The pomegranate had made it into the Levant by the Early Bronze Age, as evidenced by the carbonized skins found in ruins at Jericho. Many Biblical historians agree that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil mentioned in Genesis was most likely the pomegranate and not the apple. Pomegranates are still grown in Jericho and Jerusalem, where I have seen their gorgeous scarlet blossoms being visited by Palestine sunbirds.
Quickly adopted throughout the Levant, from southern Turkey to the northern edges of the Sinai, pomegranates diversified greatly under cultural selection. The five hundred named domesticated varieties can be as large as a softball or as small as a tennis ball. Some have deep red interiors to their compartmented fruits, and others harbor pale translucent seeds among a pinkish cream gelatinous pulp of the arils. I have witnessed displays of diverse pomegranates in the markets of Istanbul that were the botanical equivalent of seeing Saint Bernards and Chihuahuas in the same dog show.
It appears that both Turks and Persians carried pomegranates eastward, southeastward, and northward along their trade routes. The Farsi name anar and Turkic name nar are echoed in loan words found in Armenian, Bulgarian, Dhivehi, Punjabi, Hindi, and even Kazakh.
When the pomegranate made it from Damascus to al-Andalus with Banu Umayyah refugees, it was a big hit. The first cultivar in Spain was named safarí, and it persisted with that name for hundreds of years after its introduction around 755. But rather than retain the ancient Semitic term al-rummân for all pomegranates, the Moors and Syrians who immigrated to Spain instead chose the Latin-derived pomum granatum, which was Arabized and condensed to gharnata and then Hispanicized to granada. The latter, of course, also became the name of one of the three great centers of culture and agriculture in Moorish Spain during the era of convivencia, though I was disappointed to find few fresh pomegranates in its markets today.
Sephardic and Moorish Jews became just as fond of pomegranates as Arabs were and used the image of the fruit above the doorways of their homes throughout the West. From Spain, pomegranate cuttings, including the safarí variety, went on to the Canary Islands and then to the Americas.
Curiously, iconic pomegranate flowers set in silver have become known as squash blossoms in Navajo and Zuni Indian jewelry in the American Southwest, but no doubt hark back to Spanish-introduced designs that could ultimately be derived from Jewish or Muslim traditions that reached Spain. Pomegranates themselves made their way north from Mexico with Spanish missionaries, who took them as far as Havasupai villages in the Grand Canyon and isolated desert oases in Baja California. The Tohono O’odham of the Sonoran Desert along the United States–Mexico border still grow pomegranates around their homes, taking the Spanish loan word granada and making it their own: galniyu.
On the other side of the border in Coahuila and Nuevo León, it is likely that crypto-Jews played a role in elaborating the pomegranate-garnished dish chiles en nogadas, which was prominently featured in the best-selling novel Like Water for Chocolate, and in the film of the same name. The pomegranate seed garnish on the stuffed chiles echoes the seeds’ use in the Middle East and the Maghreb on stuffed eggplants. Although this fact is never explicitly mentioned in the novel, at least some members of the de la Garza family of northeastern Mexico who were fictionalized in the book were conversos.
Katzer, Gernot. “Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.” http://gernot-katzers-spicepages.com/engl/index.html. Accessed May 4 2013.
Menocal, María Rosa. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002.
Musselman, Lytton John. Figs, Dates, Laurel, and Myrrh: Plants of the Bible and the Quran. Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2005.
• SUMAC •
The burgundy red berrylike fruits of Rhus coriaria offer a bright, tangy, mouth-puckering punch up front, followed by a resinous, woody, citric combination of sweetness, tartness, and saltiness. The tanginess and fruitiness of sumac happily linger on one’s lips for some time. Sumac fruits typically grow in cone-shaped clusters, which deepen in their blush as fall proceeds. Each berry has a thin outer skin that surrounds seeds so hard that they often need to be soaked before grinding them into a coarse powder. Sumac is cultivated from Afghanistan westward, across the Middle East and the Mediterranean and as far as the Canary Islands.
Sumac, or in Levantine Arabic, simmaq, is usually sold already ground, and the crimson powder is dusted on skewered meats immediately before grilling. I grew up thinking that the smeared blotch of lipstick red that sat in the middle of each bowl of hummus was a dusting of paprika with a squeeze of lemon. I later learned that it took only a scatter of sumac to get that distinctive color and lemony zing. In Iran, parts of Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria, sumac is among the primary spices used in rubs for all sorts of grilled and baked meats, fish, and fowl. It is also a key ingredient in some, though not all, za’atar spice mixtures used in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine.
I have often been frustrated by the fact that most of the sumac I find in Middle Eastern markets in the United States is far from fresh and lacks the vibrancy of what I regularly taste in the Middle East. To remedy this dilemma, I have taken to harvesting the red berries of R. trilobata, the most widespread sumac (also known as lemonade berry) in the semiarid West. The berries of this species have long been eaten by the Navajo, or Diné, the largest tribe in western North America, but one that shares some of its genetic history with Turkic-speaking peoples of Central and northeastern Asia. Because there is at least one edible sumac species in most states of the United States (in addition to several poisonous ones), it is a good idea to source this spice from native populations near where you live.
Gambrelle, Fabienne. The Flavor of Spices. Paris: Flammarion, 2008.
Hill, Tony. The Contemporary Encyclopedia of Herbs and Spices. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004.
Katzer, Gernot. “Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.” http://gernot-katzers-spicepages.com/engl/index.html. Accessed May 8, 2013.
Sortun, Ana, with Nicole Chaison. Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. New York: Regan Books, 2006.
• ANISE •
The tiny, aromatic, sage green fruits of this Old World herb (Pimpinella anisum) emanate a vaguely dusty, licorice-like scent. Their sweet anethole-based flavor has been confused with that of fennel, star anise, wintergreen, and even dill. Although some native Latin American herbs with similar taste profiles are called yerba anís, true anise (also known as aniseed) is native to the Levant. It was quickly dispersed throughout the Mediterranean region and Asia Minor, and was well established in Greece by the fourth century BCE. In ancient Rome, Pliny observed that “be it green or dried, it is wanted for all conserves and seasonings.”
It was first brought to the Americas as a cultivated herb three centuries ago. Nowadays, it is a common flavoring in various anisette spirits in both the New World and the Old. In many countries, it is used as a digestive and as a culinary spice in pastries and sausages. If you have tasted a biscotto in Italy or a sugar-coated saunf dessert seed in India, you have likely tasted true anise.
The popularity of anisettes seems to wrap around the northern Mediterranean shores, ranging from anís and anisette in Andalusia; Pernod in southern France; sambuca in Italy; ouzo in Greece; raki in Turkey, Cypress, and Crete; and arak in Lebanon and Syria. My first taste of arak was offered to me by one of my Lebanese American uncles when I was still a teenager. He prided himself on having worked during Prohibition with the best Lebanese and Syrian American bootleggers, who had maintained a steady stream of the spirit flowing into communities of Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States.
At the same time, he painfully recalled to me that when he was exactly my age, he had been jailed briefly for selling some of his own uncle’s bootleg arak to a plain-clothes policeman! His father and my grandfather had grown up distilling the fermented juices of grapes in the Bekáa Valley and curing their distillate with aniseeds specially grown and harvested by Bedo
uins in the Houran region of Syria. To this day, Syria remains the largest producer of aniseeds in the world, as well as the place where wild anise is most valued.
Although some scholars have argued that most languages spoken in and near Europe share anis as a loan word from either the Latin (anisum) or the Greek (anison), I would argue that its roots are older and in the Semitic languages. The Hebrew anis and the Arabic terms anisun and yansun are less likely to be loan words from Greek or Roman than the other way around. Farsi also uses anisun. In fact, the handful of the world’s languages that do not use a variant of anis imply that anise is a sweet form of fennel, dill, cumin, or star anise. In south-central Asia, a few languages like Sanskrit refer to anise descriptively as “a hundred flowers,” but the similarly spelled terms in Thai, Telugu, and Sinhala may also refer to dill.
In the Americas, several wild and semicultivated species are called yerba anís, but they are all botanically unrelated to the Old World anise, which belongs to the parsley family. The herbs most commonly called yerba anís in Mexico are more closely related to Old World tarragon and belong to the genus Tagetes in the aster family. To add to the confusion, the true anise introduced to the Americas by Spanish missionaries has gone feral and naturalized in the desert oases of northwest Mexico, where it is typically called yerba anís del monte. In Mexico, anise is used in the nonalcoholic beverage atole de anís and in various distilled beverages. Aguardientes flavored with anise are popular throughout the Spanish-speaking world, as are anisette liqueurs, including Cartujo in Venezuela and Anís del Mono in Spain.
Toasted aniseeds are popular among Latin American confectioners, who use them as the signature flavor in the Mexican wedding cookies found in northern Mexico and the US Southwest and in picarones, Peruvian fritters made with pumpkin or sweet potato. The presence of anise in some Spanish and Latin American desserts may hark all the way back to the arrival of Phoenician, Arab, and Berber recipes on the Iberian Peninsula a dozen centuries ago and are now thought of as Spanish. In the remote desert oasis of San Borja in Baja California, Mexico, I once found true anise being grown and used in much the same ways as it has been in the desert oases of Arabia and North Africa since antiquity. Like the flavor of dates, the flavor of anise is a signature taste of the desert oasis wherever that oasis may be.
Hill, Tony. The Contemporary Encyclopedia of Herbs and Spices. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004.
• BERENJENA CON ACELGUILLA •
Sephardic Eggplant with Swiss Chard
Rather remarkably, Sephardic Jewish historian David Gitlitz has uncovered a burlesque poem or song lyric that not only captures tensions in the converso community of Moorish Spain at the time but also describes an eggplant casserole served at Sephardic weddings of the era. The Spanish term for eggplant, berenjena, spelled verengena in Moorish Spain, is clearly derived from bitengen, a term used throughout the Middle East and Africa by many Arabs, Jews, and Berbers. It had become a favorite vegetable to serve at feasts in Moorish Spain, perhaps because the meaty flesh of this solanaceous fruit so wonderfully absorbs the flavors of spices. Similar eggplant dishes, known as cazuelas (a term derived from the Arabic word for bowl and used for both the casserole or stew and the earthenware pot in which it is cooked), have been made in the Middle East for centuries and are kin to the famous dish imam biyaldi, or “the priest faints with pleasure.”
The following excerpt from a sixty-five-stanza canción was sung by the Sephardic Jewish poet Rodrigo Cota, who apparently wrote it in retaliation for being left off the invitation list by his converso kin for a fifteenth-century Cota family wedding in Segovia. The wedding feast was attended by conversos to honor the arranged marriage between a girl from the family of Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza and the grandson of Diego Arias Dávila, a converso who at that time was the minister of finance in the court of the Castilian king Henry IV, also known as Henry the Impotent, who reigned from 1454 to 1474. The song-poem includes this verse:
At this Jewish wedding party
bristly pig was not consumed;
not one single scaleless fish
went down the gullet of the groom;
instead, an eggplant casserole
with saffron and Swiss chard;
and whoever swore by “Jesus”
from the meatball pot was barred.
The recipe reconstruction originally offered by David Gitlitz and his wife, Linda Kay Davidson, in their fine book A Drizzle of Honey, has been modestly modified to take into account the spices used with eggplant during that era. I have also recommended using smaller Asian eggplants, rather than a large globe eggplant, as I found them easier to combine with the chard. Serves 6.
2 pounds Asian eggplants or small globe eggplants
Salt
1 large bunch red Swiss chard
2 tablespoons unfiltered or extra-virgin Arbequina olive oil
Ample pinch of saffron threads
1 white onion, sliced
1 clove Egyptian red garlic or other garlic, crushed
½ cup water, vegetable broth, or almond milk
¼ teaspoon white pepper
1 teaspoon freshly ground cassia cinnamon
¼ teaspoon crushed whole cloves
¼ teaspoon freshly grated or ground nutmeg
3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh cilantro
3 to 4 tablespoons pine nuts, toasted
Peel the eggplants, then cut crosswise into ¼-inch-thick slices. Lay the slices in a single layer on a work surface, sprinkle the slices on both sides with 1 to 2 tablespoons salt, and let stand for 30 minutes. Rinse the eggplant slices, then pat dry with paper towels. Set the slices aside.
Cut the stems from the chard leaves. Cut the stems crosswise into 1-inch lengths and coarsely chop the leaves. Keep the stems and leaves separate.
In a large frying pan or cazeula, heat the olive oil and saffron threads over medium-low heat until the oil turns yellow from the saffon, 4 to 5 minutes. Add the onion, garlic, and chard stems and sauté until the stems and onion are nearly translucent, about 10 minutes. Add the eggplant slices and cook, turning occasionally, for 3 minutes longer, to soften the slices slightly. Add the water, pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and 1 teaspoon salt and stir well. Turn down the heat to low, cover, and cook until the eggplant slices are nearly tender, 15 to 20 minutes.
Add the chard leaves, stir to combine, re-cover, and continue to cook until the vegetables are tender, 5 to 7 minutes. Transfer to a platter, garnish with the cilantro and pine nuts, and serve hot.
Gitlitz, David M. Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, p. 478.
Gitlitz, David M., and Linda Kay Davidson. A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999, p. 46.
CHAPTER 8
The Crumbling of Convivencia and the Rise of Transnational Guilds
Once again in charge of Moorish Spain, the Berbers brought in a long series of Muslim emirs, princes, and generals to take the place of the Banu Umayyah. They maintained strong ties with their kin in Morocco, in case they should ever need to escape from Christian forces. Likewise, the Sephardic Jews forged more substantial trading alliances with other Jews in Portugal, Provence, Belgium, Sicily, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Turkey. They regularly negotiated for musk from Tibet, silk from China, and ambergris from the Atlantic coast of Africa, probably from Mauritania.1 They likely perceived no risk at all in bringing in other “immigrants” (plants) to grow in their own territory that they received from distant lands, especially if this cultivation could offer them greater control over the trade in culinary resources.
After the collapse of the Umayyad dynasty, the more altruistic components of the convivencia era began to disappear. Although there was nominal coexistence, there was also considerable conflict and oppression of minority faiths. It is not surprising that following the demise of Muslim-Jewish-Christian commercial and scientific collaborations on the Ibe
rian Peninsula, two mercantile organizations independent of the ruling classes took up the slack in the power dynamics of international trade, not just on the peninsula but all across the world. They were the Radhanite Jews and the multiethnic Karimi, and perhaps for the first time in economic history, groups entirely independent of and transcendent of nation-states controlled spice commerce. As emirs and empires quickly came and went, these two entities demonstrated their staying power for several centuries. They not only traded in spices and other aromatics but also moved just about every other major salable product—from gold to linen—from Spain to China.
The Radhanites, or Radaniyya, were a guild or a clan (that is, united by genetic kinship) of Jewish spice merchants that first appeared by name around 500 CE, but later gained prominence in both western Europe and Asia Minor as the major go-betweens for trade between Muslims and Christians. Their name may have come from the Persian rad-han, “the one(s) who know the way,” although other historians associate it with place names in their trading hubs of northern Persia, Mesopotamia, and southern France. They rose to prominence after 800, when both Muslims and Christians were formally banned by leaders of their respective faiths from trading directly with each other. It appears that a multilingual, widely traveled group of Radhanite merchants gained extraordinary wealth by serving as a bridge between Christian and Muslim traders.
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Page 23