The Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook

Book excerpt: The Book of Cooking in Maghreb and Andalus in the era of Almohads, by an unknown author. The English text of the book is a translation by Charles Perry, working from the original Arabic, a printed copy of the Arabic and its translation into Spanish, and assisted by an English translation by various persons translating collaboratively the text from Spanish to English. I have altered the English translation by: - editing the translated text, - reorganizing the recipes logically into cookbook chapters, - adding extra text and explanatory text in brackets, - repeating some recipes in more than one section for ease of use - incorporating many of the translator(s) and editor(s) notes into the text, and - adding a complete Table of Contents and Appendices. I have made this document into a free-to-download PDF. The free Adobe PDF Reader allows for simple movement between recipes and chapters using a hyperlinked table of contents and bookmarks, and to search easily by any word, any ingredient. You can also easily print out the book or sections of the book. And you can purchase a print-on-demand paperback book at cost plus shipping via Amazon.com's CreateSpace online company. This book's original title was: Kitab al tabij fi-l-Maghrib wa-l-Andalus fi `asr al-Muwahhidin, li-mu'allif mayhul (or majhul). It means: The Book of Cooking in Maghreb and Andalus in the era of Almohads, by an unknown author. It is commonly known in English today as: The Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook. The book was complied by a scribe in the 1400s, whose name appeared on the first page of the text, but the first page has not survived the ages. His work contains recipes copied from a number of older works in the 1200s, some surviving and some not surviving independently to today. The major part of the English translation is by Charles Perry, a scholar, food historian, and writer of a food column for the L.A. Times. Additional notes are by various other writers, including myself.