Abu Nuwas at the table

In Baghdad, in the time of Abu Nuwas, a meal is not served as a single dish: the sufra, a leather or cloth spread, is laid on the floor, and dishes are placed on it together — sweet-and-sour stews, fermented condiments, wheat breads, fruits, and sweets. The feast continues in the majlis, the court salon, where the cup of nabidh, the music of the lute, and improvised poetry circulate. There is no starter-main-dessert distinction: sweet sits next to sour, salty next to preserved, and everyone picks according to their mood between two recited verses.

A dark, powerful sauce from the long fermentation of barley (sometimes with moldy flour and salt), murri is the umami soul of Abbasid cuisine — the Eastern equivalent of Roman garum or soy sauce. A drop transforms a bland stew into a courtly dish. It appears in nearly all 9th-century cookbooks and marks the taste of Abu Nuwas's era.