Feast for a Bedouin Event

One of our local SCA groups is planning an event focused on Bedouin culture this summer. I’ve been asked to prepare the feast. This posed an interesting challenge, what do you cook to celebrate a culture without any cookbooks for the period you’re looking at? The accounts I could find of Bedouin food from prior to 1600 were shall we say limited, so I knew I needed to choose other sources. I decided the most logical approach to preparing foods for a nomadic culture for whom I didn’t have a lot of information on food ways would be to select recipes from places they would have resided in. A little cursory research told me that the Bedouin people likely originated in the area now know as Syria and accounts from period let me know they had certainly traveled to Egypt by the 13th century. So for a non-Bedouin menu celebrating the Bedouin people (and limited to the period recipes available) I decided to make my menu a journey from Syria to Egypt in the 13th century. I used Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes by  Lilia Zaouali (Author), M. B. DeBevoise (Translator) as a source selecting recipes primarily from ] Kitab al-wusla ila l-habib fi wasf al-tayyibat wa-l-tib, Syria, 13th Century [w] and Kanz al-fawaid fi tanwi al-mawaid, Egypt, 13th Century [k] as well a a few from a 13th century Andalusian manuscript and a 10th century Bagdad collection to round out the menu.