Jesuit's Invented Tempura? Come On!

Tempura holds a bit of Japanese history

Apr. 30, 2008
By MARICEL E. PRESILLA
Tempura embodies qualities Japanese cooks hold dear: fresh ingredients, precision cooking and beautiful presentation. It also exemplifies the uncanny ability of the Japanese to absorb outside influences -- in this case, from the Iberian peninsula -- and mold them into new constructs that are very much their own.

The idea of frying fish and seafood in a light batter came to Japan with Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century. These learned and zealous men were the evangelical arm of the Portuguese crown in Asia.

They arrived in Japan in 1549 following the wreck of a Portuguese ship along the coast of Kyushu, Japan's most southwesterly island.

Led at first by Francis Xavier, who was born in Navarre, Spain, the Jesuits gained Japanese converts to Christianity even in the upper echelons of the nobility (daimyo) and the samurai warrior class.

They also managed to secure a stronghold in Nagasaki, which became the hub of Japanese trade with Portugal. Naturally, as the Jesuits came into contact with all levels of Japanese society, their influence extended beyond religion to other aspects of Western culture such as technology and science and even cooking. In the book Japan: Its History and Culture (MacGraw-Hill, 2005), historian W. Scott Morton writes that by 1569, there were about 300,000 Christian converts in Japan and that linguistic borrowings from this period include the Portuguese words for bread (pan, from the Portuguese pao) and tempura ``for fried shrimp in batter, derived from the fact that on Ember Days, quattour tempora [days of fasting and abstinence], the Jesuit fathers ate only seafood.''

Japanese rulers began issuing edicts banning Christianity as early as 1587, and soon the Jesuits, along with all the Portuguese, were expelled, effectively closing Japan to the outside world until the 1850s.

Nonetheless, Portuguese culinary borrowings like tempura became embedded in Japanese popular cooking. By the 18th century, tempura had become a popular street food all over Japan, often sold from wheeled carts. The idea was to eat the fritters as soon as they were fried -- the kind of freshness and immediacy diners still find today in Japanese tempura restaurants, where the cook working across the counter places the crispy morsels on your plate as soon as he pulls them from the hot oil. Batter-fried seafood is common in Portugal, Spain and all over Latin America, but our coatings are never as crisp and lacy as in tempura. In fact, Cuban foods (mostly fish or vegetable like eggplant) that are rebozadas (batter-fried) are meant to have a spongy crust. One of the keys to the Japanese method is careful calibration of the batter ingredients.

You can find tempura batter flour in Japanese markets that contains dehydrated egg yolks, carotene coloring and baking powder, but I much prefer making my own mix with fresh eggs and a low-gluten cake flour. Though I am partial to shrimp tempura, squid, eel, king crab and even sea urchin roe (uni) lend themselves beautifully to this cooking method.

Small Japanese eggplant (usually cut in a fan shape) and thinly sliced starchy vegetables like kabocha squash, yams and boniato (white sweet potato) are also delicious tempura style. Like the cameras and luxury cars that have become a hallmark of Japanese technological sophistication, tempura is the result of felicitous borrowing coupled with ingenuity and meticulous attention to detail.

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