Tracing the Origins of a Practice: The Earliest Recipes for Alcoholic Beverages in Medieval Arabic Cookbooks (original) (raw)

Alcoholic beverages in classical and medieval Islam have habitually been treated by scholars either in terms of the religious prohibition of wine or as a social practice. In studying thus far little-investigated drink recipes, this article looks further into the core of this culinary practice by examining the nature of medieval intoxicating beverages, their names, compositions, and preparation techniques, and the evolution of their appearance in culinary manuscripts. Analysing the composition of the forbidden drink as described in recipes gives a fresh understanding of Muslim juridical debates as well as the methods used throughout medieval times to bypass the prohibition. A lexical examination, probing into the relationship between an object name, the drink, and its content, reveals linguistic practices that enabled the continuation of drinking habits at least until the threshold of the early modern period.