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Medieval Arab cookery is attested today in over thirty-five extant culinary manuscripts. Food as a historical field of inquiry is new in Middle Eastern studies, and the colloquium demonstrated that it involves questions from various disciplines and uses different methodologies, such as codicology, prosopography, and textometry, each revealing another aspect in the food and foodways of medieval Islam. After a short overview of the main characteristics of the medieval cuisine, including the smelling and tasting of spices and cookies (freshly baked after an original thirteenth-century recipe), it took a closer look at the main sources for this investigation, the cookbooks. The colloquium then drew attention to two key questions. What are the multicultural origins of the Arab cuisine? And how was culinary knowledge formed and transmitted throughout the Middle East and by whom? Preliminary findings indicate that knowledge diffusion was to a large extent—but not exclusively—class-based and limited to the urban elites.