The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (7 page)

Ctesiphon is long gone now, but as we’ll see, Khosrau’s favorite food lives on. He loved a dish of sweet-and-sour stewed beef called
sikb
j
, from
sik
, Middle Persian for “vinegar.” Sikb
j must have been amazingly delicious, because it was a favorite of kings and concubines for at least 300 years, and celebrated in story after story.
In one story, Khosrau sent a great number of cooks
into separate kitchens, saying, “Let each one of you prepare his best dish.” I am sure the cynical among you will not be surprised to hear that it turned out that all the chefs made the shah’s favorite, sikb
j.

The Sassanid empire fell as Islam spread, and by 750, the Islamic Abbasid caliphate was established in formerly Persian areas of Mesopotamia. The Abbasids built a new city 20 miles from Ctesiphon, Madinat al-Salam, “the city of peace,” in a former market town called Baghdad. The Abbasids were heavily influenced by Sassanid culture, hiring local Persian-trained chefs who knew how to cook sikb
j. The dish became
the favorite of the new rulers, like Harun al-Rashid (786–809). I love the stories of Caliph Harun in
One Thousand and One Nights
, and how he would go in disguise at night through the city of Baghdad with his vizier Jafar, listening to the complaints of the people, and I imagine some of these adventures must have happened after a big dinner of sikb
j. In fact Harun’s recipe for sikb
j and others are given in the oldest surviving cookbook in Arabic,
Kit
b al-Ta
b
kh
(
The Book of Cookery
) compiled by Ibn Sayy
r al-Warr
q, c. 950–1000
CE
. Here’s the recipe that al-Warr
q claims is the original sixth-century Persian version eaten by Khosrau, slightly shortened
from Nawal Nasrallah’s translation
:

Meat Stew with Vinegar (sikb
j)

Wash 4 pounds of beef, put in a pot, cover with sweet vinegar, and bring to a boil three times until almost done.

Then pour out the vinegar, add 4 pounds of lamb, cover completely with fresh undiluted vinegar, and boil again.

Now clean and disjoint a chicken and add it to the pot, along with fresh watercress, parsley, and cilantro, a few snips of rue, and 20 citron leaves. Boil until the meat is almost cooked. Discard the greens.