Lewicka’s book is divided into four parts. The first, unnumbered, part has two chapters: a survey of medieval Cairo and its people that orients the reader to the world of the Cairenes, which is followed by a survey of the sources for medieval Cairo’s foodways. As Lewicka notes, the student of Cairene foodways faces some considerable problems with sources for the foodways; medieval Cairenes did not consider it good manners to talk about food, and this extended to writing about food as well. Though this reticence is an important problem for scholars of medieval Cairene foodways, there are, as Lewicka shows in her first chapter, ways around it. Other sources, ranging from the reports of market inspectors to cookbooks, describe foods and their preparation. Each has its limitations, though judiciously used, these sources allow a folklorist or historian to study the foodways of the people of Cairo.
Part I of her book is called On Food. In the first chapter in this part Lewicka examines the genesis of the Cairene menu. She looks for answers to the questions: what were the sources of culinary inspiration (as she calls it) for medieval Cairenes? where did the food of Cairo come from? what were the traditional Egyptian foods, and which came from abroad? She also looks at the business of selling food. As she shows, much of the food that Cairenes ate was not made in the home; rather, it was purchased from street vendors, and thus, if we are to understand medieval Cairene foodways, we must know what these sellers sold and how they prepared their food. After establishing what the Cairenes ate, and how they got it, Lewicka then examines the ingredients that went into the foods that medieval Cairenes ate.
Part II of her book, On Eating, looks at where food was eaten and the ritual behaviors that accompanied meals. The first chapter here looks at where meals were eaten; as would be expected, food was consumed both in public and in private. She then looks at the “routine eating practices” of Cairenes. This chapter has three subsections: the first is “Prerequisites, Conditions, and Customs Related to the Idea of Eating,” which includes such things as attitudes toward hospitality and the times of meals; the second is “The Meal,” where she examines, among other things, hand-washing, posture at the table, and the “techniques of eating.” Part II concludes with “After the Meal,” where Lewicka examines such things as the permissibility of licking one’s fingers, general cleaning up after a meal, and leave-taking.
Part III of the book is On Beverages. Lewicka covers this part of Cairene foodways in two chapters. The first looks at the non-alcoholic drinks: water, ashriba, or “syrupy drinks” (which were believed to have medicinal qualities in addition to being drunk to relieve thirst), and the “quasi-alcoholic” beverages fuqq? and aqsim?. It is not clear just what fuqq? was; Lewicka suggests that it wasn’t, in fact, a single drink. It appears to have been made either with wheat bread or barley, and was fermented, though not strongly alcoholic. “Aqsim?,” she writes, “was almost as mysterious a drink.” There are a number of recipes for this drink, which also seems to have been a fermented, mildly alcoholic drink, though, as with fuqq?, the many recipes for this drink point to the name having been applied to many different drinks at different times and places in the city. The final chapter then examines the place of alcohol in medieval Cairene foodways. Though a Muslim city, a considerable amount of alcohol in the form of beer and wine was consumed by the residents of medieval Cairo. The story of wine and beer in medieval Cairo is an intriguing story of the variation in the enforcement of religious laws and of the clash of cultures with very different attitudes toward drinking alcoholic beverages.
Lewicka undertook a difficult project in this book, but the result is an excellent book on medieval foodways; her synthesis of previous research and her own original research create a convincing portrait of the foodways of medieval Cairo. Indeed, Lewicka’s book is a model of how the historical foodways of a culture can be reconstructed, and this makes her book of interest to anyone who works with foodways, historical foodways, or historical folklife studies more generally.
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[Review length: 722 words • Review posted on October 15, 2014]