One question that food
historians just can’t resolve is just how much Arabic influence there is on
medieval European food. Some have argued
that medieval cuisine is little better than a distant echo of the glories of Baghdad
and Cordova while others insist that the smattering of Middle-Eastern recipes
in European cookbooks represents nothing more a few exotic dishes added to an
otherwise indigenous repertoire. The
more I read about Arabic cooking in 10th and 11th centuries, the more I am
inclined to go with the first view. Of
course Arabic cooking itself didn’t appear out of a vacuum. You could probably argue that it was a
synthesis of Persian and Byzantine styles with a dash of Indian, Turkic and
Bedouin influence.
I thought a lot about this
when I was doing research for may last book, Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert, since it was unquestionably
the Arabs who introduced sugar cultivation to the Europeans. Along the way, they gave us such things as
custard, cannoli and marzipan (and possibly puff pastry and sponge cake). What I didn’t think they gave us was sugar
sculpture, which became all the rage in the Renaissance, a fad that continued
well into 18th century not only in Christendom but the Ottoman Empire too. I didn’t even believe it when I read about it
in Sidney Mintz’s brilliant Sweetness and
Power, figuring his information was second hand. Who ever heard of Islamic sculpture? Well a lot I knew.
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| Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sculpture: Ivan Day |
Admittedly, the evidence for
medieval Arab sugar sculpture is pretty skimpy.
The cookbooks don’t give any instructions for making the kind of sugar
paste necessary to make it but there is one source that is pretty explicit,
mainly Nāṣir-i Khusraw, a Persian visitor
to Fatimid Egypt. "The last day of Ramadan 440 (1049),” he writes, “they
said that fifty thousands maunds [about 150,000 pounds] of sugar were
appropriated for this day for the sultan's feast. For decoration on the
banquet table I saw a confection like an orange tree, every branch and leaf of
which had been executed in sugar, and thousand of images and statuettes in
sugar..." Now let’s say his numbers were a little off, even so there must
have still been many, many sugar sculptures.
I asked Ellen Kenney, a professor of Islamic art at Cairo’s American
University whether this seemed plausible and she wasn’t fazed. She writes, “Nāṣir-i Khusraw is a reliable
narrator… and statuary in the medieval Islamic context is not unheard of by any
means. Especially in palaces, figural sculpture is known from descriptions and
archaeological contexts, fashioned from more durable materials than sugar. For
example, the Fatimid palace in Cairo reportedly contained sculptures of gold (I
think portraits of the royal family) and I believe examples of figural statues
in stucco were excavated at a Ghaznavid palace in modern Afghanistan.” She points to an (admittedly Persian) sculpture in the
collection of the Metropolitan Museum.
The Met website
offers a brief outline of the Fatimid art (including figurative sculpture) that
confirms Professor Kenney’s point.
Not that any of this proves a
direct connection between renaissance Italian sugar sculpture (or spongade as it was known in Venice) and
the medieval Arab variety but it does seem implausible that the Italians, who
depended on the Arab world for all their early sugar imports, wouldn’t have
picked up the idea of making sculpture out of the sweet stuff along the
way. The additive typically added to the
sugar to make it hold together was tragacanth gum and guess where that comes
from? Yup, the Middle East.
Again, there is no way to make
a connection but one of the best known reports of sugar sculpture in the
Ottoman Empire comes from the seventeenth-
century Turkish travel writer Evliyâ Çelebi who describes a sweet makers’
parade that concluded with the sugar artists of Galata, who sold fruit
preserves and candied fruit that, which, for the procession, they mounted and
carried on cypresses and fruit trees made entirely of sugar. I had assumed that these confectioners were
of Western European origin since the Galata neighborhood tended to be populated
by Venetians and other Italians. But who
is to say that the tradition hadn’t been kept up in the Middle East? Nāṣir-i Khusraw’description of a sugar tree is awfully suggestive
of an Egyptian connection. I haven’t
come across any mentions of sugar trees in the Italian context. It is, of course perfectly possible that the tradition
developed in one place (Egypt?) was refined in another (Venice?) and adapted in
yet a third (Istanbul?). Suffice it to
say that this sort of inquiry tends to bring up more questions than it answers.
