Farridnejad, Shervin, and Touraj Daryaee (eds). 2022. Food for gods, food for mortals. Culinary and dining practices in the greater Iranian world. University of California, Irvine.
Preparing, serving, and consuming food can be political, as it was arranged in the royal banquet of the great kings. It could also be considered as a ritual, both in the frame of the greater ritual practices in the banquets for the gods, as well as according to a set of family costumes and gestures, which endures from one generation to the next. All these aspects have been one of the major human’s activates during the history of the civilizations and have fascinated the scholars to investigate and decode the culinary customs of the peoples during the history. The contributions of this volume present a small collection of writings, which put focus on various aspects of culinary and dining practices in the Greater Iranian World from the ancient period to the contemporary religious feast of Sufi Orders in the Balkans. They aim to overview the recent developments in the field and discuss selected aspects of the rich variety of culinary practices.
Table of Contents
- Shervin Farridnejad & Touraj Daryaee: “Eating and Drinking in Ancient Iran: A Survey”
- Henry P. Colburn: “Some Material Correlates of Drinking in the
- Achaemenid Empire”
- Touraj Daryaee: “Drink Dūγ Like an Ancient Persian”
- Shervin Farridnejad: “The Banquet for the Gods: Sacrifijicial Meat and Bread as the Main Ritual Foods in Zoroastrian Liturgies”
- Sara Kuehn: “‘Nourishment of Remembrance’: Ritual Foodways during Mātam and the ʿĀshurāʾ Feast at Sufi Orders in the Balkans”
- Jake Nabel: “Hydration, Ancient Persian-Style”
- Charles Perry: “What We Know About Medieval Persian Cuisine”