The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (10 page)

By 1492, the Reconquista had extended Christian influence over Spain and Portugal as well, and cookbooks from neighboring Catalonia, like Master Robert’s 1520
Llibre del Coch
, began to be translated into Spanish,
bringing words for many seafood and other gastronomic terms
into Spanish, and the new Spanish word
escabeche
seems to have been one of them. Meanwhile, other descendants of sikb
j had appeared in Arabic cookbooks in Spain under different names, including another fried fish recipe very similar to the twelfth-century Egyptian sikb
j, called
“dusted fish,”
in which fish is dipped into a spicy egg batter, fried in oil, and then eaten with vinegar and oil.

By the early 1500s, Spain and Portugal thus had a number of closely related dishes involving fried fish with vinegar, usually eaten cold, which derived from various versions of sikb
j. In escabeche the fish was first fried, with or without crumbs or batter, and then soaked in vinegar and onions. In
pescado frito
, there were no onions, and the fish was invariably battered before being fried and then eaten cold with vinegar.

Sikb
j 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 r
o, 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 sikb
j, 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