Meantime, looks as if the Jesuits are out.

A couple of days ago I finally got around to reading Gary Nabhan’s book Arab/American.  I was entranced as Nabhan,  best known for his work on the ecology of the Sonoran desert, for foraging, and for support of local foods, explained how he kept finding parallels and resonances between the American southwest and Lebanon/Syria, the home of his  ancestors.  He muses on the parallels between the desert that spans the US Mexico border and the Arabian desert, with a good many side excursions to the Sahara, tracking sideways into family history, immigration politics, camel whisperers in the US, and frankincense.

Particularly intriguing given my interests (here and here) were the chapters where he explores the influence of Arabia and al-Andalus on the cuisine of the US Southwest and Mexico and the the words, particularly for water technology and plants, that are also common to both places.   He mentions in passing that dishes such as mole poblano and chiles en nogada are products of arid Arabia as much as of Mexico, music to my ears.   In a move I had not thought of, he links the fruit-based drinks called tesguinos to the tiswin of the Maghreb. And he traces how the word al-Jubb for a covered well ends up in the indigenous American language O’odham as alquives and al-naurah goes through Spanish noria to O’odham no:lik.

All great stuff.  And what was thought provoking was that even indigenous American languages include loan words from Arabic.  That means, of course, that saying that a certain dish must be an indigenous dish of the New World because it has a name in a New World language won’t work by itself.  You have to go further and show that the word is not a loan word that has come in since the Conquest.

Yet from time to time, I felt a bit disoriented by Nabhan’s journey.  And I think the reason is this.  He is an American tracing his roots.  And in that quest, certain distinctions–ones that he is perfectly aware of as a scholar–tend to get overlaid by the dynamic of the story itself.  The wave of immigration from the Middle East to the Americas in the early twentieth century, when his ancestors arrived, comes from a different place and a different time from the first wave from the Islamic western Mediterranean of the sixteenth century.  That earlier wave included Jews as well as Muslims, many of whom were Spanish or Berber rather than Arab (though this term is pretty elastic).  The Siwa oasis of the Sahara, which Diana Bujua has written about eloquently here,  has striking differences from the Lebanon-Syrian border.

So I’d love to see this first step taken further.  Granted that there are both ecological parallels and historic links between the two great deserts (or three if you include the Sahara), are we now in a position to tell a more detailed story about how these have worked to produce the contemporary scene in the arid (and the non arid) regions that stretch from the part of the United States that was once part of Mexico down through Mexico itself?

The Islamic-Christian culinary connection is one that fascinates lots of readers of my blog. So when I saw that Cathy Kaufman had published this piece in the IACP history of food newsletter, Prandial Post, I asked her if I could re-publish it here since many of you are not members of the International Association of Culinary Professionals.

Cathy is always worth reading on food history.   Her dual training and (more important) work as both a lawyer and a professional cook means that she brings kitchen experience and a sharp eye for argument and evidence to whatever she talks about.

She will be happy to respond to comments.  Thanks Cathy.

The Roots of Rhythm: Where does the New Orleans’ Mardi Gras Beignet Come From?

New Orleans’ famous Café du Monde has an equally famous limited menu: chicory-laced coffee (served black or au lait) and beignets, gossamer pillows of fried yeasted dough buried under an avalanche of powdered sugar. This simple combination delights tourists and locals (who call them “doughnuts,” using the term in its non-cakey sense) in the never-ending revelry that marks New Orleans. Like so much of New Orleans’ culinary culture, the beignet is part of New Orleans’ French ancestry.

Beignets are widely claimed to have been introduced to New Orleans in 1727 by a group of Ursuline nuns who founded an academy for girls in what was then New France. Nuns are always good for origination myths (think of the nuns in New Spain who are popularly credited with inventing molé poblano for a visiting bishop in the late sixteenth century), so the culinary fakelore antennae should be on high alert. There may be yet-undiscovered beignet recipes hidden in early Louisiana manuscripts, but among the first beignet recipes published in New Orleans (under the name “doughnut”) is the one found in The Creole Cookbook, dating to 1885. The recipe is worth quoting because it may offer clues to the origins of beignets and their migration from the Old to the New World:

Doughnuts. Three lbs of sifted flour, 1 lb of powdered sugar, 3 lbs of butter, 4 eggs, ½ cup of the best brewers’ yeast, 1½ pints of milk, 1 teaspoon powdered cinnamon, 1 grated nutmeg, a tablespoon of rosewater, fry them in lard and grate fine sugar over them.

Tracing the possible origins of the Mardi Gras Beignet

At the risk of preaching heresy to denizens of The Big Easy, Mardi Gras did not originate in New Orleans, nor was New Orleans the first place in what was to become the United State to celebrate Mardi Gras (that honor goes to Mobile, Alabama, which can trace Mardi Gras to 1703). Literally “Fat Tuesday,” Mardi Gras had been a Christian feast throughout Catholic Europe since the Middle Ages. On the day before Ash Wednesday, when the strictest fasting requirements of the Church year would settle in for the Lenten season, Catholics (and even some post-Reformation Protestants) would stuff themselves silly with soon-to-be-forbidden foods. During the nearly seven weeks of Lent, devout Catholics forewent foods that might excite venality—meat, dairy, animal fats, and eggs— to put themselves in the proper mindset for the Holy Week culminating in Christ’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. To work down the stores of proscribed foods, Catholics indulged in Carnavale, where these foods featured prominently during the few days prior to Ash Wednesday. The derivation of the name “carnavale” is open to dispute, but many believe that it is the vernacularization of the Latin caro levare, meaning to lift [away] meat.

Whatever the derivation, foods rich in meat, eggs, dairy, and animal fats mark the holiday, although unlike the essential Thanksgiving turkey, different regions and ethnic groups favor variations on the theme of fried dough. Pancakes are consumed in England for Shrove Tuesday, while oliebollen, a type of doughnut are found in Holland. Jelly-filled malasadas from Portugal, cream-filled German fasnachts, and custard-filled Polish pạczki all are closely related. Many different Italians treats are popular; a relatively unusual dish from Emilia-Romagna (albeit eaten year-round) pairs yeasted fried dough with an assortment of cured meats and is known as gnocchi fritti con affetati. These gnocchi are worlds removed from the familiar boiled and baked dumplings served in a rich sauce: these are finger foods, hot balloons of slightly sweetened dough that the diner wraps around prosciutto or other fatty meats. Served immediately out of the fryer, the heat gently softens the fat in the meats and forms an unctuous sweet and salty mouthful. A fuller description and recipe is available at http://convivial.blogs.com/my_weblog/2006/01/gnoccho_fritto_.html

Allowing for some irregularities in spelling, beignets have been a part of the French kitchen since at least the Middle Ages, and many recipes for beignets appear in French works around the same time when the Ursuline nuns allegedly introduced beignets to New Orleans. Massialot’s Le Cuisinier roial et bourgeois (1691), Le Cuisinier gascon (1747) and Le Dictionnaire portatif de cuisine (1767) all acknowledge beignets as a type of pastry fried in butter, lard or sometimes oil, leavened either with brewers’ yeast or eggs that can either stand on their own or act as a dense batter for sweet or savory morsels. According to Le Grand Robert de la langue française, the term seems to have acquired its modern spelling in Olivier de Serres’s Théâtre d’agriculture (1605). De Serres commented that apples worked particularly well in “tartellages, beignets and similar delicacies.”

Beignets have been associated with Mardi Gras in France since at least the sixteenth century. Edmond Huguet’s Dictionnaire de la lague française du seizième siècle (1925) identifies “bignetz” as something eaten during “les Jours gras Bancquetz,” citing the usage by Pierre Gingore in his play Le Jeu du Prince des Sotz et de Mere Sotte, first performed on Mardi Gras in 1512. A seventeenth-century work by the Dutch Calvinist Philips de Marnix was quickly translated into French as Différences de la Religions; it identifies “bignets” as a food for the last day before Lent.

Le Trésor de la langue française traces the earliest known use of beignet as a culinary term to the Roman de Fauvel of 1314, which lists an array of medieval pastries: “Il y ot gauffres et oublees. . .pommes d’espices, darioles, crespines, bignez et roissoles.” Mots de Table, Mots de Bouche (1996), an etymological and historical dictionary of gastronomy, suggests that beignet might have been adapted from “bugne,” meaning either an architectural bosse or a bump in the Provençal dialect. The visual affinity is obvious. Mots de Table goes further, however, to suggest that “buignets” were introduced into Provence by Saracens (i.e., Muslims living in Europe) in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.

The Saracen connection is intriguing. Numerous scholars have persuasively argued that medieval European courtly cuisine was heavily influenced by the sophisticated cooking of the Islamic world, primarily through the proximity of the Moorish courts in Andalusia, Sicily, and southern Italy. Karen Hess has suggested in The Carolina Rice Kitchen (1992) that there may be underexplored connections between the cuisine of Provence and the cooking of the Caliphates. I propose that Mardi Gras beignets may have their origin in the medieval Islamic dish luqam al qadi, a version of which appears in the Baghdad Cookery Book of 1226 AD/623 AH. That recipe, as translated by A.J. Arberry, instructs: “Make a firm dough. When fermented, take in the size of hazelnuts and fry in sesame oil. Dip in syrup and sprinkle with fine ground sugar.” According to Claudia Roden in A Book of Middle Eastern Food, the syrup would be flavored with rose and orange blossom waters, two of the Islamic world’s outstanding culinary inventions.

There is more circumstantial evidence supporting an Andalusian introduction of beignets into Mediterranean France. The Spanish name for yeasted fritters is “buñuelos,” and while I have not traced the etymology of the Spanish term, I would be surprised if it did not share a common root with the Provençal bugne. Moreover, pets de nonne, deep-fried balls of airy choux paste, were known as “Spanish beignets” in the late Middle Ages, again associating deep-fried dough with Spain. Keeping in mind that Andalusia was under Islamic rule from the eighth until the end of the fifteenth century, many Islamic foods had ample opportunity to be integrated into what has evolved into Spanish cuisine.

Another reason to believe that beignets may have migrated from the Islamic to the Christian worlds is that the deep-frying used to prepare beignets is a relatively expensive technique, requiring a profligate use of fat and preferring metal pans to clay to withstand the high temperatures that the hot fat reaches. Deep-frying thus would have been more typically practiced at the elite end of the spectrum, so that recipes for fritters likely were distributed at the courtly level, only later to be diffused downwards. Cordoba, in Andalusia, was home to one of the wealthiest courts in the High Middle Ages when the buignet made its way to Provence, and the Islamic world had a more developed written recipe tradition in the thirteenth century than anything in Christian Europe.

The similarities between the luqam and the beignet are unmistakable. All of the key elements of the Creole Cookery Book’s doughnuts are found in luqam, save the choice of frying medium. However, what ultimately makes luqam al qadi so tempting as the origin of the Mardi Gras beignet is the use to which devout Muslims put the little pastries: they were a traditional part of the meal breaking the Ramadan fast. Sephardic Jews also used sweet fritters called bimuelos to break the Yom Kippur fast, according to David Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, authors of A Drizzle of Honey. (In recent years these treats have migrated through the calendar to become associated with Hanukah.) The bimuelos are the Jewish dialect for the Spanish buñuelos, and in the relatively tolerant and cosmopolitan world of Saracen Spain in the High Middle Ages, it is hardly surprising that Muslims, Christians, and Jews might have traded recipes, making the necessary adjustments for their dietary restrictions. Thus, while Muslims could never use the pork fat for frying called for in the Creole Cookery Book, the presence of rose water and the association of fritters with fasting among the three European religions of the medieval period suggests an Islamic origin for the Mardi Gras beignet.

Cathy Kaufman

Mardi Gras Beignets

The original brewers’ yeast as been omitted in favor of dry yeast.

1 lb all purpose flour plus more for shaping

14 grams instant yeast

20 grams granulated sugar

1/3 cup milk

1 tablespoon orange flower water

6 oz sweet butter

3-4 extra large eggs, room temperature, as needed

14 grams slat

Lard or other fat for deep frying

Superfine or confectioner’s sugar

1. Combine 4 oz flour with the yeast, granulated sugar, milk, and orange flower water to make a leavening dough. Form into a ball, cover with a bowl, and let double in volume.

2. Paddle the butter until aerated in a stand mixer. Add 3 eggs, 1 at a time, until incorporated. Combine the salt and remaining flour and fold into the butter mixture. Add the leaven and paddle to incorporate. If the dough seems dry, ass as much of the last egg as needed to make a pliable dough.

3. Turn into a greased bowl, cover, and let rise until doubled. Deflate the dough, cover again, and let rise until doubled.

4. Roll the dough on a lightly floured surface into a ½ inch thick sheet and cut into 2 inch squares. Cover with a floured cloth and let rise for 30 minutes.

5. Heat the cooking fat to 370° F. Working in batches, fry the beignets until golden brown, turning once. Drain on absorbent toweling, dust with sugar, and serve immediately.

For those coming late to this discussion, we’ve been kicking around possible origins for the Mallorcan and Menorcan ensaimada here, as well as the puzzles of its spread (why did it get to Argentina, Puerto Rica, and the Philippines but skip Mexico) here.

Adam Balic isn’t happy with a Moorish origin for ensaimadas

I think that to prove a link with the Iberian Moors, then the first thing that needs to be demonstrated is that the origin of the pastry goes back that far in this location. By the early/mid 16th century the Papal court kitchen were producing pastries identical to ensaimadas in all important respects, so the technique was widespread at an early date, with no direct Arabic influence. Which isn’t to say that both the Balearic and Italian pastries don’t have Arabic connections, but I don’t see the evidence for this yet.

He continues

I also have this etymological bombshell. This is the OED entry for “Seam” (a name for a type of fat, used in England for cooking).

Forms: 2-3 seime, 3 seim, 4-5 saym, (5 sayme, 5 sem), 5-6 seme, 6-7 saime, same, 6, 9 Sc. seyme, 7 seame, 8-9 dial. and Sc. saim, 7- seam. [a. OF. saim (also saime fem.), later sain, mod.Fr. only in saindoux lard; a Com. Rom. word, = Pr. sagin-s, saïns, Catal. sagin, sagi, Sp. sain, It. saime:{em}popular L. *sag{imac}men, related to classical L. sag{imac}na fattening, fatness.]

So the derivation of “ensaimidas” could easily be from Latin (or even French for that matter), as easily as Arabic.

My thoughts.  Nice find in the OED.  Can’t wait to get back to Guanajuato and check it as I’m not prepared to shell out for the on-line OED.  Does the OED give any uses?  And what type of fat?  And what about common Latin o or Greek origins for both Arabic and European uses of “saim” or related word as there are common roots for “semita” or “cemita?”

And what about the possibility that both the Papal recipes and the ensaimada (fat raised pastries) both have had Arabic origins, the one through (say) Sicily, the other through al-Andalus?

I probably missed earlier postings, but it seems likely that ensaimadas evolved on Mallorca during its Moorish occupation. The argument against this is that the Moors didn’t use lard (saim in Catalan), but the word probably has an Arabic root, and in any case, the pastry skills of the moors were far more advanced than those of Medieval European cooks. Think baclavas and kadaifs. Think also croissants whose texture correlates with that of an ensaimada. The Moors turned a blind eye to wine making in the Balearics, so I think this pastry is another link in your Hispano-Arabic chain.

I am always happy to have more links in the Hispano-Arabic chain so I am happy with this theory.  Any more objective folk out there who want to raise doubts?

]]> http://www.rachellaudan.com/2009/05/ensaimadas-again-more-moorish.html/feed 0 http://www.rachellaudan.com/2009/03/why-not-mesoamerican-influences-on-mole.html http://www.rachellaudan.com/2009/03/why-not-mesoamerican-influences-on-mole.html#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:16:40 +0000 Rachel Laudan http://www.rachellaudan.com/?p=1110 Some time ago, a commentator (Tim) raised the following question about my thesis that Mexican mole is basically an Islamic dish transported to Mexico (just hit mole in the tags section). Here’s what he said.

Your argument is well and good until you look at the bigger picture. You don’t need a liberal attitude toward multiculturalism for ingredients and techniques to spread between cultures. Were the European colonial powers not trying to enter into the markets of the East Indies to access their spices?

Just look at the history of chocolate. The Mesoamericans had their own native cacao drinks, which the Europeans tweaked with sugar and milk to produce the renowned European chocolate-making traditions we see today. The fact that mole recipes include indigenous ingredients such as cacao and chili peppers indicate that there were definately influences coming from the Mesoamerican side.

In fact, your entire argument is based on cross-cultural influences between Hindu, Muslim, and Christian cultures. Why is it such a stretch to suppose Mesoamerican influences into the picture?

Thanks Tim.  Comments always help sharpen ideas.  Here’s the short answer.

I do not deny that Mesoamerican ingredients such as cacao and chiles slip into mole.  In any culinary exchange, ingredients are the very easiest things to include (see current fusion cooking).

My point is that the Spanish brought an entire cuisine to Mexico–ideas, ingredients, techniques, plants, farming.  One of the parts of this cuisine was a way of making a rich spicy stew.  If they added cacao and chile to that, fine.  It was an easy change to make.  But it does not change the point that the cuisine was from al-Andalus and ultimately from the center of Islam.

And I don’t see the adoption of cacao in Europe as being something as easy as tweaking.  It was a transformation.  Hot not cold, sweet not savory, embedded in a different religion.  And I think the milk was a long time coming.  But the drinks are another discussion.

Thanks again for an interesting commentary.

Here’s a Sunday dinner we had with our friend Jordi and his family just outside Barcelona a year or so ago.

First course:  Fideu.  Short thin pasta fried until crisp in oil, then cooked in fish broth until tender.  Served with aioli.  The real stuff. Just garlic and oil.

Second course.  The fish, the source of the broth.

Third course.  Bought pastries.

Here’s a meal I can have with my neighbor across the street any time.

First course.  Fideos.  Short thin pasta fried until crisp in oil, then cooked in chicken broth until tender.  Served with a few cooked black beans and fresh Mexican cheese on top.  (Versions of this are a Mexican standard–many have tomatoes but I prefer them without).

Second course.  The chicken, source of the broth, served with one of half a dozen sauces.

Here’s a link to a picture of Mexican fideos, though not the same recipe.

Accidental similarity.  Of course not.  Mexico has its own old pasta making tradition that goes back, I suspect, to the Conquista though there aren’t many records.  But there is some evidence.   Here’s a press for pasta in the great monastery of Yurriria in the south of Guanajuato.  This is an Augustinian foundation,l a fortress monastery from just a few years after the Conquest.  Each of those tiles is a foot square so this is some mean press.

And there are old-established companies making dry pasta in Mexico.  Their history is yet to be explored.  But there is a sufficient market that the Italians are moving in.  See two bags below: traditional Mexican on the left, Italian Barilla made in Mexico on the right.

So what does this have to do with the Islamic connection?  Because most historians of food believe that the pasta of Catalonia and Andalucia was Islamic in origin.

Now to Americans a sherbet usually means an icecream, an icecream that is rather less rich than the custard-based ones and often based on fruit, though recipes vary a good bit. So the question is what’s the link between ice creams, Turkish sherbet drinks, and Mexican agua frescas?

Luckily the food historians Alan Davidson and Laura Mason dug out many of the connections–though not the Mexican link–and they are laid out in the article on sherbet in the Oxford Companion to Food.

Let’s jump back about a thousand years. At that time the Arabic word for a cold, sweet, non-alcoholic drink often based on fruits was sharâb. The Spanish and the Italians, impressed with Islamic cuisine, picked this up and it moved into European languages as the French sirop and the English syrup.

Meantime, the meaning of sharâb was shifting in Arabic to include alcoholic drinks (a meaning it apparently still has in Turkish and Syrian Arabic). Whoops. So in the later Middle Ages a new word for the non-alcoholic drink entered the lexicon, sharbât. If you go to English-language Middle Eastern cook books, you’ll find a plenitude of these sherbets, like Nevin Halici’s pomegranate sherbet.

Once more the Europeans picked it up, it being the origin of the Italian sorbetto, the French sorbet, and the English sherbet. Since these drinks were served cool, the name became applied indifferently to iced fruit drinks and drinkable ices (and in England to certain kinds of candy or confectionery as well, but that’s another story).

But what about the Mexicans and their aguas frescas? Well, the syrup-sherbet vocabulary just simply isn’t around in Mexican Spanish (except for the verb sorber, to sip). They use terms such as agua fresca or agua de sabor (flavored water). For syrups, they use almíbar (obviously a term with Arabic origins) or miel (honey) as in miel de agave (agave syrup).

So my suspicion is that the Spanish who arrived in Mexico had never picked up the sherbet terminology which was developing only as the Moors were being expelled from Spain. They did, however, bring with them the idea of flavored non-alcoholic drinks which still remain such an important part of the drink landscape in Mexico.

All of which just simply raises dozens of new questions to follow up on the agua fresca trail. Why did sherbets figure so largely in Islam and who drank them? Was it in Islam that these drinks originated? How far did they penetrate into Europe? And so on.

And the quote that titles this post? That’s a quotation from the Mesnevi, one of the major works of the 13th century Muslim Sufi poet and mystic, Mevlana Jalal al Din Rumi, the founder of the Mevlevi Order of Sufism. More of him too.

Perfectly good question. And I think there is an answer to this question. In a word, the servants.

Talking about servants is not particularly politically correct in the English-speaking world. It is a reminder of a time that we would like to forget.

Consider though. A nun in one of the well-to-do Mexican convents had perhaps six servants. The lady of the hacienda probably a whole lot more. The servants were the people who did the actual cooking with their mistress doling out the ingredients, teaching techniques, dictating the recipes, and making the final taste adjustments.

The world of the elite and the world of the village were not completely separate. They were linked by the to and fro of servants.

My suggestion is that that the servants made the high cuisine of their employers the festival cuisine of their villages. This is a very common pattern worldwide. I have no direct evidence so it’s just speculation. But it seems pretty probably to me.

Plus Eaton has a great couple of pages on the “covenant of salt” from ancient Mesopotamia to seventeenth century India. Salt as the symbol of the tie between patron and client.