Mesopotamian heritage explored through the history of cooking

It was sometime in 1990 when Iraq was going through another wave of political and military turmoil under former president Saddam Hussein that Nawal Nasrallah, at the time a professor of English literature and linguistics, arrived on the East Coast of the United States. 

As Dina Ezzat describes in the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram, having a passion for the quality food that she had long enjoyed wherever she had lived in Iraq, Nasrallah, like many Arab expatriates, connected with her home country while abroad through its traditional recipes. 

With the passing of time, Nasrallah’s cooking evolved from being a way to satisfy her homesickness to an incitement to do research about the history of these delightful meals, however, not just in terms of the evolution of the recipes, but also in terms of documenting the long history of Iraqi cuisine. 

Eventually, she ended up being the translator of several ancient cookbooks, including classics from the 10th, 13th, and 14th centuries that offer a thorough insight into culinary culture, not just in Iraq but also in other countries that were once controlled by the mediaeval Abbasid Dynasty in Baghdad. 

Published in 2003, another crucial moment in the modern history of Iraq, Nasrallah’s Delights from the Garden of Eden introduced Iraqi cuisine in both its past and present guise to a world that may have known more about Saddam’s political and military adventures. 

The title was the culmination of thorough research into the history of mediaeval Arab cuisine that had led Nasrallah to translate a 10th-century classic by Ibn Sayyar Al-Warraq called Kitab Al-Tabikh (Cookbook) that came out in English as Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens. 

There were also her translations of the Best of Delectable Foods and Dishes from Al-Andalus and Al-Maghrib, a cookbook by the 13th-century Andalusian scholar Ibn Razin al-Tujibi, and the 14th-century Kenz Al-Fawaed fi Tanwia Al-Mawaed that came out under the English title of the Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table: A Fourteenth-Century Egyptian Cookbook. 

Nasrallah is keen to establish two facts about her work: first, that writing about the history of food is also a type of literature; and second, that a cookbook in the mediaeval context is not just a set of recipes but also includes nutritional facts, cooking techniques, and eating manners. 

Through her work on the subject, Nasrallah said, it is not difficult to trace the uninterrupted thread of recipes from Mesopotamia, the Iraq of the Middle Ages, to modern Iraq today.