This new book focuses on the multicultural foodways of the medieval Iberian Peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal, although Portugal is not included here at all). The emphasis is on the culinary encounters of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the peninsula before 1500. Although there is some material on animal husbandry, viniculture, irrigation, cereal crops, and horticulture, this is not an agricultural study. However, it is an interesting introduction to Iberian foods, if rather vague at times in its geography, politics, and chronology. Martha Dass is a specialist in Castilian literature, and it is through that lens that this book can best be appreciated. Daas primarily uses food as a way to explore the interactions and tensions between different religious communities.
After a short introduction on the sources (cookery books, literary and religious texts, agricultural manuals, and medical treatises dating between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries, written originally in Arabic,...
