The Sultan's Feast: A Fifteenth-Century Egyptian Cookbook vs Scents and Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook

Both are English translations of medieval Arabic cookbooks, but they serve different readers. The Sultan's Feast is the larger, more scholarly volume: 288 pages, 330-plus recipes, and a bilingual Arabic-English critical edition from a fifteenth-century Egyptian source. Scents and Flavors is a shorter, more approachable Syrian collection in the NYU Library of Arabic Literature series, translated by Charles Perry with a foreword by Claudia Roden. Buy The Sultan's Feast if you want the deeper historical and linguistic record; buy Scents and Flavors if you want a readable, well-annotated cookbook to actually cook from.

• Choose The Sultan's Feast if you want the fullest bilingual scholarly edition, with more recipes and the original Arabic facing the translation.
• Choose Scents and Flavors if you want a compact, readable Syrian cookbook with modern annotations and a lower page count to work through.