Middle Eastern cuisine

Middle Eastern cuisine or West Asian cuisine includes a number of cuisines from the Middle East. Common ingredients include olives and olive oil, pitas, honey, sesame seeds, dates, sumac, chickpeas, mint, rice and parsley, and popular dishes include kebabs, dolmas, falafel, baklava, yogurt, doner kebab, shawarma and mulukhiyah.

Quotes

• Mahomet, chiefly prohibiteth in his Alcoran, the eating of Swines flesh, and drinking of Wine, which indeed the best sort do, but the baser kind are dayly drunkards: Their common drinke is Sherpet, composed of Water, Honey, and Sugar, which is exceeding delectable in the taste: And the usuall courtesie, they bestow on their friends, who visite them, is a Cup of Coffa, made of a kind of seed called Coava, and of a blackish colour; which they drinke so hote as possible they can, and is good to expell the crudity of raw meates, and hearbes, so much by them frequented. And those that cannot attaine to this liquor, must be contented with the cooling streames of water.
  • William Lithgow, Totall Discourse, IV, 152

• The board was spread with fruits and wine,
  With grapes of gold, like those that shine
  On CASBIN hills;—pomegranates full
    Of melting sweetness, and the pears,
  And sunniest apples that CAUBUL
    In all its thousand gardens bears;—
  Plantains, the golden and the green,
  MALAYA’s nectared mangusteen;
  Prunes of BOCKHARA, and sweet nuts
    From the far groves of SAMARCAND,
  And BASRA dates, and apricots,
    Seed of the Sun, from IRAN’s land;—
  With rich conserve of Visna cherries,
  Of orange flowers, and of those berries
  That, wild and fresh, the young gazelles
  Feed on in ERAC’s rocky dells.
  All these in richest vases smile,
    In baskets of pure santal-wood,
  And urns of porcelain from that isle
    Sunk underneath the Indian flood,
  Whence oft the lucky diver brings
  Vases to grace the halls of kings.
  Wines too of every clime and hue
  Around their liquid lustre threw;
  Amber Rosolli,—the bright dew
  From vineyards of the Green-Sea gushing;
  And SHIRAZ wine that richly ran
    As if that jewel large and rare,
  The ruby for which KUBLAI-KHAN
    Melted within the goblets there!
  • Thomas Moore, "The Light of the Haram", Lalla-Rookh, an Oriental Romance (1817)

•   And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
    In blanchèd linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
    While he from forth the closet brought a heap
    Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd:
    With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
    And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
    Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
    From Fez; and spicèd dainties, every one,
  From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.
  • John Keats, "The Eve of St. Agnes", XXX

• The slave pour’d sherbet to the brink,
    Stirr’d in wild honey and pomegranate,
  With snow and rose-leaves cool’d the drink,
    And bore it where the Caliph sate.
  • Sir Edwin Arnold, "The Caliph’s Draught", Indian Poetry (1904)

• There were times we regretted
  The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces
  And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
  • T. S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi", Ariel Poems (1927)