by Dan Jurafsky
Sikbj had reached the western edge of Europe; but its travels were not over. In 1532–33, Francisco Pizarro González, the Spanish conquistador from Estremedura in Spain, led the army that conquered Peru. Pizzaro’s soldiers brought many European foods to Peru, including onions and citrus fruits (limes, lemons, sour oranges), but also found many local foods like potatoes and corn. They also brought a version of escabeche, probably one using sour orange juice instead of vinegar (an early Spanish dictionary, the 1732 edition of the Real Academia Española’s Diccionario de la lengua castellana, suggests that citrus used to be an alternative in escabeche):
Escabeche. A kind of sauce and marinade, made with white wine or vinegar, bay leaves, cut lemons, and other ingredients, for preserving fish and other delicacies.
The Spanish encountered indigenous coastal groups like the Moche who lived off fish and molluscs such as snails; Gutiérrez de Santa Clara (1522–1603), one of Pizarro’s soldiers, reported that “los indios desta costa . . . todo el pescado que toman en el ro, o en la mar, se lo comen crudo” [the Indians on this coast . . . all the fish they take from the river or the sea, they eat raw].
Local lore in Peru suggests that the Moche flavored this raw fish with chile. Modern ceviche (fish, lime juice, onions, chile, salt; see recipe below) is thus probably a mestizo dish that incorporates chile and raw fish from the Moche’s tradition, and onions and limes or sour oranges from the Spanish escabeche. Most scholars (such as Peruvian historian Juan José Vega and the Royal Spanish Academy’s Diccionario de la lengua española) believe that the word ceviche thus derives from a shortening of escabeche, although we may never know for sure—the word doesn’t appear in writing until almost 300 years later in lyrics for an 1820 song, where it is spelled sebiche.
Ceviche
1 pound fish (red snapper or halibut), cut into ½"–¾" cubes
½ red onion, sliced thin
cup + 1 tablespoon fresh key lime juice
¼ cup fish broth
2 teaspoons aji amarillo (Peruvian yellow chile) sauce
2 teaspoons chopped cilantro leaves
1 habanero pepper, minced
¼ teaspoon salt (to taste)
Marinate onions with lime juice in a medium bowl in refrigerator. Meanwhile, mix fish broth, aji amarillo paste, minced pepper, salt, and cilantro in a small jar and set aside. Fifteen minutes before serving, mix cut fish thoroughly with the lime juice and onions, and marinate in refrigerator for 10–15 minutes. Then add fish broth mixture into the bowl with lime juice and fish, and mix well. Serve with sliced cooked sweet potato, boiled Peruvian choclo corn kernels, or the toasted Peruvian dried corn called cancha.
Now just about the time Pizarro was bringing escabeche to Peru, another descendent of sikbj, a version of pescado frito, was also brought to Japan, this time by the Portuguese Jesuits. The Portuguese first arrived in Japan in 1543, and established an active colony in Nagasaki, where Jesuit missionaries lived and Portuguese merchants traded Chinese products from their colony in Macao. Around 1639 a recipe for battered fried fish appears in the Southern Barbarian Cookbook, a collection of Portuguese and Spanish recipes written in Japanese. This cookbook included recipes for confectionary and baked goods (the Japanese word for bread [pan] and the names for various cakes and candies all come from Portuguese), and gives the following recipe for what is clearly a version of pescado frito:
Fish dish
It is fine to use any fish. Cut the fish into round slices. Douse in flour and fry in oil. Afterward, sprinkle with powdered clove and grated garlic. Prepare a stock as desired and simmer.
By around 1750 this dish is called tempura in Japanese; Japanese food scholar Eric C. Rath suggests that the name comes from tenporari, the name of a related dish in the 1639 Barbarian Cookbook, a chicken fried with six spices (black pepper, powdered cinnamon and cloves, ginger, garlic, onions) and then served in stock. This word is likely a borrowing of the Portuguese noun tempero (seasoning) and the related verb temperar (to flavor).
Just as the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors, Jesuits, and merchants were traveling to Asia and the New World, another group left Spain and Portugal: Jews, expelled by both countries. Many of these Sephardic Jews moved to Holland and then England. In 1544, Manuel Brudo, a Portuguese crypto-Jewish doctor, wrote about the fried fish eaten by Portuguese exiles in Henry VIII’s London. Once England rescinded its own ban on Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the community grew, and fried fish dishes became widely associated with Jews.
By 1796, a cold battered fried fish with vinegar appeared in Britain in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy. Here’s her recipe for battered and fried fish soaked in vinegar and served cold, called
Take either salmon, cod, or any large fish, cut off the head, wash it clean, and cut it in slices as crimped cod is, dry it very well in a cloth, then flour it, and dip it in yolks of eggs, and fry it in a great deal of oil till it is of a fine brown and well done; take it out, and lay it to drain till it is very dry and cold. . . . have your pickle ready, made of the best white wine vinegar; when it is quite cold pour it on your fish, and a little oil on the top; they will keep good a twelvemonth, and are to be eat cold with oil and vinegar: they will go good to the East Indies.
This final note in Glasse’s recipe reminds us why this dish originated as a favorite of sailors and why it spread so quickly up the coasts of the Mediterranean. Fish sikbj and its descendants were made of an ingredient readily available at sea, and kept well for long periods, in this case preserved by the antimicrobial powers of the acetic acid in the vinegar, an immensely useful property in the days before refrigeration. As we’ll see in the next chapter, sailors and the need for food preservation played a similar role in the story of how an Asian salted fish developed into both ketchup and sushi, and even indirectly led to the invention of the cocktail.
By the early nineteenth century, the Jews began selling this cold fried fish in the streets of London. In Oliver Twist, first serialized in 1838, Dickens talks of the fried-fish warehouses of London’s East End: “Confined as the limits of Field Lane are, it has its barber, its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried-fish warehouse. It is a commercial colony of itself: the emporium of petty larceny.”
In 1852, a Times of London reporter covering a story on London’s Great Synagogue complained of being forced to pass through strange Jewish alleys “impregnated with the scents of fried fish.” The 1846 A Jewish Manual, the first Jewish cookbook in English, written by Lady Judith Cohen Montefiore, gives a recipe similar to Glasse’s, and distinguishes between Jewish fried fish and “English fried fish.” In “English” recipes, Montefiore tells us, the fish is dredged in bread crumbs and then fried in butter (or presumably lard, although Montefiore doesn’t talk about that) and served hot. “Jewish” fried fish, by contrast, is encased in an egg and flour batter and is fried in oil and served cold.
Roughly the same fried fish recipe, still eaten cold with vinegar, is considered “Jewish” as late as 1855 in Alexis Soyer’s Shilling Cookery for the People:
75. Fried Fish, Jewish Fashion.
This is another excellent way of frying fish, which is constantly in use by the children of Israel, and I cannot recommend it too highly; so much so, that various kinds of fish which many people despise, are excellent cooked by this process. . . . It is excellent cold, and can be eaten with oil, vinegar, and cucumbers, in summer time, and is exceedingly cooling.
By the mid-nineteenth century, potatoes fried in drippings came to London, probably from the north of England or Ireland. Modern fish and chips arose at the latest by 1860, as Ashkenazi Jews began to move into London and integrate Sephardic foods and customs. One of the earliest known fish and chips shops was opened by Ashkenazi Jewish proprietor Joseph Malin, combining the new fried potatoes with Jewish fried fish, and serving everything warm rather than cold.
The last time I was in London food writer Anna Colquhoun and linguist Matt Purver took me to an old-f
ashioned Dalston chippie where you can have your lovely fried haddock battered in matzo-meal batter, made from the pulverized matzos that Jewish mothers like mine still use as a breading. (It wasn’t until my twenties that I realized that matzo was not a main ingredient in other moms’ recipes for veal parmesan.)
So it seems that it’s not just melting-pot America whose favorite foods come from somewhere else. This family of dishes that are claimed by many nations as cultural treasures (ceviche in Peru, Chile, and Ecuador, fish and chips in Britain, tempura in Japan, escabeche in Spain, aspic in France) were prefigured by the ancient Ishtar worshippers of Babylon, invented by the Zoroastrian Persians, perfected by the Muslim Arabs, adapted by the Christians, fused with Moche dishes by the Peruvians, and brought to Asia by the Portuguese and to England by the Jews. And you can now find all these descendants of sikbj, sometimes on the same block, in the ethnic restaurants that fill San Francisco and other bustling cities around the world.
I’d like to think that the lesson here is that we are all immigrants, that no culture is an island, that beauty is created at the confusing and painful boundaries between cultures and peoples and religions. I guess we can only look forward to the day when the battles we fight are about nothing more significant than where to go for ceviche.
Four
Ketchup, Cocktails, and Pirates
FAST FOOD IS AMERICA’S signature export, and one of its most pervasive: Every day another few outlets open in Europe or Asia, spreading the distinctively American diet to the world. It’s ironic, then, that—just like England’s fish and chips, Japanese tempura, or Spanish escabeche—America’s hamburgers, French fries, and ketchup are not even originally ours. The borrowing is clear from what we call them: the large German contribution to American cuisine is obvious in words like hamburger, frankfurter, delicatessen, and pretzel, while French fries make their Franco-Belgian origins plain.
And, of course, ketchup is Chinese.
Chinese food has always been important in San Francisco. The Cantonese who settled the region were from the seafaring southern coastal region of Canton, and Chinese fishing and shrimping villages dotted San Francisco Bay in the nineteenth century. But the path that ketchup took from China to America didn’t come through San Francisco at all. Ketchup originally meant “fish sauce” in a dialect of China’s other southern coastal region, mountainous Fujian Province, which also gave us the word tea (from Fujianese “te”). Fujianese immigration to the United States has increased in recent years, so you can now sample Fujianese dishes in Chinatowns up and down the East Coast, paired with the homemade red rice wine that is a specialty of the province. The history of this red rice wine is intertwined with that of ketchup—but while the wine has stayed largely the same over the centuries, ketchup has undergone quite a transformation.
The story begins thousands of years ago, when people living along the coasts and rivers of Southeast Asia and what is now southern China began to preserve local fish and shrimp by salting and fermenting it into rich savory pastes. These groups didn’t leave written records but we know they spoke three ancient languages that linguists call Mon-Khmer (the ancestor of modern Vietnamese and Cambodian), Tai-Kadai (the ancestor of modern Thai and Laotian), and Hmong-Mien (the ancestor of modern Hmong). All three left traces of their languages in the old names of many rivers and mountains throughout southern China, and in the words and grammar of the southern Chinese dialects.
Especially further south and inland the Mon-Khmer and Tai lived on the freshwater fish that were plentiful in their rice paddies in the rainy seasons. To make it through the dry season they devised sophisticated preservation methods, layering local fish in jars with cooked rice and salt, covered with bamboo leaves, and left to ferment. The enzymes in the fish convert the starch in the rice to lactic acid, resulting in a salty pickled fish that could be eaten by scraping off the goopy fermented rice. Chinese historians recorded this recipe by the fifth century CE, and the exact same methods are still used by the Kam, a Tai-speaking hill tribe who make this dish, called ba som (sour fish) in the hills of China’s Guangxi province, the province where Janet’s father grew up. Anthropologist Chris Hilton, who lived with the Kam, describes a thirty-year-old ba som that literally melted in his mouth, salty but mellow like “a Parma ham,” with a “distinct sourness.”
The Chinese people, who came from further north along the Yellow River, called these southerners the “Yi” or the “Hundred Yue,” and around 200 BCE Emperor Wu of the Chinese Han dynasty began to expand the newly unified nation of China south and east toward the coast, invading the Mon-Khmer and Tai areas of what is now coastal Fujian and Guangdong. Chinese soldiers and colonists poured in, pushing the Mon-Khmer speakers south into what is now Vietnam and Cambodia, and the Tai speakers west and south into Thailand and Laos, with some tribes like the Kam remaining west in the hills of Guangxi. Evidence from early Chinese sources demonstrates that it was during this period that the Chinese adopted these fish sauces; here’s one fifth-century account:
When the Han emperor Wu chased the Yi barbarians to the seashore, he smelled a potent, delicious aroma, but could not see where it came from. He sent an emissary to investigate. A fisherman revealed that the source was a ditch in which was piled layer upon layer of fish entrails. The covering of earth could not prevent the aroma from escaping. The emperor tasted a sample of the product and was pleased with the flavor.
The Mon-Khmer and Tai speakers who remained in Fujian and Guangdong (Canton) intermarried and assimilated, becoming thoroughly Chinese but continuing to make their indigenous fish and shrimp pastes. Soon this fermented seafood was adopted widely throughout the Chinese empire and other products began to be developed there, including a fermented soybean paste (the ancestor of Japanese miso) that eventually gave rise to soy sauce and a paste made from the leftover fermented mash from wine making, which spread to neighboring countries as preservatives and flavoring agents.
By 700 CE, for example, the Japanese began to use this Southeast Asian method of fermenting fish together with rice, calling this newly borrowed food sushi. This early fermented fish, now technically called narezushi in Japanese, is the ancestor of modern sushi. Sushi evolved to its modern fresh form in the eighteenth century as the lactic fermentation was replaced with vinegar, and again in the nineteenth century when the fish began to be eaten immediately rather than waiting for it to ferment.
Meanwhile, back in the original coastal areas of Fujian and Guang-dong, fish and shrimp pastes remained a local specialty, as did another ancient fermented sauce: red-fermented rice (called hongzao in Mandarin), the lees or mash (used fermented rice) left over from making red rice wine. (The technique probably spread even further; sake lees, sake kasu, are used in Japan too as a marinade and flavoring in kasuzuke dishes like grilled kasuzuke butterfish.) Fujianese red rice wine and the resulting dishes like Red Wine Chicken, chicken browned in sesame oil with ginger and garlic and then braised in wine lees, became famous throughout China. You might like that dish too so I’m including the recipe here:
Fujian Red Rice Wine Chicken
2 tablespoons sesame oil
1 large knob of ginger, sliced
3 smashed and peeled cloves of garlic
3 chicken thighs, each cut through the bone into 3 pieces
3 tablespoons red rice wine lees
½ cup Fujian red rice wine (or Shaoxing rice wine)
2 tablespoons soy sauce (to taste)
1 teaspoon brown sugar (or pieces of Chinese rock sugar)
Salt to taste
4 dried shitake mushrooms, reconstituted in about ½ cup boiling water, removed and sliced, reserving the water
Heat sesame oil and sauté ginger and garlic until fragrant. Add chicken and sear the chicken pieces until browned, then flip and brown the other side. Push chicken aside, fry the red wine lees briefly until fragrant, then add the wine, soy, mushrooms, and mushroom liquid, stirring until the chicken is well coated. Turn the heat to low and simmer 10 or mor
e minutes or until chicken is done and sauce begins to thicken, stirring occasionally.
By the year 1200 CE, this shrimp-paste and red-rice eating region of Fujian became the bustling center of seafaring China. The port city of Quanzhou was one of the greatest and richest in the world, filled with Arab and Persian traders who prayed at the city’s seven mosques. Quanzhou was the start of the Maritime Silk Road, and Marco Polo marveled at the vast number of ships in the harbor as he passed through on his way from China to Persia. By the fifteenth century Fujianese shipwrights built the great treasure fleet of Chinese Admiral Zheng He that sailed to Persia and as far as Madagascar in Africa, and Fujianese-built ships took Chinese seamen and settlers to ports throughout Southeast Asia.
In Southeast Asia, fermented fish products rather than soy products had remained the most popular seasonings, and the Vietnamese, Khmer, and Thai had developed many sophisticated fermented seafood products, like the fish sauce called nuoc mam in Vietnamese or nam pla in Thai, a pungent liquid with a beautiful red-caramel color. Fish sauces occur in Europe and the Middle East as well, probably developing independently of the Asian sauces. The ancient Babylonians had a fish sauce called siqqu, and classical Greece had a sauce called garos that probably came from their colonies along the Black Sea, a region that is still famous for salted fish products like caviar. Garos became the Roman fish sauce garum, eaten and made throughout the Roman world. The garum from Hispania was particularly prized; you can go tour the ruins of the garum factories under the streets of Barcelona.
