Most Middle Eastern urban residents bought cooked food rather than cooking at home

Evidence

The generality of Western travelers seem to agree that very few people, other than the great and the wealthy, cooked food in their own homes. They bought cooked food in marketplaces, in cook-shops, from a widely ramified range of professional cooks. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 264

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges implicit ‘domestic kitchen’ assumptions pervasive in writing about household life; relevant to material-culture historiography similar to A Midwife’s Tale’s domesticity questions.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 264