Cherchez la femme: Women’s Dual Presence in Premodern Arab Cuisine

This chapter investigates the presence of women in the culinary culture of premodern Islamic societies through both their material practices and their imagined representations. Drawing on understudied sources such as cookbooks and manuscript miniatures, alongside chronicles and poetry, it examines the roles of women, especially enslaved women, in the symbolic realm, where their bodies and attributes were metaphorically invoked in the naming of dishes, particularly sweetmeats. These gendered and classed representations reveal how food served not only as a domain of labour but also as a vehicle for projecting desire, beauty, and social hierarchy. This chapter then turns to elite kitchens to examine how enslaved women acted as skilled cooks and indispensable figures in the organisation of food production. Taken together, the practical and symbolic dimensions show how women inhabited both real and imagined culinary spaces in the making of premodern Islamic food culture.