- Baqdadi, Bavarchi. A Persian Cookbook: The Manual. Translated by Saman Hassibi and Amir Sayadabdi. London: Prospect Books, 2018.
The full original name in Persian is Karnameh dar Bab-e Tabbakhi va San'at-e An [Manual on Cooking and Its Craft] by Bavarchi Baqdadi. This is another fascinating "culinary time travel" cookbook, though I do not recommend cooking from it.
I wrote the following review on October 13, 2023:
This book is purely an academic and scholarly glimpse into the past. That's about it. I returned the book for a full refund. As a cook who is experienced with cooking Persian cuisine using Food of Life and Cooking in Iran by Najmieh Batmanglij, I am familiar and know my way around the Persian kitchen. As a cooking book, it is not "practical" in the sense that the instructions are written like prose. In other words, although you can clearly cook from the book, you will be doing the homework of restructuring and reformatting the prose into a modern-day recipe format.
This includes a full rewrite with a list of ingredients for the modern kitchen, along with minor unit conversions [conversions are in classical Persian units of measure]. If you enjoy that kind of process, by all means, you will probably enjoy this book. For me, I thought this book was translated and restructured and formatted into a modern-day recipe format. Nope! You've been warned. Purchase with caution. You'll more than likely have to flip back and forth to look up Farsi words used dispersed throughout the text.
