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Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? (2021)
- mock-possum 3y agoI wanna see Max feature this on Tasting History. 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 - “
- beebeepka 3y ago"cut the crust off - there, leaving us with just the best parts for our sandwich" 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
- Broken_Hippo 3y agoBut the crust is the best part. 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.
- mock-possum 3y agoWell as someone with 0 experience on the subject in the last three decades I’m sure you know best
- arketyp 3y agoI remember hearing some story about the pizza originally being just an edible vehicle for food into the mouth because there wasn't any notion of eating from a personal plate with fork and knife. Bread is served to be used as a scoop even in fine dining today. The sandwich is the default!
- reillyse 3y agoYes. It is literally all nonsense. As soon as people invented bread they started eating it with things. All of those things were sandwiches.
- wirrbel 3y agoSo much this! Smørrebrød, Butterbrot/Wurstbrod 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.
- crooked-v 3y agoFor a long time, the standard "plate" in Europe, for anyone fancy enough to need one, was just a large slab of very stale bread left over from a previous meal [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trencher_(tableware) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trencher_(tableware)
- eesmith 3y ago"Sandwich" is not a well-defined word. Is a hot dog a sandwich? Yes, according to some. No, according to others. 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/sandwiches.htm 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."
- samrus 3y agoGiven the whole misconceptions a about "the earl of sandwich INVENTED the sandwich" and "Columbus DISCOVERED the new world" when other people already knew about those things, I think we should add "... For Europe" to the end of this stuff.
- Affric 3y agoIt’s interesting the great man version of history and its hold on our consciousness. 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.
- eesmith 3y agoWhen you get into the nitty-gritty details, it is convention that Greenland is in North America while the western half of Iceland, which is on the North American Plate, is not. Leif Erickson did not discover Vinland. It was Bjarni Herjólfsson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarni_Herj%C3%B3lfsson 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.
- curiousgal 3y ago> Medieval Arabs Talk about an oxymoron since the Middle Ages were actually the Islamic Golden Age.
- flextheruler 3y agoIsn’t medieval just a time period for after the fall of Roman Empire and before the renaissance
- karatinversion 3y agoThe complaint is that these delimiters are really only meaningful for Western Europe - the delimiting events both happen in Italy. One of the running themes of early medieval Arab history is, after all, wars with the (eastern) Roman empire. So it's a bit like talking about Elizabethan Turkey, or Warring States-era Brazil.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoThe fall of the Roman Empire basically allowed the Islamic Empire to exist. Even if Muhammad had arisen while the Roman Empire still existed he would have been limited to the greater part of the Arabic peninsula. https://imgur.com/bHLF70L https://imgur.com/bHLF70L
- karatinversion 3y agoPerhaps I can interest you in this map of the Roman Empire from 565AD, sixty years before the Muslim conquests: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:4KJUSTINIAN.png https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:4KJUSTINIAN.png
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoVery nice. The Romans were no longer dividing Iraq in half, thus severing Persia from Arabia.
- 3y ago
- stretchwithme 3y agoHard to believe people could figure out how to put things between two pieces of bread. Seems so complicated.
- quickthrower2 3y agoAnd calling food rolled in khobz a sandwich is a stretch. At what point is any bread-like plus non-bread-like a sandwich? E.g. a pizza or a beef pie or peshwari naan is a sandwich (yes I’ve seen the cube rule!)
- marginalia_nu 3y agoWell yeah. I think it can be argued that a significant portion of what we consider food is a homomorphism of tasty-thing-in-or-on-bread. There are other families, this is one of the bigger ones.
- endominus 3y agoFundamentally, a lasagna is a sandwich.
- INTPenis 3y agoYeah I recently moved out to a rural village in the balkans and it's amazing how they eat greasy food with bread, so it makes sense to use the bread to pick up the greasy food with. It's a no brainer really. Bread is and has always been a non-sticky, non-greasy, and dry way of picking up food.
- borissk 3y ago[flagged]
- moonchrome 3y agoI think the US could deal with Mongolia.
- ReptileMan 3y agoThat is a good argument against immigration - don't import cultures in quantities you can't assimilate when they are incompatible with the current culture. Also don't lose wars. Bad habit.
- wahern 3y agoThe Arab dynasties during the Golden Age were multicultural; that's part of what made them so successful. But Islam in the Middle East had already turned away from natural philosophy before the Mongols, in a resolution to a religious debate that pre-existed the Golden Age. The Siege of Baghdad simply erased the institutional vestiges of the previous era. IOW, the end came from within.
- 3y ago
- amelius 3y agoYes, but they didn't have Nutella.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoFrom the article: …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.
- ManuelKiessling 3y agoSay what you want about medieval times — folks knew how to sell a recipe.
- n4r9 3y ago> ... its dots be cheese ... its vowels mint ... 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 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirham
- have_faith 3y agoIn poem form and yet still more informative that your average recipe website.
- beezlewax 3y agoI find it hard to believe that any culture who ate bread didnt have some form of sandwich the minute they ate their first piece of bread and had something else on hand to eat with it.