Tick. Tock. Time is always moving, even when we fantasise that we’ve escaped to a place where it has stopped. Time doesn’t stand still in our mouths, either. Each bite of food we take during our mid-August holiday – chopped tomatoes or oranges on our bruschetta, caponata with our fish, lemon sorbet to wrap it all up – wouldn’t be possible without a series of food revolutionaries who preceded us in centuries gone by.

Each explosion of flavour is a burst of history. And, much as we might complain that our tourism industry, not to mention holiday destinations, could be under threat from Islamist terrorists, we owe many of the pleasures of our table to an earlier period of expansionist Islam, when long-distance trade, scientific curiosity and savoir-vivre were hallmarks of Arab culture.

The Mediterranean table as we know it today was unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans. During their campaigns in Persia and Egypt, they might have tasted citrus fruits and aubergine. But they did not grow them back home. They couldn’t.

The Romans undertook the engineering feats to irrigate cities. However, it was thanks to medieval Arab engineering that the Mediterranean countryside got the water needed to cultivate citrus and other fruits and vegetables brought over from Arab trading expeditions in the Middle and Far East.

It might seem impossible to imagine a Mediterranean cuisine without a ripe plum tomato sauce or roast potatoes. But tomatoes and potatoes were, of course, brought over to the Mediterranean after the discovery of the Americas.

In many languages, not only European, the first instinct was to call any new fruit or vegetable by the generic name of apple. In French, the potato was called an earth apple, pomme de terre. In Italian, the tomato became a pomodoro, golden apple.

Modern Hebrew (which could not find a name in biblical or rabbinical Hebrew) reserved ‘golden apple’ for an orange. German and (more so, in current usage) Dutch call the orange an apple of China, which is where Portuguese traders originally brought it from.

The names for orange indicate the mutual influence of the Middle East and Europe on one another. In Arabic, Persian and Turkish, the sweet orange is called Portugal (as it is in some European languages, such as Italian). But the common Portuguese name for orange is laranja – of the same root as orange, arancia, and naranjo – which is derived from a Persian name, narang, for a small sour orange – used for cooking, preserving, and some medicines – that Europe initially owed to the Arabs.

Likewise, the name of the peach – pesca in Italian, persica in Greek – indicates its Iranian origin.

Revolutions of engineering – for ships, agriculture and preservation – have made our cuisine possible, as has technology transfer

The common Arabic name for aubergine, badinjan, is the same as the Persian and from which the term ‘aubergine’ itself is derived.

The Maltese name is derived from an older Arabic word, brinjal, a term used in southern and eastern Asia.

At first it’s puzzling that the Sicilian name is different. Nothing might seem to be more Sicilian than the aubergine. But the Italian name, melanzane, indicates that the relationship between the land and this vegetable was troubled at first. Melanzane is a variation of mela insana, crazy or unhealthy apple.

The name referred not only to the belief that it was poisonous but also to the initial perception that the vegetable looked like a weird apple.

Today, the Sicilian aubergine-based dish, caponata, is considered to be not only a hallmark of the island’s cuisine but also of its collective imagination. Some see in the multitude of variations, each fiercely championed, an icon of a wider anarchic attitude. The sweet and sour ingredients are said to capture the bitter-sweetness of Sicilian life.

The origins of the dish are thought to lie in a seafarer’s diet, where generous doses of vinegar acted as a preservative, while whatever food was available was combined into a single stew.

To paint caponata as a poor man’s dish, however, would do it an injustice. Aristocratic versions mention not only raisins, almonds and cocoa (a Spanish touch to be found in popular versions as well), but also tuna roe, crumbled hard-boiled eggs, baby octopus, shrimps, swordfish as well as shellfish.

Such elaborate fantasies today are as appalling to most European appetites as the baroque imagination seemed to puritan reformers. But let’s not rush.

Try googling a simple Levantine and Iranian dish – watermelon with labneh, strained thick yogurt – which is served both for breakfast and as a side-dish for lunch or dinner.

This refreshing salad is now all the rage on the fashionable cookery websites, usually in its Greek version, with feta cheese substituting the labneh. But what a load of other ingredients push their way into the dish and the complicated dressings. It’s as though the cookery writer is trying to crowd the entire Mediterranean into a single dish.

Baroque? Hardly. But it certainly goes to show how consciously we try to capture an entire world into a mouthful.

When doing so, however, we seem to very often forget the real history that made up those worlds.

The origins of our sorbet lie in the sweet sherbets of the Arabs (sherbet is an Arabic word for drink), who, let us remember, first introduced that essential sorbet ingredient, sugar (and not just lemons), to Europe.

From Europe, sugar was exported to the Americas and Caribbean, where the plantation system proved to be more economical than that of the original exporters. Hence, sugar made its way back to Europe and was also sold to the Arab world.

The pleasures of our mid-August table would hardly be possible had it not been for a series of millennial, criss-crossing exchange of goods and influences between Europe, the Middle East and the world beyond them.

Revolutions of engineering – for ships, agriculture and preservation – have made our cuisine possible, as has technology transfer. Other cultural revolutions, in the Arab world as in Europe, enabled open-minded exploration of the world and our senses.

Today, such open-mindedness and exchange by the two sides is difficult to imagine. But the goodness of each bite we have should tell us that cultural revolution is possible.

ranierfsadni@europe.com