God's Banquet: Food in Classical Arabic Literature
by Geert Jan Van Gelder
Columbia University Press, 178 pages

"I have never enjoyed anything as much as three things: eating flesh, riding on flesh and rubbing flesh against flesh," wrote Ibn Zuqqa, around the year 816. Eating flesh (and other goodies) is the subject of this rich little book about images of food in classical Arabic literature. The result is as dense and delicious as one of the rice puddings stuffed with dates which appear so often in its pages.

Geert Jan Van Gelder ably guides the reader through careful analysis of poetry and other classical Arabic texts on food. Among the topics covered are the relation of food to sex, ethical life and food in the afterlife. Though sometimes a little too aczdemic, the book is packed with tasty details, like Islamic theologian al-Ghazali's description of a culinary heaven: "You will look at the fowl in Paradise; as sson as you desire it, it falls down, roasted, in front of you." What gourmand could resist?