“I believe that this was the work of a man who had a yearning for the homeland that he would never see again,” says British food historian Daniel Newman. He’s talking about Fiḍālat al-Khiwān fī Ṭayyibāt al-Ṭaʿām wa-l-Alwān, meaning “Remainders on the Table as Regards Delightful Foods and Dishes,” the original title of a cookbook written in Arabic around the year 1260. The author, Ibn Razīn al-Tujībī, was a scholar from a prominent family in the city of Murcia in southern Spain, when it was under Muslim rule as the…
