The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (25 page)

Lauz
naj was so celebrated that every medieval Arabic cookbook had a recipe, from the tenth-century cookbook of al-Warr
q to this (abridged) recipe from the thirteenth-century Baghdad cookbook
Kit
b al-Tab
kh
(
The Book of Dishes
), in
Charles Perry’s translation
:

Lauz
naj

Take a pound of sugar and grind it fine. Take a third of a pound of finely ground peeled almonds, mix them with the sugar, and knead it with rose-water. Then take bread made thin . . . —the thinner, the better— . . . and put the kneaded almonds and sugar on it. Then roll up . . . and cut it into small pieces.

Some recipes for lauz
naj
left off the pastry shell, others were flavored with musk or were drenched in syrup flavored with rosewater, or were sprinkled with finely pounded pistachios.

Roger II, from a mosaic in the Church of the Martorana in Palermo

By 1072 the Normans had conquered Sicily (and England), and for a brief period
the rule of Roger I and Roger II of Sicily
was an experiment in mutual tolerance, at least compared to the rest of Europe: Greek, Arabic, and Latin were all official languages, government officials were drawn from all three cultures, and Muslims and Jews were governed by their own law. In Sicily, and in Toledo, Spain, another contact point between Muslim and Christian culture, pastries like lauz
naj entered the European culinary repertoire and developed into desserts like the almond paste tarts called
marzapane
and
caliscioni
.

Marzapane
(marzipan in English) comes from the Arabic word
mauthaban
, which originally meant the jars the tarts came in, and then by extension the pastry shell. The 1465 cookbook of Maestro Martino tells us that marzipan was originally filled with a mixture of almond paste, sugar, rosewater, and sometimes egg whites. The modern word
marzipan
means the almond paste confection itself (like the beautiful colored fruit shapes that my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Scheel, made when I was a kid). Here’s Martino’s recipe for the marzipan filling:

Marzipan

Peel the almonds well and crush. . . . When you crush them, wet them with a bit of rose water so that they do not purge their oil. . . . take an equal weight of sugar as of almonds . . . and add also an ounce or two of good rose water; and incorporate all these things together well. . . .

Then take some wafers . . . made with sugar and wet them with rose water; dissolve them in the bottom of a pan and add this mixture or filling on top . . . cook in the oven . . . being very careful to apply moderate heat.

Caliscioni was a very similar dessert, pastries made of almond paste wrapped in or sitting on a sugar dough. Again it’s the shell that gives the pastry its name;
caliscioni comes from the word for stocking
or legging. (
Calceus
was the Latin word for shoe; think of French
chaussure
or
chausson
or the name Chaucer, originally “makers of leggings or footwear.”) Many desserts acquired their names from their former pastry “crusts”; our word
custard
was formerly
crustade
, from French
croustade
, akin to Italian
crostata
, from
crostare
, “to encrust.” Here’s Martino’s recipe:

How to Make Caliscioni

Take a similar filling or mixture like that described above for marzipan, and prepare the dough, which you make with sugar and rose water; and lay out the dough as for ravioli; add this filling and make the caliscioni large, medium-sized, or small, as you wish.

As is clear from these recipes, marzipan and caliscioni, even a few hundred years later, were still very close to the original recipes for lauz
naj.
The main change was that marzipan and caliscioni were baked (at low heat) while lauz
naj was often not cooked. The details of the pastry had also changed in the transition, but the Europeans were basically still making confections of almonds, sugar, and rosewater wrapped in pastry. Sugar was still quite expensive, and so such desserts were still luxury products originally available mainly to the wealthy.
Francesco Datini, a fourteenth-century merchant
, wrote that marzipan torte was more expensive than a brace of peacocks.