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Showing posts from December, 2016

Eating Medieval Art: Buran (Meatballs in Eggplant Sauce)

Since election day, writing about medieval food and cooking has seemed a little silly to me.  I've wanted to privately take refuge in the Middle Ages, reading books and writing my lectures about medieval art, but putting medieval stuff out over the interwebs has seemed to be beside the point. But.  Then I got thinking about this recipe, which I made the week before the election, and is a medieval Middle Eastern dish.  According to Pleyn Delit , Middle Eastern or "Saracen" food was the trendy new cuisine in western Europe in the Middle Ages.  That fits a pattern I often talking about in teaching medieval and Islamic material: the medieval perception of the east and specifically of the Islamic world as a source of good things that people wanted for themselves.  In the current political climate, it also strikes a useful contrast against perceptions of the Middle Ages that have begun to concern the broad community of medievalist scholars: specifically the idea that the