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Ropa Vieja: A Colonial Stew of Global Threads

For my brother, Manuel Pino, who keeps our family’s best memories alive through his cooking.

Ropa Vieja. Image credit: Manuel Pino
Ropa Vieja. Image credit: Manuel Pino
By Alessandra Pino

Recipe: Ropa Vieja (Serves 6)

Legend has it that a poor man once cooked his old clothes because he had nothing else to feed his family. His love and care transformed the rags into a rich and comforting stew known as Ropa Vieja.

Although today it is considered a symbol of Cuban cuisine, both the story and the dish originated in the Canary Islands. The first known mention of the recipe appears in Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (1857).[1]

First known printed recipe for “Ropa vieja” from Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (Havana: Imprenta y Librería La Cubana, 1857), by J. P. Legran. University of Miami Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc9999/id/16111
First known printed recipe for “Ropa vieja” from Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (Havana: Imprenta y Librería La Cubana, 1857), by J. P. Legran. University of Miami Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc9999/id/16111


In my Venezuelan family, this recipe has been passed down through generations. We call it
carne mechada and serve it inside arepas, a corn-based flatbread. I am recording it for the first time as I cook it for this piece.

Ingredients:

  • 900g flank steak, cut into bite-sized pieces
  • 1 onion, peeled and quartered
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 tablespoon of olive oil
  • 1 medium onion, sliced lengthwise into strips
  • 1 small red bell pepper, deseeded and sliced
  • 120g tinned chopped tomatoes
  • Salt and pepper, to taste

Method:

  1. Place the beef, quartered onion, garlic, and bay leaf in a pot and add enough water to cover. Bring to a slow boil over medium heat, then reduce to low and simmer for 2–3 hours.
  2. Strain the beef and broth through a fine-mesh strainer, reserving the liquid. When the beef is cool enough to handle, shred it with your fingers or two forks.
  3. In a skillet, warm the olive oil over medium heat. Add the sliced onion and green pepper and cook for 3–4 minutes, until softened. Stir in 360 ml of the remaining broth, tomatoes, shredded beef, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for 30 minutes to combine the flavours.

A Stew of Empire and displacement

Few dishes embody the entangled histories of empire, trade, and transcultural adaptation as vividly as ropa vieja, the “old clothes” stew that today stands as a culinary emblem of Cuba and the Canary Islands. Its name conjures up rags and scraps, yet its history is anything but threadbare: Jewish Sabbath traditions, Iberian colonial expansion, African slavery, and Indigenous ingredients of the Americas are stitched together in this deeply resilient dish.

Because cooking was prohibited on the Sabbath, Sephardi Jews often prepared a hearty stew the night before, allowing it to cook slowly until the following day. Ropa vieja is often understood as echoing these Iberian Jewish culinary traditions of the late medieval and early modern period. Sabbath dishes such as adafina or cholent — slow-cooked blends of legumes, vegetables, and meat — sometimes left behind strands of beef once the broth was consumed. These remnants could be reheated with onions, garlic, and chickpeas, producing a dish that resembled tattered rags, perhaps inspiring the evocative name ropa vieja. Following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and the forced conversions that followed, such recipes circulated into new cultural contexts. Adapted and reinterpreted over generations, they persisted within Iberian domestic cooking, carrying traces of memory and identity even as Jewish ritual and language were suppressed. As Gitlitz and Davidson explain, Spanish and Portuguese mariners began exploring the off-shore African islands — the Canaries, Azores, and Madeira — in the early fifteenth century. By its end, farming colonies and trading posts had been established, turning the islands into key “stopover points” for Atlantic galleons engaged in the South Atlantic and American trade.[2]

Crossing Oceans: From Canary Islands to the Caribbean

The dish entered global circulation with Spanish colonization of the Canary Islands and subsequently the Caribbean. In Cuba, ropa vieja adapted to locally available ingredients. Cattle introduced by Columbus’s second voyage in 1493 thrived on the island, becoming central to ranching economies and local diets. African enslaved cooks contributed slow-braising techniques and sofrito — a base of onions, garlic, and other vegetables gently cooked in olive oil —  while Indigenous crops such as tomatoes and peppers transformed the dish’s flavour. Ropa vieja thus became a product of empire, blending Iberian culinary traditions with African labour and American ingredients in colonial households. Each component reflects a history of circulation and encounter: beef reshaped Caribbean landscapes, supplying hides for European markets and meat for colonial stews; chickpeas, central in Iberian and Canarian versions, sustained sailors and settlers but were less prominent in Cuban adaptations; and tomatoes and peppers, native to the Americas, were cultivated in the Caribbean alongside Iberian staples like onions and garlic, exemplifying the transatlantic movement and exchange of crops.

As Fernando Ortiz observes in his discussion of plantation life in Cuba in his essay Los factores humanos de la cubanided (1939), “In Cuba’s pot there is always a constant renewal of roots, fruits, and exotic meats, an unceasing bubbling of heterogeneous substances.”[3] The plantation system that shaped the Caribbean landscape violently brought together people from diverse origins who, despite profound inequalities, interacted socially and culturally. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s perspective was that the Caribbean could not be considered a single cultural area, since the mix of different colonial powers made it too heterogeneous to fit that definition. Instead, he proposed the term “societal area,” describing the region as a socio-cultural space structured by the plantation system. (Mintz, 1966).[4] Mintz’s concept captures the fragmentary nature of Caribbean cultures, stitched together by a language of colonial dominance until they fused into something new. I argue that this dynamic extends to food itself: the region’s culinary cultures reflect a constant process of interaction and adaptation, where ingredients and techniques from Africa, Europe, and the Americas combined to create shared expressions. In this way, a common language of flavour emerged from displacement, survival, and creativity. The dish becomes, in effect, a ragged form of globalization, stitched together from uneven power, movement, and culinary ingenuity. In my chapter on “Dark Food” (Palgrave, 2025), I explore how violence is integral to this process, showing how food can carry and transmit memories that continually reconstruct narratives of oppression and suffering.

Invisible Hands: Women and Enslaved Cooks

Although colonial records often privilege governors, merchants, and planters, the making of ropa vieja depended on domestic cooks — many women, many enslaved or otherwise marginalized. African-descended cooks in Cuban households brought Indigenous crops and African cooking techniques into Iberian stews, layering them with flavour and complexity. Women have long been central to the transmission and transformation of Caribbean traditions, even if historical documentation has largely obscured their contributions. As Keja L. Valens observes,

“Ropa vieja” inscribes a mixing of ­ European (flour, beef, wine), Indigenous (tomatoes and peppers), and African (plantains) ingredients, doing so ­ under a recognizably Spanish-­ language title. As much as they declare its ­ independence from Spain, ­ these White Criollo authors claim the dish. “Ropa vieja” serves settlers who occupy, incorporate, and claim as their own the ­ tables and kitchens of Cuba. As they break from the colonial center, the settlement remains. (Valens 2024, p.62)

Valens further notes that cookbooks rarely include detailed biographical information, meaning that the labour and expertise of women — often exercised in domestic or informal spaces — is transmitted primarily through recipes rather than through explicit authorial self-representation.

Recipes as Memory and Metaphor

The name “old clothes” resonates powerfully in this colonial context. Just as the dish turned scraps into nourishment, displaced peoples — Sephardic Jews, conversos (converted Iberian Jews), enslaved Africans, and Canarians — wove fragments of memory, ritual, and foodways into continuity. The preparation of traditional dishes like ropa vieja involves more than following a recipe; it encompasses embodied knowledge passed down through generations. This tacit knowledge includes techniques, timing, and sensory cues that are often not documented but are crucial for authentic preparation. The act of cooking such dishes serves as a living archive, preserving cultural practices and memories; as Francisca Sinjae has argued, “across the world, food is not just sustenance; it is a living archive, a record of migration, survival, identity, and belonging.”[5] Food preparation is a form of cultural expression and memory, where each dish tells a story of migration, adaptation, and survival. The recipe’s adaptability made it a form of culinary survival: to simmer shredded beef with onions and tomatoes was to claim a taste of familiarity while fashioning something distinctly of the Americas. In this sense, ropa vieja embodied the patchwork realities of colonial life.[6]

From Stew to Symbol

By the eighteenth century, ropa vieja was firmly recognised as part of Cuban cuisine.[7] Today, it is celebrated both as Cuba’s national dish and as a heritage food of the Canary Islands. Its survival illustrates how recipes forged in colonial entanglements persist as markers of identity, memory, and resilience.

Centuries later, in Miami, Cuban exiles revived and popularised the dish, transforming it into a symbol of home and memory within the American landscape. In Cuba itself, it acquired poignant resonance during the 1990s Período Especial, when meat shortages forced cooks to adapt. On television, culinary icon Nitza Villapol famously demonstrated a version suggesting the use of plantain skins in place of beef, a modern echo of the “old rags” metaphor and a reminder of the creativity born from scarcity.[8]

A Global Ragout

Ropa vieja is a culinary palimpsest, its flavours carrying the traces of Jewish exile, Iberian colonisation, African labour, and Indigenous ingredients. To taste it is to encounter the fragments of empire itself, scraps reassembled into sustenance like old clothes patched into new garments, carrying traces of resilience and creative adaptation that give the dish new life with each preparation. In her review of Carla Cevasco’s Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast for The Recipes Project, Peggy Brunache emphasizes how Indigenous communities have long used food as a form of resistance and cultural assertion, noting that “Indigenous communities performed culinary resistance through a politics of food and stood culturally resilient against colonial manipulation and assimilation.”  As a platform, The Recipes Project itself sustains this ongoing conversation between food, history, and identity, revealing how culinary practices can serve as both archives and acts of meaning-making. This perspective illuminates how cooking, including the preparation of ropa vieja, transcends mere sustenance. It becomes a deliberate act of cultural preservation and identity maintenance, an embodied form of resistance through which displaced or marginalized communities uphold heritage, reinforce communal bonds, and assert belonging in the face of colonial and postcolonial pressures. In this sense, ropa vieja not only preserves the past but also speaks to the present: a dish refashioned across generations, carrying in each bite the intertwined histories of memory, survival, and identity.

*****
Alessandra Pino is an expert on the intersections of the Gothic, food, and cultural memory. Born in Hampstead, London, to an Italian mother and Venezuelan diplomat father, Alessandra grew up in different countries and across cultures and languages. She holds degrees from ‘L’Orientale’ University, Naples (Italy), and from the University of Westminster (UK, MA in Translation Studies); she was awarded a PhD in Food, Cultural Memory, and the Gothic in 2022. Alessandra worked with a Michelin-starred chef for nearly ten years before moving to academia, researching and publishing on food, cultural memory, the supernatural and the Gothic.

Alessandra is the co-author of A Gothic Cookbook, which digs into food themes and motifs in a series of classic and contemporary novels from the 19th century to the present day and the co-host of “Fear Feasts,” a podcast which analyses the horror genre- films and books- through the lens of food. She publishes and speaks/lectures on the history of food, cultural memory, the supernatural, horror and the Gothic in journals, anthologies, TV and podcasts.

FURTHER READING

Barthes, Roland. 1975. “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption.” In European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, edited by E. Forster and R. Forster, 47–59. New York: Harper and Row.

Brunache, Peggy. “New Work Forum: On Food and Identity in Cevasco’s Violent Appetites.” The Recipes Project, July 7. Accessed October 24, 2024.

Cabrisas, Juan. 1858. Nuevo manual de la cocinera catalana y cubana.

Douglas, Mary. 1972. “Deciphering a Meal.” 

Gitlitz, David M., and Linda Kay Davidson. 1999. A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Jawhara Piñer, Hélène. 2021. Sephardi: Cooking the History. Boston: Academic Studies Press.

Langarika, Enrique. 1862. El cocinero de los enfermos, convalecientes. Havana: Imprenta y Librería La Cubana. Biblioteca Nacional de España; UTSA Digital Collections, Texas.

Legran, J. P. 1857. Nuevo manual del cocinero cubano y español: con un tratado escojido de dulcería, pastelería y botellería, al estilo de Cuba; indispensable para aprender a componer de comer con la mayor perfección y economía, y necesario a todas las clases de la sociedad y en particular a los gastrónomos, madres de familia, fondistas. Havana: [s.n.]. 

Mintz, S.W. 1966. “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area,” Journal of World History, 9 (4), 912-937.

Noviatur, J. F. 1891. Novísimo manual del cocinero pastelero dulcero y licorista cubano. Havana: Imprenta La Idea.

Ortiz, Fernando. 1939. “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad.” In Ensayos etnosociológicos, 10–31. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Pelaéz, Ana Sofía, and Ellen Silverman. 2014. The Cuban Table: A Celebration of Food, Flavors, and History. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Pino, Alessandra. 2025. “Dark Food.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Memory Studies, edited by Lucy Bond, Susannah Radstone, and Jessica Rapson, 263–283. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pino, Alessandra. 2020. Hunger and Meaning in the Novels of Cristina García. 

RWI Magazine. The Taste of Memory: Food as Cultural Archive.

The Atlantic. 2016. “Cuba’s Julia Child.” The Atlantic, August 2016. 

Valens, Keja L. 2024. Culinary Colonialism. Rutgers University Press.

Villapol, Nitza. 2022. Cocina al Minuto YouTube video. Posted 7 July 2022.

NOTES

[1] There is a reference to this being the first known mention in Pelaéz and Silverman, The Cuban Table (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014) p.162. See also the ‘ropa vieja’ recipe in Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (1857) by J.P. Legran. The complete title is: Nuevo manual del cocinero cubano y español : con un tratado escojido de dulcería, pastelería y botellería, al estilo de Cuba; indispensable para aprender a componer de comer con la mayor perfección y economía, y necesario a todas las clases de la la sociedad y en particular a los gastrónomos, madres de familia, fondistas.

[2] For the link between Sephardic Sabbath stews and later Iberian/Atlantic shredded-meat dishes, see 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), p. 207; and Hélène Jawhara Piñer, Sephardi: Cooking the History (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021). Both discuss adafina/dafina/hamín as a slow-cooked Jewish stew in medieval and early modern Iberia.

[3] F. Ortiz, “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad,” in Ensayos etnosociologicos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1939), 10-31. “Siempre en la olla de Cuba es un renovado entrar de raíces, frutos y carnes exógenas, un incesante borbotar de heterogéneas sustancias.” Quote is on p. 6. My translation.

[4] “It would probably be more accurate to refer to the Caribbean as a ‘societal area’ based on the plantation system.” Sidney W. Mintz, “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area,” Journal of World History, 9 (4) (1966), pp. 912–937.

[5] Francisca Sinjae, “The Taste of Memory: Food as Cultural Archive,” Raising Women Magazine, September 15, 2025

[6] My work on comparison between the culinary process and the process of memory formation in relation to constructions of identity and nation is available here. Going beyond the idea of food as being purely nutritional, Barthes’ use of semiotics allows for a contextualisation of food in its role as a signifier. Roland Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” in European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, edited by E. Forster and R. Forster (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 47–59. Mary Douglas’ work in “Deciphering a Meal” establishes the importance of memory in creating food patterns. Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus Vol. 101, No. 1, Myth, Symbol, and Culture (Winter, 1972), pp. 61-81. Douglas’ work is available here.  

[7] Valens points out that this is evident in the cookbooks of the time: the Manual del cocinero cubano includes just one recipe for “Ropa vieja andaluza,” alongside recipes for both “Ropa vieja cubana” and “Ropa vieja habanera.” In contrast, Legran’s cookbook presents only “Ropa vieja á la Americana,” Cabrisas includes only “Ropa vieja cubana,” El cocinero de los enfermos contains only “Ropa vieja cubana,” and the Novísimo edition of Noviatur features only “Ropa vieja habanera.”

[8] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/08/cuba-castro-villapol-julia-child/494342/

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

 

Lacquer Fantasies: Japanning as a Colonial Global Recipe

By Nur’Ain Taha

Two images frame this story of lacquer and imaginaries. The first, from Print of Sixteen Crafts and Trades (Ambachten en Beroepen) by Hendrik Numan (1788-1796), shows a Dutch lacquer craftsman (lakwerker) bent over a pot of varnish in a quiet workshop. The second, from Draken in Oost-Indie, Lakwerk en Papier uit China by Romeyn de Highe (published by Pieter van der Aa, Leiden, 1682-1733), depicts a crowded  Chinese atelier buzzing with figures polishing and painting lacquer onto various objects. Between these two scenes, the differences are jarring. The Dutch scene is subdued and contained, while the Chinese one is imagined and exotic. Despite the sharp contrast, both scenes reveal how early modern Europe had transformed Asian materials into a fantasy. These contrasting images, however, invite a question: what can recipes reveal about how the world was imagined, handled, and domesticated in early modern Europe? To see how distant worlds become embedded in recipes, we might start in a seventeenth-century Oxford manual that made “Asia” reproducible in decorations and on the surfaces of English furniture.

“Lacquer work (lakwerk)” from Print of Sixteen Crafts and Trades, Hendrik Numan (engraver), 1788-1796. Image credit: Nederlands Openluchtmuseum, object no. PR.2014. Public domain.
“Lacquer work (lakwerk)” from Print of Sixteen Crafts and Trades, Hendrik Numan (engraver), 1788-1796. Image credit: Nederlands Openluchtmuseum, object no. PR.2014. Public domain.
Dranken in Oost-Indië; Lakwerk en Papier uit China, etching by Romeyn de Hooghe, published by Pieter van der Aa (I), Leiden, 1682–1733. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, object no. BI-1972-1043-21. Public domain.
Dranken in Oost-Indië; Lakwerk en Papier uit China, etching by Romeyn de Hooghe, published by Pieter van der Aa (I), Leiden, 1682–1733. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, object no. BI-1972-1043-21. Public domain.

In 1688, John Stalker and George Parker published A treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688), a craft manual that offers readers and aspiring makers the promise of “distant mastery” by making it possible to reproduce the gloss and sheen of the much-admired Asian varnish without ever leaving home. “Japanning,” in short, was a craft of imagination that materialised in European craft manuals. The English japanner became a kind of armchair traveller — a maker who imagined the East through the replication of textual recipes.

Chapter I from the Treatise instructs its readers on how to select the best ingredients needed for “japanning”: “To choose gum Sandrick,” “To choose Benjamin or Benzoine,” and so on.[1] Each line lists a commodity extracted from distant colonies. Benzoin, also known locally in the Malay Archipelago as kemenyan, for example, was tapped from Styrax trees in the Sumatran highlands by local resin gatherers, then traded through Batavia to Amsterdam and London. “Sandrick,” or sandarac, was drawn from the Tetraclinis articulata of North Africa. Yet, the Treatise makes no mention of these routes or the labourers who made their extraction and trading possible. Instead, the instructions reduced global exchanges to simple verbs: melt, strain, mix, and apply.

Excerpts from A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688) by John Stalker and George Parker, detailing material instructions for gum lac, benjamin, shell-lac, and sandrick. Image credit: Digitized edition via Archive.org. Public domain.

Excerpts from A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688) by John Stalker and George Parker, detailing material instructions for gum lac, benjamin, shell-lac, and sandrick. Image credit: Digitized edition via Archive.org. Public domain.

Three excerpts from A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688) by John Stalker and George Parker, detailing material instructions for gum lac, benjamin, shell-lac, and sandrick. Image credit: Digitized edition via Archive.org. Public domain.
Three excerpts from A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688) by John Stalker and George Parker, detailing material instructions for gum lac, benjamin, shell-lac, and sandrick. Image credit: Digitized edition via Archive.org. Public domain.

Here, between the lines of this manual, transformation is not only chemical but also conceptual. Through craft, the  empire becomes domesticated where its raw materials are melted, strained, and mixed into manageable forms. “Japanning” is the epitome of the global recipe, one where cultural entanglement, armchair exoticism and colonial dependence become condensed into a set of formulaic instructions. With each varnish layered on the glossy surface, the trace of global commodities and distant labour is progressively erased.

Global trade became transmuted into domestic craft where the processes of making varnish in English workshops indicate not just a fantasy of control and possession but also acts of erasure and forgetting.

If Stalker and Parker’s Treatise turned encounters into varnish, the Malay Kitab Tib (medical manuscripts) transformed globalised commodities such as benzoin, camphor, ambergris, and musk into fragrance and medication. Across different manuscripts, one finds recipes that domesticate exotic materials not into fantasy, but into care and healing. One recipe for a special medicine (ubat Istimewa) in Kitab Tib MSS 2515: p. 194 for example, lists several rare ingredients to treat male impotence (mati pucuk):

Firstly, take male cubebs weighing nine mas[2], javanese cinnamon weighing nine mas, nutmeg weighing nine mas, ambergris weighing nine mas, cloves weighing nine mas, musk weighing nine mas, benzoin weighing seven mas, Bengal kara-kara root weighing one mas, mustaqim weighing half a mas, and camphor weighing one mas.[3]

Like the English recipe for varnish, recipes in various Kitab Tib manuscripts constituted commodities and incorporated rare ingredients transported across the oceans. The use of ambergris (ambar, or muntah ikan) reveals how non-European traditions also absorbed global commodities into local systems of healing and knowledge. Unlike Stalker and Parker, whose 1688 Treatise of Japanning detached resins and other global commodities from their geographical sources, Kitab Tib mapped its ingredients to known worlds: “javanese cinnamon (kulit manis Jawa),” “Bengal kara-kara root (akar kara-kara Benggala),” “Chinese galangal (lengkuas Cina),” and “nutmeg flower from Penang (bunga pala Pulau Pinang).”[4] These names turned trade into routes, marking a world already known to Malay healers and setting the ground for how global matter was embodied in local traditional healing practices.  In Malay medical manuals, global trade was neither exoticised nor imagined—it was rooted in the regional networks and embodied within local medicinal knowledge. The Kitab Tib transformed distant commodities into medicine and created scent that transformed the body’s balance. Where the English Treatise staged “Asia” at a distance, the Malay recipes absorbed it. Read together, these manuals show that early modern recipes were never just technical guides; they were ways of reimagining and embodying worlds, near and far. As Daniela Bleichmar observes for European processes of appropriation, “the expeditions’ selective efforts to make the empire visible always involved rendering parts of it invisible.”[5] The same applies to japanning: on every varnished surface, its sheen is not just beauty, but colonial possession that is made visible and invisible all at once by erasing the hands and landscapes that produced global commodities.

*****
Nur’Ain Taha is a PhD candidate in Art History at Utrecht University, Netherlands. Her research project, Crossing Worlds: The Global Materiality of “Netherlandish Objects” in the Early Modern Period, 1600-1800, examines the visible and invisible global origins of materials, techniques, and makers behind early modern “Dutch objects”. By tracing their trajectories, she reveals how cross-cultural exchanges shaped their creation and meaning, uncovering the interconnected worlds of production, influence, and knowledge beyond Europe.

FURTHER READING

Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Mat Piah, Harun. Kitab Tib: Ilmu Perubatan Melayu. Kuala Lumpur: Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, 2019.

Stalker, John, and George Parker. A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing. Oxford, 1688. Digitized edition via Archive.org. https://archive.org/details/treatisejapanin00Stal/mode/2up.

 


[1] John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford: 1688), 2–3.

[2] 1 mas ≈ 3.4 grams; recipes in old Malay manuscripts use early modern Malay measurement systems.

[3] Malay translation: Pertama ambil kemukus Jantan berat sembiln emas dan kulit manis Jawa berat Sembilan emas dan buah pala berat Sembilan emas dan ambar berat Sembilan emas dan cengkih berat Sembilan emas dan kesturi berat Sembilan emas dan kemenyan berat tujuh emas dan akar kara-kara Benggala berat seemas dan mustaqim berat tiga emas dan kapur barus berat seemas. From Kitab Tib: Ilmu Perubatan Melayu, ed. Harun Mat Piah (Kuala Lumpur: Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, 2019), 102.

[4] Many other examples also appear throughout Kitab Tib MSS 2515, p. 194. See Harun Mat Piah, Kitab Tib: Ilmu Perubatan Melayu (Kuala Lumpur: Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, 2019), 102-104.

[5] Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 151. On the thorny connections between visibility and invisibility, specifically in colonial Latin American visual culture, see Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 5-35.

 

Rhyming Recipes in the Early Modern Arab Mediterranean

By Leonie Böttiger

On the purpose of the urjuza:

This urjuza I have entrusted / with useful benefits, all of them tested

Of what our collection will have need / so, accept what I say in evidence, indeed

O you who these matters investigate / memorise all that I relate

For I have set for humankind in my verse / nothing but the truth of all you observe[1]

The beginning of the Eloquent Poem in a manuscript now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des Manuscrits, Arabe 6844, f. 134v-135r.
The beginning of the Eloquent Poem in a manuscript now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des Manuscrits, Arabe 6844, f. 134v-135r.

Why versify a recipe, let alone an entire recipe collection?

Readers might be familiar with what is arguably the most famous of English rhymed recipes: the witches’ song from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which the three sorceresses cook up a potion featuring ingredients both disgusting and nonsensical. This Barbadian rum punch rhyme or Reverend Sydney Smith’s rhymed salad recipe might instead offer more delectable examples of culinary poetry, while The Recipes Project has previously highlighted playful aspects of recipes, including satire and rhyme.

Arabic, a language famed for its poetical tradition, also boasts its fair share of food-related poetry—but a curious North African craft recipe collection made up entirely of rhymed couplets might be a closer kin to the English playwright’s double trouble, though admittedly less renowned.

The Eloquent Poem in Rajaz[2] on the Proper Crafts was probably composed sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century CE by one Abu Bakr al-Kharrat, likely somewhere in North Africa, based on the manuscript evidence—we don’t have any other sources about his life. The Eloquent Poem has survived in at least five manuscripts which are now housed in Paris, Leiden, Gotha, and Djerba, and one of which is dated to 1579 CE. Arranged in four maqālāt (sg. maqāla) or treatises, the short book is a didactic poem which consists of recipes for various household and other craft activities.

Versified recipes can be considered an almost ‘double-didactic’ genre: both the recipe and the poem are inherently concerned with the transmission of knowledge. As such, they present an intriguing lens through which to approach the poetic adaptation and dissemination of knowledge: what does it mean to transform recipes for scribal arts and household activities into didactic verse?

For Abu Bakr, poetry had the decisive advantage of being easier to memorise and transmit—a device humans had taken advantage of for centuries, if not millennia, before its mechanisms were ever explained by psychologists and neurolinguists. He explains in his brief foreword:

“Now then, brother, […] I have compiled for you in this poem benefits and useful properties for whatever purposes you wish. You informed me that you are keen to attain it in a way that eases its memorisation and transmission, and I have abbreviated the composition and clarified what I have set forth of my knowledge…”

Abu Bakr does not mention any of his sources, but many of the recipes contained in the poem have parallels in older Arabic recipe collections from all across the Arabic-speaking world, dealing with stain removal and other crafts, as well as in books on the occult properties of substances, attesting to a fluid body of knowledge that was nevertheless transmitted somewhat cohesively.

Unlike his predecessors, Abu Bakr, however, did not seem to hold much esteem for established authorities: as we see in the excerpt above, as well as in several other places in his text, he continuously highlights his own expertise, claiming that he is presenting his own knowledge. Where older texts make frequent reference to Greek, Roman, or even Indian physicians and scholars (think Dioscorides, Galen, or Suśruta) to substantiate and verify the efficacy of their recipes, Abu Bakr does not mention any ancient authorities. This might reflect both a shift in how expertise was construed at the time the Eloquent Poem was composed as well as its expected audience: What use was it to namedrop Aristotle if his name meant nothing to your readers—or perhaps, listeners? It seems that Abu Bakr considered highlighting his own practice-based expertise a more useful strategy to convey authority onto his text.

So, what did that look like in practice? The following recipe, to remove stains from clothes, may give a little taste of Abu Bakr’s style (I have tried my best to retain the rhyme scheme):

Whoever loves knowledge, clearly to comprehend / Should vinegar and potash blend

In a pot, raised on the fire to stay / For three hours of the day

And wash the fabric and the wool with this / For it is described by my premise

I mean it removes every stain, alluded / before this, and is concluded.

Illustration of an alchemical operation in the Kitāb al-Diryāq, now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des Manuscrits. Arabe 2964, p. 15.
Illustration of an alchemical operation in the Kitāb al-Diryāq, now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des Manuscrits. Arabe 2964, p. 15.

About half of this recipe consists of material that is merely there to make the rhyme work. It thus facilitates memorisation but wouldn’t be strictly required to actually follow the procedure. Additionally, and similarly to its non-versified cousins, the recipe above does not offer any quantities or measurements apart from the “three hours” boiling time for the vinegar and potash. Now, stain removal is not necessarily an exact science, but the absence of such specifications indicates that people were likely familiar with the procedures described. This lack of measurements is also the case in recipes that require more precision, such as making inks, where a drop of liquid can mean the difference between a rich, saturated colour and a watery splotch:

Green verdigris, o you of bright mind / with vinegar smoothly grind

And mix it, my friend, with dissolved mastic / Write with it, it turns doubtlessly fantastic

Among the most amazing things with which to write / And ask, if you don’t know, someone who has tried!

As we have seen, Abu Bakr’s Eloquent Poem provides a unique glimpse into what was considered useful knowledge, addressing a wide array of needs in an easy-to-memorise format while stressing the importance of practical experience. Finally, italso offers practical solutions for getting rid of all kinds of pests—no quantities required, but PLEASE do not try at home:

Whoever wants to expel every mouse / from all the corners of the house

Should scatter arsenic on the fire / in his room or the house entire

He does this once, on a Friday / and doesn’t see a mouse in his house—all away!

Illustration for the chapter on the mouse from the Manāfiʿ al-ḥayawān by Ibn Baḫtišūʿ, now held in the Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.500 fol. 53r.
Illustration for the chapter on the mouse from the Manāfiʿ al-ḥayawān by Ibn Baḫtišūʿ, now held in the Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.500 fol. 53r.

*****
Leonie Böttiger (formerly Rau) is a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) and the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. Her PhD project investigates premodern Arabic recipe collections as resources of knowledge, focusing on a variety of disciplinary contexts, periods, and regions. Leonie has written about premodern Arabic recipes for the Library of Arabic Literature, the American Historical Association, and The Recipes Project. She is the managing editor at ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly.

[1] All translations from Arabic are mine.

[2] An Arabic poetic metre typically used for didactic poetry. A poem written in rajaz is called an urjuza.

 

Bal-Po Stew: The Empire’s Recipe

By Lewis Ebert

Bal-Po Stew in the "Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Diet." Figure scanned by CADAL from the Peking University Library displayed as part of the Open Source Chinese Text Project.
Bal-Po Stew in the “Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Diet.” Figure scanned by CADAL from the Peking University Library displayed as part of the Open Source Chinese Text Project.

The third entry of the section entitled “Strange Delicacies of Combined Flavors” in the medieval Mongol cookbook, “Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink,” is the Bal-Po stew, a recipe that exemplifies the multivalent food culture of the Yuan dynasty:

Bal–po Soup [Stew] (Nepali Soup) (fig 1)

It supplements the centre, and brings down qi. It extends the diaphragm.

Mutton, cardamom pods (five), chickpeas (500ml, pulverize and remove the skins), Chinese radish.

Boil ingredients together to make a soup. Strain broth. Chop meat and radish. Add the mutton cut into coin-sized pieces to the soup, then add cooked Chinese radish [4 grams] of saffron, [8 grams] of Turmeric, [8 grams] of Black (“Iranian”) Pepper, [2 grams] of chicory, and coriander leaves.

Adjust flavours with a little salt. Eat over cooked aromatic non-glutinous rice. Add a little Vinegar. [1]

“The Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink,” compiled in 1330 by Hu Sihui, occupies a unique position in the history of Eurasian cuisine. Written under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, it is designed to offer life-extending medical solutions for the emperor and to foster a healthy diet for the court. As it is described in a famous encyclopedia of the Qing era: “[the author] compiled into a single book the rare and unusual delicacies, medicinal soups, poultices, and decoctions he offered, along with the formulas and methods found in the medical works from famous physicians.” [2] This manual for life-engendering dietary practice straddles multiple cultural products, ingredients, economic ties, and ritual cosmologies. Its genesis mirrors the vast empire that it was designed to accommodate: Mongol ancestral food types met Near Eastern ingredients all condensed into Traditional Chinese Medical form. Its prescriptions for the imperial table reveal a world in which food was never merely sustenance but a medium for negotiating health, hierarchy, and cosmology. Later, during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), it was officially promulgated as a compendium of useful culinary insights; the Ming Imperial preface to the text states: “We have examined the entire book Yinshan zhengyao of the former Yuan dynasty…this book is not just an aid for hygiene and nourishing. It is also a great aid for training to receive the correct [way of living].” [3] The culinary and medicinal recipes detailed therein were thus disseminated by imperially sponsored publishing houses from the 14th century and beyond, even into the Qing dynasty. [4]

Among the “Strange Delicacies of Combined Flavours,” the Bal-Po stew, a seemingly modest dish of mutton, chickpeas, and spices, offers a particularly rich case study in the articulation of Mongol Empire culinary cosmology. The chapter features ninety-five courtly recipes, ranging from mutton to camel to wolf; each entry is first described in terms of its medical benefits (relation to qi or organs) before detailing its ingredients. At first glance, Bal-Po stew resembles the Mongol šülen, the mutton broth that, as Buell and Anderson have noted, was believed to contain the “very essence, the soul of the animal.” [5] The broth was achieved by the boiling down of whole animals, usually sheep, for extended periods of time until their collagen thickened the stew and the carcass imparted a strong flavour. In this way, the essence or soul of the sheep, its vital energies, were transposed directly into the broth, thus creating a nourishing meal. It is for this reason that the stew could be said to supplement the individual, balance the qi, or extend the diaphragm; its effects were at once nutritious and medicinal.

From this traditional šülen form, Bal-Po distinguished itself through its inclusion of imported aromatics (saffron, turmeric, and black pepper), Near Eastern ingredients (chickpeas), and ingredients typical of East Asia at the time (radish and cardamom). These ingredients, sourced across the empire from as far as India through Islamic trade networks, marked the stew as a product of the trans-Eurasian circulation that the Mongol empire made possible; they represented a new fusion of food that had never been consumed before on Chinese soil. The result, Buell and Anderson claim when cooking the recipes themselves, is a dish that resembles a curry from the Kashmir: “an excellent dish.” [6]

Of particular interest is the inclusion of chickpeas and radishes. The first, a typically West Asian ingredient, at once accommodates for the many Muslim clients of the Mongol Empire, but also fulfils a curious role as thickening agent. As mentioned above, šülen is generated out of the prolonged boiling of a sheep carcass until a thick broth is produced: chickpeas, however, along with a number of other thickening agents included throughout the cookbook, can expedite that process. In place of the long-standing collagen-based thickening technique, the introduction of the chickpea from West Asia symbolises an evolution of culinary technique: instead of waiting for hours for the broth to thicken, the use of chickpeas (along with ground almonds and mung beans elsewhere) can reproduce the desired texture in minutes. The second, the Chinese radish, had likely come into contact with the Mongol šülen in the past given the occasional assimilation between Mongol and Chinese cultures, but here, instead of being used in dumpling mixtures or in chopped salads, the radish’s inclusion has a more functional role: removing the gamey odour of the stew. As has been accounted for across the materia dietetica of this era, the šülen, although nutritious and of great spiritual significance, tended towards pungency. Thus, with the inclusion of one half-way domestic ingredient and one imported one, a stew could be produced with increased speed and reduced smell.

What appears to be a simple stew, then, actually features a unique set of cultural impulses that could only have come together during the territorial zenith of the greatest land empire in history: from its name, Bal-Po, meaning Nepal, one of the old territories of the Tibetan Empire then under Yuan dynastic control, to the diverse set of ingredients generated through an extensive Muslim trading network, to its textual representation in a Chinese medical framework, to its flavours that could even be considered West Indian, the dish exemplifies the multivalent nature of the Mongol Empire.
*****
Lewis Ebert is a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford, specializing in East Asian culinary and ritual cultures. His research focuses on Mongol and Chinese food cosmologies, examining how recipes encoded beliefs about vitality, spirit, and nourishment. Combining archaeological, textual, and anthropological analysis, he explores the intersection of food, ritual, and social life across the Eurasian world.

FURTHER READING

Buell, Paul D and Eugene N Anderson (2013). Soup for the Qan. Milton Park: Routledge.

Hu, Sihui (1994). Yinshan zhengyao sanjuan 飲膳正要三卷. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe.

Qinding Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao 欽定四庫全書總目提要 (1997). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.

NOTES

[1] YSZY 1994, juan 1, 27A. My translation: measurements have been adjusted for broader audience.

[2] Qinding Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao 欽定四庫全書總目提要 1997, 9026. My translation.

[3] YSZY 1994, 1A

[4] This text is printed and reprinted even up until the modern day, with critical editions being consistently produced at a regular basis. The impact of the text on the Ming is hard to measure but its official promulgation is evidence for an interest and investment into its recipes.

[5] Buell and Anderson 2013, 42.

[6] ibid., 272, footnote.

[7] Bal-Po Stew in the “Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Diet,” figure scanned by CADAL from the Peking University Library displayed as part of the Open Source Chinese Text Project.