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Chapter 10 - Digestive Syrups and After-Dinner Drinks

Food or Medicine?

from Part II - The Borders of Pharmacology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2023

By
Leigh Chipman
Edited by
Petros Bouras-Vallianatos  and
Dionysios Stathakopoulos
Petros Bouras-Vallianatos
Affiliation:
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Dionysios Stathakopoulos
Affiliation:
University of Cyprus
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Summary

In the medieval Middle East, thinking about health and illness was closely connected to thinking about food and cooking. Can we know what happened in practice? Building on previous research, I will try to show how fine the line was between ‘food’ (or drinks) and ‘medicines’. I examine specific recipes appearing in two books composed in Mamluk-era Cairo – the pharmacopoeia Minhāj al-dukkān and an anonymous cookbook called Kanz al-fawāʾid – to show that some foods were also medicines, and some pharmaceutical preparations were largely food (or rather, snacks!). Comparing and contrasting not only the instructions appearing under the same headings, but also the appearance (or lack thereof) of medical indications, provides information as to which side of the divide given medico-culinary compounds were thought to fall. I also investigate to what extent Kanz al-fawāʾid contains recipes for the foods recommended in the dietetic advice found in some Cairo Genizah prescriptions.

Keywords

pharmacyGalenic medicineculinaryMamluk periodCairoCairo GenizahMinhāj al-dukkānKanz al-fawāʾid
Type
Chapter
Information
Drugs in the Medieval Mediterranean
Transmission and Circulation of Pharmacological Knowledge
 , pp. 320 - 335
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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