The cookbook hints at radically different ways of using perfume but is (as much as possible) an exact translation so is missing context to the perfume section (well... and all other sections).
In a similar vein, is Al-Kinfi's “The Chemistry of Perfumes and Distillations" available in English translation? Articles reference it as being widely used so I expect it survives but I keep hitting dead ends.
In a similar vein, is Al-Kinfi's “The Chemistry of Perfumes and Distillations" available in English translation? Articles reference it as being widely used so I expect it survives but I keep hitting dead ends.
As far as I've been able to tell, there's an Arabic edition and a German translation. Some of al-Kindi's works were translated into Latin at some point in the Middle Ages, but I don't think this particular one was.
al-Kindi is a really interesting and classically medieval case--dude wrote some 300 "texts," according to lists by other medieval writers. But a lot of them are more what we'd call essays or pamphlets, and often taking the format of letters. (Referring to genre, not to whether he actually wrote them to send to someone). So most of them are lost, although in al-Kindi's case we're lucky that someone in the 20th century discovered a manuscript that preserved a bunch of them. However, this does also tend to mean that translations are less likely. As are, frankly, modern translations from medieval Arabic in the first place.
If you're interested, the German is Karl Garbers (trans.), Buch über die Chemie des Parfums und die Destillationen: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des arabischen Parfumchemie und Drogenkunde aus dem 9. Jahrhundert (1948).