Searching for the Pre-Expulsion Foods of Spain

REPAST VOLUME XVII, NUMBER 1 WINTER 2001 SEARCHING FOR THE PRE-EXPULSION FOODS OF SPAIN reversal of their beliefs were called conversos. A third group refused both options, and many of these, along with Muslims who could see the handwriting on the wall, went to hide out in the forested slopes and whitewashed villages of the Alpujarras, the Moors’ historic production center for raw silk and soon the main base of Muslim and Jewish resistance. Together over the next several years the villagers launched heroic revolts, but these were quelled with the utmost cruelty, leading to new strictures against Muslims, who were given the same choice of conversion or exile as the Jews. The Plaza Nueva where I was dining at Sibari’s that evening, built by the Catholic monarchs as the new center of Granada, was the scene of Cardinal Cisneros’ 1499 bonfire of 80,000 books from the Muslim university library. In a way that resonates today, the fates of Muslims and Jews were inextricably linked. by Randy K. Schwartz I had a surprise last summer from the first dinner that I ate in Granada, Spain. It was a Sunday, and I had chanced upon a restaurant called Sibari whose blue and white logo, with a six-pointed star, suggested a Jewish or Muslim origin. I was happy to eat outside, away from the soccer fans yelling at a televised match, and to watch the flocks of birds flitting about the Plaza Nueva at dusk. But once I’d been seated, my eyes opened wide when I found that the evening’s menu featured jamón con habas: ham with fava beans! Although I normally don’t eat meat, and my heritage is Jewish, I confess that I couldn’t resist trying such a “forbidden” casserole. It was glorious. The baby green habas (fava or broad beans), glistening with olive oil in a glazed earthenware stewpot, had the robust spring flavor of Brussels sprouts. They’d been cooked with rich, chewy morsels of cured pork, the famous dulce (sweet) ham of the white Trevélez pig. The pig is named for its home, the highest village in Spain (4,842 feet), up in the Alpujarras mountains about 25 miles to the southeast. The pigs are slaughtered in Trevélez in the winter, their hams weakly brined for eight days and then hung outdoors, where months of cool, dry breezes over snow-capped peaks do the brunt of the curing. The hams are then sweated over the summer. Traditionally, Trevélez was the only place in Iberia that could produce such low-salt hams.1 In the chambers of the Inquisition, the rumored avoidance of pork was a most telling piece of evidence against the converso accused of holding fast to the Jewish or Muslim faith. Gitlitz and Davidson recount many heartbreaking cases, including that of a Jewish woman who was burned alive in Catholic-ruled Extremadura in 1485 after her servant told inquisitors that she had to keep salt pork in a separate dish when preparing Sabbath meals, because her mistress would not eat it.2 A decree in Granada in 1526 banned spoken and written Arabic, as well as Muslim dress, adornment, circumcision, halal slaughter and other customs. Such measures had already been taken against the Jews. A last desperate uprising in the Alpujarras in 1568 was again violently suppressed, and the mountain villages were soon completely emptied of non-Christians. The silk industry, once Granada’s chief source of wealth, withered and died for lack of craftspeople. Where there had once been mulberry trees, the Christians began raising their white pigs of Trevélez. What a bargain, then. And the same 2100-peseta menu also brought me bread, wine, and another pork-inflected favorite in the form of tortilla al Sacromonte, a firm, warm, disk-shaped, 8-inch egg omelette filled with bits of ham, onion, green peas, and the brains and testicles of lamb. I had never before tasted these minced lamb organs traditionally enjoyed by Jews and Arabs in the Middle East; they brought to the omelette a pleasant flavor of oysters. There was no more pork on my menu that night, although ham could easily have garnished my bowl of gazpacho andaluz (as I found out later on my trip), or have been wrapped around the sweet slice of melon, served instead as my dessert. Constantly under suspicion, most conversos had to make sure they ate pork in public frequently, a practice that puts my dining experience at Sibari’s in a different light. Sometimes the dish was a Christian staple like ham and eggs, which the converts called duelos y quebrantos, “trials and sorrows.”3 But pork would also be added to older nonChristian dishes. For centuries, the basic meal of Spain had come from a stewpot set on a low fire, or placed amid dying embers to conserve expensive fuel. For Jews, this had made possible the warm Sabbath casserole, the adafina (from the Arabic al-dafína, “buried thing”4) or ani. An Inquisition memorandum outlines the custom: Pork is Never Just Pork As I drove around the country, passing one smelly hoghauling truck after another, the tables of Spain would surprise me with many more porcine dishes. I have traveled in other pig-loving areas of Europe as well as our own South, but to be honest the sheer quantity and variety of pork in Spain was bewildering. Then it dawned on me: in Spain, pork is never just pork. It is in fact an emblem of Christian faith and power. Ani, which means hot food, was usually made with fat meat, chickpeas, faba beans, green beans, hard-boiled eggs, and any other vegetable. It was cooked all night on Friday, because on Saturday the Jews could not cook food. And that dish was kept hot on its warming oven until mealtime on Saturday. And thus this ani was a principal way of keeping the Sabbath.5 To see why, consider the history. When Granada, the last stronghold of Arab rule on the peninsula, fell in 1492, the Catholic monarchs Fernando and Isabel, who had launched the Inquisition twelve years earlier, demanded that Jews either convert or leave the country. Some 400,000 Jews were shipped off in short order. Those swearing instead to a Jewish converts continued making their stews, but on pain of death they could not openly make them in the old way that honored the Sabbath. It was necessary as well to 7 REPAST VOLUME XVII, NUMBER 1 WINTER 2001 toss some loathsome piece of pig into the pot: fresh pork, cured ham, sausages, even ears, feet, or tail. Mingling with ingredients that were suspect as preferred foods of Muslims and Jews (olive oil, Asian grains and fruits and vegetables, eastern spices), the pork afforded a kind of protective stamp, a legal seal of endorsement. Thus branded “Christian,” the stews were safe for any Spaniard to eat. Alicia Riós sums up that Spanish cocidos, or regional stews, “may be traced back to the ancient Jewish adafina, a stew that the Spaniards Christianized by adding pork.”6 on the nuts of the bellota oak, for which they forage in large herds out in the open. The bellota nuts (from Arabic balloot, “oak”) are more like chestnuts than the acorns we know in North America. The resulting hams have the nuts’ sweetness, and are salt-cured for over two years. From ancient times, Iberians themselves ate these nuts fresh, or dried and ground into bread flour. In 12th- and 13th-Century Spain, poor people surviving on them in this way were called bolótiín (“oakies”), but there was also a big export trade of the nuts to Italy for use in sweets.9 Thus, the tables of Spain were “ethnically cleansed.” As a reminder of their humiliation, converted Jews and Muslims living in Christian areas were called marranos, Spanish for “swine.” The life and death struggles leading to such a turnabout are barely hinted at in the bland tourist brochures: Since tapa is Spanish for “lid, cover,” people guessed that tapas arose in the 1700s, when tavernkeepers might serve a glass of wine covered by a slice of bread adorned with bits of food. Far-fetched, but that’s popular wisdom! The tapas tradition is actually centuries older than that. As Corriente’s dictionary notes, tapáshúr was a medieval Andalucían term meaning “tidbit, delicacy,” from an Arabic verb meaning “to be prosperous, to live in luxury.”10 A luxurious array of sausages, olives, cheeses and pastries, presented as appetizers on small plates, customarily greeted guests at Moorish homes. Both Jews and Arabs in Spain made sausages out of lamb or other meats, and they pioneered the addition of spices, sugar, raisins and other strong flavors.11 The Christians later substituted pork and various grades of New World paprika, the latter giving both morcilla and chorizo their redness. Besides its Moorish and Jewish influences, Granada’s extraordinarily rich cuisine mixes a variety of different cultures. Especially in those previously prohibited foods brought in by new inhabitants. In this way there appeared, for example, the broad beans with ham, whose origin from the 7 east of Trevélez, possesses a delicate and sweet flavour. I went to Granada last summer to attend a conference that dug up what many Europeans have tried to bury or to claim for others, the mathematical and scientific discoveries of Arabs. As I traveled around eastern and southern Spain and into northern Morocco, I could see that Arabs and Jews had also exerted a huge influence on European cuisine. Not surprisingly, however, few of their dishes themselves have survived in an unadulterated state. Their contributions in cookery, like those in science, must be dug up and dragged into the light of day. Here, then, is another case of older Andalucían traditions being transformed. Certain types of Moorish tapáshúr were transplanted to a wholly new context, that of taverns with their alcoholic drinks. On Sundays, when Catholic women went home to cook after mass, their husbands might tarry in pubs conversing, drinking, and whetting their appetites with tapas.12 One tourist brochure— which lists the best places to taste favorites like eggplants in honey, tripe with chickpeas, or fried anchovies stuffed with spinach, pinenuts and raisins— acknowledges the debt: What is the Origin of Spanish Tapas? Over time, the original Moorish character of many cocidos and other Spanish dishes became hidden. Converts reconciled themselves to various aspects of Christian life. In a striking case, a Jewish converso family was hauled before the inquisitors in Toledo in 1621 after an African servant spied them secretly making their own morcilla (pig-blood sausage) and adding it to their stew. Their secrecy and their arrest were necessary because this occurred during Lent.8 The arabic or arabic-andalucian is without doubt the culture which prevails and defines granadan gastronomy. Therefore the sampling of tapas can be considered an exquisite and enjoyable journey through history and granadan culture and is, at the same time, the best way to identify and understand the people of Granada.13 In Granada, I tried pig-blood sausage in a spicy version, morcilla al infierno, that is now a very popular tapa, or finger food. Turned from its casing, the morcilla is a reddish-black pudding, which was served to us smeared inside little buns that had a sweet buttery glaze. Breadcrumb Soups and Salt Cod Built Iberia Another striking inversion of foodways awaited me at a Granada restaurant called Las Almenas, which is Spanish for “the battlements” (from the Arabic al-man‘a14). Since they were strong in seafood there, I ordered sopa de maimones marinero for starters and was brought a deep bowl of broth made from fish stock and a bit of tomato paste. In the broth were mussels, baby shrimp, and cubes of a pure white fish, spongy and succulent— I believe it was monkfish, rape mozárabe in Spanish (more on the Mozarabs below). I sampled other tapas at Taberna Casa Enrique, a bodega-style Granada tavern established in 1870 by a family whose third generation is now in charge. Pickled artichoke hearts, each draped with a large, filleted anchovy, were my favorite there. The chorizo ibérico bellota were thin, deepred slices of cured pork sausage that covered my plate like coins and were served with a quiver of toothpicks. This hard chorizo was spicy and sweet, made of coarsely chopped (not ground) bits of meat and fat from Ibérico pigs of Salamanca. Despite the New World tomato and the nonkosher shellfish and monkfish, this soup has telltale signs of a Sephardic past. First there is maimon itself, which means “luck, good fortune” in Aramaic and is a popular name in Hebrew. Most famous is Moshe ben Maimon (Maimónides), the rabbi, physician and philosopher born in Moorish In contrast to the Trevélez pigs, the thoroughbred Ibérico pigs, raised in a few places on the peninsula, engorge 8 REPAST VOLUME XVII, NUMBER 1 WINTER 2001 Mozarabic, an extinct Latin-derived language once spoken alongside Arabic by the Mozarabs, the “Arabized” or bilingual Christians of Moorish Spain.17 Food historian Raymond Sokolov has called gazpacho “the soup the tomato overwhelmed,” an apt description of the now prevalent postexpulsion version, gazpacho andaluz.18 It is made mostly from tomato and green pepper, both New World plants. Perhaps more important is the absence of almonds or fava beans as found in older gazpachos like ajo blanco. Córdoba. Maimon and other Jewish and Arab physicians touted the healthfulness of hot soups, which were a fixture of the common diet of Spain and had a reputation for bringing good luck. They ranged from crude porridges of wheat or barley meal, to substantial soups of vegetables, fish or lamb. Most were somewhere in between, typically humble meat broths with oil and vinegar, herbs and spices, in which stale bread would be sopped or breadcrumbs sprinkled as the soup was completed. The garlic-rich broths known as maimones were of this latter type.15 By itself, then, gazpacho andaluz does not make a satisfactory one-dish repast for a peasant or anyone else. It only “works” as an early course of a larger meal, which is how I always ate it. The gazpacho andaluz at Sibari’s was deep orange, with a few bits of raw onion, tomato and green pepper afloat as garnish. Over in the Sacromonte district, the version served at a zambra gitana (gypsy grotto restaurant) was thinner and yellowish-orange, with more vinegar and less tomato, slurped right from the bowl without a spoon. At a streetcorner restaurant in Málaga, the soup was pinkishorange, also thin but served with a saucer of chopped onion, green pepper, cucumber, tomato and pimento for sprinkling. At the opposite extreme, at a neighborhood place in Antequera I tried the local version, porra antequerana. Intensely deep orange, as stiff as prepared salad dressing from a jar, it was served in an earthenware bowl. Resting on the surface were wedges of tomato, chopped hardcooked egg and yes, salty morsels of jamón ibérico. Since one good garlicky dish of seafood deserves another, I ordered supremas bacalao con glase ajo (codfish fillets glazed with garlic) as my main fare at Las Almenas. Two thick fillets of cod had been placed skin-side down in a ceramic dish, topped with a layer of very lemony, pale yellow garlic “mayonnaise,” and baked until the topping glazed over and the skin caramelized. Served in the baking dish, surrounded by a tomato sauce and flanked by stalks of baked young asparagus, it was a robust and satisfying meal. The Spanish term bacalao, like the Portuguese bacalhau, can mean either fresh or salted cod. To specify salt cod, Spaniards can ask for arriero, a contraction of bacalao arriero, “muleteer’s cod.” Muleteers were medieval Muslim and Jewish merchants who would trek with their wares from the Spanish coast across the rugged interior by pack mule. The salting of cod, an invention of the time, enabled muleteers, shepherds, and other landlocked Iberians to survive on ocean fish. I was fascinated to learn that the word arriero derives from the Arabic Arree! Arree!, the ubiquitous “giddyap” of the muleteer.16 Paella: the World on a Single Plate It was late at night in Torredembarra, a fishing town some 10 miles north of Tarragona on the northeast coast of Spain. I hadn’t eaten, and drove up to the first place I found open on the sea road, the Bar/Restaurant Tropic. There, surrounded by tables of dingily dressed fishermen while “Gone With the Wind,” dubbed in Spanish, played overhead on TV, I feasted on one of the best meals I have ever had, a paella marinera. In Granada I ate little croquettes of finely pounded salt cod, and another type of croquette made with ham. These were appetizers at a conference dinner at the Carmen de los Chapiteles, a restaurant perched above the river Darro at the edge of the Albaicín, the most recognizably Moorish district of the city. Both types of croquette were oblong and filled with a béchamel-type sauce, and had been rolled in breadcrumbs and gently deep-fried in oil until crispy. The paella was preceded by a grand ensalada catalunha that featured a large flank of tuna, halved hardcooked eggs draped with anchovies, a silky-pink slice of jamón serrano, three kinds of olives and nearly a dozen other items. The croquettes were followed by bowls of ajo blanco (“white garlic”), a refreshing cold soup of Andalucía. In Granada it is made by soaking bread or crumbs in water and vinegar, then beating this with olive oil, fava bean flour, and garlic pounded with salt. The resulting emulsification is smooth, drinkable, and milky-white. In a renowned version from Málaga, a port city to the southwest, ground blanched almonds replace the bean flour, and a few Muscat grapes that have been peeled, halved, and seeded are floated in the bowl before serving. Ajo blanco is one of many uncooked breadcrumb soups eaten in Moorish times by muleteers and peasants as simple midday meals, prepared raw from stale bread with a mortar and pestle. Our meal at Los Chapiteles included two other eminently Moorish dishes: berenjenas rellenas, or eggplant halves stuffed with minced vegetables and breadcrumbs and topped with beaten eggs before baking; and cordero asado, or roast leg of lamb, glazed with the juice of Seville (sour) oranges sweetened with sugar. The chief glory of a properly made paella is, ironically, the rice itself. I stared in wonder at the 12-inch pan that was set on a little table beside me as the waiter carefully transferred some of its contents to my plate. The rice was short-grain white rice but it was a deep golden brown, for it had been simmered in a rich fish broth to which saffron and other spices had been added. The broth is typically made from fish bones and skin and mortar-pounded shellfish carapaces, making it taste like the very brine where the seafood once swam. As the broth simmers in the uncovered pan, most of the water vaporizes leaving a thick slurry, golden brown and slightly grainy: yes, like mud. Crowned with mussels, oysters, and a cabrajo (langoustine) and langostino (jumbo shrimp) with their claws, eyeballs and antennae all intact, the dish resembled the ocean floor itself. Gazpacho, the Castilian name for cold breadcrumb soups like ajo blanco, appears to have been borrowed from Such a seafood paella is kith and kin with the fish and rice casseroles prepared for family and religious occasions in 9 REPAST VOLUME XVII, NUMBER 1 WINTER 2001 and smells of a typical 13th-Century Sephardic home in which “the fine texture and small size of the meatballs, in a deep dish awaiting diners from the brazier, convey a sense of accumulation, a mountain of abundance.”26 Such meatballs were also commonly added to the Sabbath stew, or adafina, along with chickpeas and other ingredients. In a typical Inquisition case, a Jewish conversa was tortured on the rack in Guadalajara in 1520 for what investigators called her “having practiced Jewish rites, preparing adafina and albóndigas in the Jewish fashion, and keeping the Sabbath.”27 The adafina version of albóndigas is often called armundigas in Morocco and olmendigas in Mexico. medieval Spain. The shallow, uncovered paella pan was developed from the earlier Roman patella to make the best use of heat from scarce firewood, while allowing the evaporation of moisture and the absorption of wood smoke. When the simmering was completed, the Moors would remove the skillet from the fire and sit Bedouin-style around it, eating with boxwood spoons from the common dish.19 Centuries later, in Christian Spain in the countryside around Valencia, there arose another saffron-rich paella preparation made with meats and vegetables instead of seafood, the now classic paella valenciana. Living under Islam, many social classes in Spain— and not just the wealthiest ones— had access to foods once available only in distant lands. It became customary to combine these in a single meal or even, as we see in paella, a single dish. This approach to eating was perhaps the Moors’ greatest contribution to cuisine. Fleets that operated along the Mediterranean coast netted tuna, sardines, anchovies and other seafood, which was even carried to great inland cities like Córdoba and Seville.20 The Arabs had brought rice from Asia in the 9th Century, creating paddies by draining the marshes around Lake Albufera just south of Valencia; it was a short-grain rice, which would later be transplanted elsewhere in Spain and in northern Italy.21 By 960, the Moors were producing saffron from a species of crocus they introduced to the plains of La Mancha.22 The Marrano Sweets were Preserved by Nuns Walking through downtown Tarragona, I saw a whole window display of turrón de Alicante, a high-quality, dense almond nougat carrying the name of a coastal town over 200 miles to the south. Something clicked in my memory. Once, when I was a little boy, my parents gave us some orange-flavored almond nougat sold under the name Torrone Ferrara. The tiny halfounce box in which my candy was individually packed was so cute that I held onto it. Reading the side panel now, I see that the Ferrara Confectionery Company of New York claimed the following origin for Italian torrone: The birth of torrone occurred in Cremona in 1441 at the famous wedding celebration of Francesco Sforza to Bianca Marie Visconti. The buffet featured a new sweet made of nutmeats, honey and egg whites in the shape of the famous tower of Cremona called Torrione, hence the name torrone. Also symbolic of medieval culinary riches are the tiny Spanish meatballs albóndigas, so named because of their size and shape (from the Arabic al-bunduq, “hazelnut”23). Traditionally they were made of finely minced lamb or beef, eggs, herbs and spices. The oily broth in which they were stewed would be acidulated with either lemon juice, pomegranate juice, or vinegar of raisin or tamarind, and thickened with flour. In modern Spain the meatballs are often made with a mixture of pork and beef, and are stewed in a tomato sauce.24 The occasional use of spices like saffron, cumin and cilantro is one of the few overt reminders of their Moorish origin. At a corner pastry shop in Granada I bought a pastel de carne (meat pie), a puff pastry having two or three cylindrical levels tapering up from a six-inch base. Stuffed inside were the famous stewed albóndigas. Actually, torrone was not named for any tower, and it was far from being “a new sweet” in 1441. The names of torrone, marzapane and other almond confections, along with the knowledge of how to make them, had arrived in Italy from Spain as the Christian conquest of Iberia advanced during the first few centuries of the millennium. Earlier, the Arabs had planted Spain with groves of almonds in many varieties, including Málaga’s large lawz al-jiná’in (“garden almond,” which became in Spanish almendra jardín, whence the corrupted Jordan almond in English). People in Alicante would toss almonds into a pot of honey heated to boiling on hot coals, then pour this syrup into rectangular molds lined with flour-dusted paper. The nougat came to be called turrado or turrón, from the Spanish verb turrar, “to boil on hot coals.”28 In Jijona, just north of Alicante, the almonds were first ground into paste, producing a turrón akin to the mazapan of Toledo. Iberian Jews, for whom almonds symbolically recalled the Holy Land, enjoyed turrón at Passover, Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot.29 I had the pleasure of tasting these meatballs in their original Moorish form at a bar-restaurant in Chefchaouèn, a town in the foothills of the Rif mountains in northern Morocco. Because Chefchaouèn was mostly settled in the 1500s by Muslims and Jews expelled from Granada, its architecture, cuisine and music preserve an Andalucían influence. My waiter called the little meatballs of finely minced lamb by their later Ottoman name, kefta. No more than half an inch wide, they’d been cooked in their unctuous sauce in a tagine (a North African stewpot with a conical lid), having been flavored with a careful mixture of cumin, coriander and other spices. The meatballs were arrayed around a lightly fried egg sprinkled with flat-leaf parsley, giving the dish a charming center of green on white. In time, white sugar joined honey as a sweetener for turrón and mazapan, making these among the first sugar candies produced in Europe. The Arabs in Spain had perfected sugar refinement and sugarcane irrigation, spreading the latter as far north as Castellón de la Plana (the same latitude as Philadelphia) and bringing 74,000 acres under cultivation by 1150.30 Cane is still grown on a small scale outside Málaga and Motril, mostly to make rum. I saw some isolated canebrakes in southern Spain, and segments of Albóndigas meatballs were most closely associated with the Jews of Spain, who fried them in olive oil, or cooked them in broth after stuffing them in mutton tripes tied with string.25 Swiss scholar Lucie Bolens conjures up the sights 10 REPAST VOLUME XVII, NUMBER 1 WINTER 2001 Endnotes 1. Richard Ford, Gatherings from Spain (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1906 [first published 1846]), p. 143. 2. David M.Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 110, 163-4, 178, 219. 3. Luce López-Baralt, “The Legacy of Islam in Spanish Literature,” in Salma K. Jayyusi, ed., The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 1992), pp. 521-2. 4. F. Corriente, A Dictionary of Andalusian Arabic (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 1997), p. 181 s.v. DFN. 5. Gitlitz and Davidson, p. 148. 6. Alicia Riós, “The Olla,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 1:1 (February 2001), pp. 22-24. 7. Granada Local Tourist Guide (Granada: Office of Tourism and Promotion, Granada City Council, 1999). 8. Gitlitz and Davidson, pp. 100, 210. 9. Ford, pp. 139-143; L. Benavides Barajas, Al-Andalus: La Cocina y su Historia (Motril, Spain: Ediciones Dulcinea, 1992), pp. 202-3; Corriente, p. 63 s.v. BLT. 10. Ibid., p. 38 s.v. PHSS. 11.David Waines, “The Culinary Culture of Al-Andalus,” in Salma K. Jayyusi, ed., The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 1992), p. 733; Gitlitz and Davidson, pp. 209-221. 12. Alicia Riós and Lourdes March, The Heritage of Spanish Cooking (New York: Random House, Inc., 1992), pp. 25-6; Habeeb Salloum and James Peters, From the Lands of Figs and Olives (New York: Interlink Books, 1995), p. 22. 13. Granada Tapas Routes Map and Guide (Granada: Office of Culture Tourism and Sport, Tourism Council of Granada, c. 1999). 14. Corriente, p. 513 s.v. MN‘. 15. On these various soups see Benavides Barajas, pp. 47-50; Expiración García Sánchez, “La Alimentación en la Andalucía Islámica. Estudio Histórico y Bromotológico. I: Cereales y leguminosas,” Andalucía Islámica: Textos y Estudios II-III (1981-1982), pp.168-173; and Miguel Cruz Hernández, El Islam de Al-Andalus: Historia y Estructura de Su Realidad Social (Madrid: Instituto de Cooperación con el Mundo Arabe, 1992), pp. 201-204. 16. Ford, p. 86; Corriente, p. 11 s.v. ’RR. 17. Ralph Penny, A History of the Spanish Language (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 223-224. 18. Raymond A. Sokolov, Why We Eat What We Eat (New York: Summit Books, 1991), pp. 116-120. 19. Riós and March, pp. 93-97. 20. Mohammed Hammam, “La Pêche et le Commerce du Poisson en Méditerranée Occidentale (Xe-début XVIe): Tableau Historicogéographique Établi d’Après les Sources Musulmanes,” in Mohammed Hammam, ed., L’Occident Musulman et l’Occident Chrétien au Moyen Âge (Rabat, Morocco: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres, 1995), pp. 153-4. 21. Margarita López de Pablo López, “La Filière Riz en Espagne,” Cahiers Options Méditerranéennes 15:2 (1996), pp. 93-100. 22. Sarah Woodward, Moorish Food: Mouth-Watering Recipes from Morocco to the Mediterranean (London: Kyle Cathie Ltd., 1998), p. 8. 23. Corriente, p.67 s.v. BNDQ. 24. Riós and March, p. 185; Joan Nathan, Jewish Cooking in America (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998), p. 172. 25. Miguel-Ángel Motis Dolader, “Mediterranean Jewish Diet and Traditions in the Middle Ages,” in Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, eds., Food: A Culinary History (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1999), p. 238. 26. Lucie Bolens, “Le Soleil Pulvérisé sur les Tables Andalouses du Moyen Âge: Viandes et Sorbets (XIIIe Siècle),” L’Andalousie du Quotidien au Sacré: XIe-XIIIe Siècles (Hampshire, UK: Variorum, 1990), p. XI:29. My translation. 27. Gitlitz and Davidson, pp. 171-4. 28. Ibid., pp. 261-3. 29. Ibid., p. 261; Motis Dolader, pp. 225-6. 30. Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700-1100 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 28-9; Tor Eigeland, “Arabs, Almonds, Sugar and Toledo,” Aramco World 47 (May-June 1996), p. 35. 31. García Sánchez, p.151; Maxime Rodinson, “Recherches sur les Documents Arabes Relatifs à la Cuisine,” Revue des Études Islamiques (1949), p. 140, 152; Li Guo, “Arabic Documents from the Red Sea Port of Quseir in the Seventh/Thirteenth Century, Part I: Business Letters,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 58:3 (July 1999), pp. 183-5. 32. Gitlitz and Davidson, pp. 266-74; Motis Dolader, p. 229. A small patch of sugarcane in Jaén province, southern Spain. At left th in the distance are the remains of the 10 -Century Moorish castle of al-Qabðáq, modern Alcaudete. (Photo: Randy K. Schwartz) cane were being sold at a sidewalk fruit stall in Granada, deep green in color, about 9 inches long and 3 inches wide. In a Granada bakery I tried a rosco de naranja casero, or “homemade orange doughnut.” It looked like half of a tawny-brown bagel, except that the top was glazed with egg wash and the inside was pale yellow. The texture and flavor reminded me of a mild, orange-zested mandelbrot. Roscos have been linked to the older k‘ak, a plain baked bread ring of Egypt dating back to the 1100s or earlier.31 A great variety of them were eaten in Moorish Spain, made from matzo meal or white or semolina flour colored with egg yolks or saffron, often flavored with rose water, sugar, ground almond or anise seed. The leavened or unleavened dough would be rolled into logs that were coiled round to make rings, hence the name rosco, “coiled thing” in Spanish. Smaller ones, as little as 1½ inches in diameter, are called rosquillas. The doughnuts can be fried in olive oil, baked in an oven, or boiled in water and then baked, as with bagels. The fanciest versions have a fruit or nut filling and are topped with honey, syrup or sprinkled sugar. The Jews of Spain celebrated marriages and births with rosquillas and the similar tarales.32 The Grand Inquisitors succeeded in expelling most Jews and Muslims from Iberia through sheer terror. Even so, they could not expunge all traces of Moorish culture or cuisine. Simply put, it tasted too good! Ironically, as portions of the peninsula were conquered from the Arabs, it was Catholic nuns who took over baking many treats like turrón, mazapan and rosquillas. The convents produced these sweets in order to raise funds for their own preservation. But in the process, they also preserved a Muslim and Jewish high art of confection, and helped spread it to the rest of Europe. 11