In my Iraqi Kitchen: Recipes, History and Culture, by Nawal Nasrallah (2024)

In 1946 a cookbook titled Recipes from Baghdad waspublished. It was by far the first cookery document to have been written inIraq after a long silence of almost seven hundred years.

To be sure, documenting cookeryin Iraq has a very long history, which goes as far back in time as ancientMesopotamia, when our ancestors the Babylonians immortalized their cooking oncuneiform tablets around 1700 BC. Also, from medieval Arabic sources we learnthat a lot of cookery books were written in Baghdad during the Abbasid erabetween the ninth and thirteenth centuries, by professional chefs, gourmets,physicians, princes, and even the caliphs themselves. Unfortunately, only acouple of cookbooks survived the ravishes of time, one was written in the tenthcentury by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq and the other, in the thirteenth century byMuhammad bin al-Kareem al-Katib al-Baghdadi, both titled Kitab al-Tabeekh(cookery cook). After that, our records remain silent until 1946. But this timearound the cookbook was written in English. Recipes from Baghdad was itstitle, published to raise funds for the Indian Red Cross. It was printed at theGovernment Press in Baghdad. The second edition was published by the RedCrescent Society (Women’s Branch) in Baghdad in 1952, and the third and lastedition was done by the privately-run El-Ani Press in in Baghdad in 1961.Obviously, the book was pretty popular.

In editing the book Beatie was assisted by Bedia Afnan, an eminent Iraqi educatorwho later worked for the UN; Renee Al Kabir, a member of a prominent BaghdadiJewish family; and Helen Gaudin (B.S., MA.) and Ann Walter, two English orAmerican ladies whom I have not been able to trace.

Lady Margaret Cornwallis, wife ofthe then British ambassador to Iraq, Kinahan Cornwallis, wrote the Foreword (March,1945). In it, Lady Margaret stated that the purpose of writing this book was toraise funds for the Red Cross. She also saw in it a chance for a culturalexchange. With its ‘oriental’ and ‘occidental’ collection of recipes, sheexplained, the book would enable Westerners who enjoyed the Arab delicacies ofthe table to make them for themselves, and introduce the Eastern readers toWestern food. The book was “the result of friendly co-operation between Iraqiand British housewives, with help from the ladies of other nations.” Indeed, theAcknowledgment list the book provides of contributors included no less than 118names of Baghdad residents, which besides the ‘housewives’ Lady Margaretmentioned, included professionals, physicians and institutions, such as ‘HomeArts School’ for girls, and ‘Painforce Schools of Cookery.’

The book reveals a mid-twentieth-centurycultured metropolitan Baghdad, rarely depicted in documents dealing with thisera in the history of Iraq. At the head of the contributors list were the namesof two Iraqi female royalties: Queen mother of Iraq Aliyya bint Ali(1911-1950), spouse of King Ghazi and mother of Faisal II, the last of theIraqi kings, and Queen Nafisa bint Abd al-Ilah, who is Aliyya’s mother. QueenNafisa provided recipes, but Queen Aliyya’s involvement in the project wentbeyond offering recipes. She was the one to write the Introduction for thebook, enthusiastically endorsing it as a ‘scholarly’ work, “artisticallyexecuted and exceedingly interesting.” Recommending it, she adds,

I find that it meets an urgent need andfills an existing deficiency. I was delighted with the variety of dishes dealtwith and I admire the accuracy and originality with which the recipes areexplained.

After acknowledging the emergenceof the ‘art of cooking’ as a respectable field in this modern age, Queen Aliyyaembarked on summarizing the background to the interest of the Arabs in cooking,which goes back to the times when they entered into settled life andcivilization, She supported her claim with references to medieval books such asKitab al-Diyarat by al-Shabushti, and more importantly al-Baghdadi’s thirteenth-centurycookery book Kitab al-Tabhk [sic], mentioned earlier, which at the timewas a relatively new discovery. It was published in Mosul in 1934, andtranslated into English in 1939 by the British Orientalist A. J. Arberry.

What is truly exciting about thisbook is the cartoon-style sketches, all 35 of them, dispersed throughout thebook, done by Suad Salim, as stated in the inner title page. No further mentionof this cartoonist was made in the book. Interestingly, I was under theimpression that the artist was a woman since Suad is a familiar female name inthe Arab countries. I was pretty amazed to discover that this Suad is no otherthan the older brother of the famous Iraqi artists, Jawad Saleem and Nazeeha Saleem. He was one of the pioneering cartoonist in Iraq. Surprisingly, little is written or known about him (here is a link to anArabic interview with himin 1985), and no records of his artistic worksare available in print. This is one of the reasons why this book is a truly preciousrare find.

Here are samples of Suad Saleem's cartoons: