In the medieval Middle East, thinking about health and illness was closely connected to thinking about food and cooking. Can we know what happened in practice? Building on previous research, I will try to show how fine the line was between ‘food’ (or drinks) and ‘medicines’. I examine specific recipes appearing in two books composed in Mamluk-era Cairo – the pharmacopoeia Minhāj al-dukkān and an anonymous cookbook called Kanz al-fawāʾid – to show that some foods were also medicines, and some pharmaceutical preparations were largely food (or rather, snacks!). Comparing and contrasting not only the instructions appearing under the same headings, but also the appearance (or lack thereof) of medical indications, provides information as to which side of the divide given medico-culinary compounds were thought to fall. I also investigate to what extent Kanz al-fawāʾid contains recipes for the foods recommended in the dietetic advice found in some Cairo Genizah prescriptions.

This chapter features a book from the era which marks the culmination of the Ottoman intellectual efforts to reinstate traditional categories of knowledge from an imperial perspective. Ahlak-i Alai [The morals of Ali] of Kınalızade Ali Çelebi showcases the maturation of moral thinking that overlaps the central themes of Shakespearean virtue ethics. Written by a contemporary of Shakespeare and became the representative account of moral thinking in social and political domains of the Ottomans, the book is of interest to the readers of Shakespeare as it accommodates more parallels with the moral world of Englishmen than indicated in Shakespeare’s ‘turning Turk’ in Othello. Ahlak-i Alai follows in form and content the Aristotelian virtue ethics and deals with a broad spectrum of questions from the source of morality and the possibility of an individual’s moral education to the highest good and the moral order in society. It is suggested in the chapter that the common moral ground of Ottomans and Shakespeare is shaped mainly by the Aristotelian virtue ethics whose objective is to operate in moderation what is thought to be the powers of the self.