In Avicenna's time, meals were not served as "starter-main course-dessert" but on a sufra, a cloth spread on the floor or a low dais, where everything arrived together: wheat bread serving as base and utensil, an âsh (thick pottage) to whet the appetite, a khorâk of stewed meat to honor the guests, medicinal drinks (sharâb), and honey-and-almond sweets. The order was free: each person would pick according to their temperament, a principle dear to the physician of Bukhara, who tailored foods to each person's humors.

A dark sauce obtained by long fermentation of salted barley and flour, murri is the eastern equivalent of Roman garum: a few drops add umami depth to almost anything. It flavors broths and stews from Baghdad to Bukhara and appears in 10th-century cookbooks that Avicenna might have consulted.