New York Public Library
Peasant and City Dweller Illustrations by Mohamed Salah (2019)
Colourization: Maijane Saba
