Secret Foods of the Spanish Inquisition

Lots of conversation about this video in the comments! Also feel free to join in on Reddit or Discord: Reddit ► www.reddit.com/r/TastingHistory/ Discord ► discord.gg/d7nbEpy

Of every topic, I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.

I am so pleased to see you using the book a drizzle of honey. It was written by my father and stepmother and was quite a labor of love. We spent months taste testing recipes. He actually found the oldest known recipe for charoset, a traditional Passover dish. He found it after the manuscript had been approved and they had to stop the presses in order to add this historically significant recipe.

My Scoutmaster originally came from Mexico. When he was growing up, he noticed that his mother never put cheese and meat in the same dish. When he asked his mother why, she said that she didn't know other than her own mother did the same thing (and she didn't know the reason either, other than family tradition). Later, when my Scoutmaster went to school in Los Angeles, he discovered that the meat and cheese separation was part of kosher. He began to research his family's genealogy, and he discovered that not only his mother's family (Moreno), but also his father's family (Cardenas) had Sephardic Jewish roots. The earliest history he could find was that both of his ancestral families originally lived in Sicily around the 10th century, which was then under Arab Muslim control. After the Normans conquered the island in the early 1100s, the Normans expelled the Jews and Muslims, and most of them (including my Scoutmasters ancestors) fled to Spain. 400 years later when the Reconquista was complete and the Spanish Inquisition came, my Scoutmaster's ancestors fled to Mexico in hopes of avoiding the eyes of the Inquisition and thus continue their religion in secret. They actually first arrived in Nuevo Leon, which was then under the control of the Carabajal Family, who were secretly Jewish and thus allowed the Marranos some freedom of worship. Unfortunately, the Spanish Inquisition sailed into Mexico eventually, and they made their presence known to Mexico's Jewish community by burning to death the Carabajal family. After that brutal show of force, my Scoutmaster's family slowly became Catholics over the next centuries, although they somehow managed to retain certain practices from their Jewish roots like separating meat and cheese in their dishes.

Being Portuguese, I’m hoping you do an episode on homemade alheira choriço. Started as a means of pretending to be Christian by having what looked to be pork sausage in your kitchen, but was actually made with game meat or fowl, spiced up to look like typical pork sausage and stretched with bread because, hey we’re poor we need to make the most of what protein we have (that’s why the texture is off). Now it’s a beloved Portuguese sausage in all its iterations.

The main purpose of Chamin in our house was to drive the family crazy with the smells escaping the pot for over 15 hours.... 15 hours of mouth watering anticipation

Hanging chorizo to ward off the inquisitors was the Spanish equivalent of hanging garlic to ward off the vampires. If I had to choose, I’d rather deal with a vampire than the Inquisition.

As a Sfardi jew it's so strange hearing a dish we eat every week be discussed like this. Great vid thanks

As a Sephardi Jew, I thank you. It's hard to find pieces of our history since the inquisition tried to eliminate every trace... my ancestors fled Medina del Campo in Spain as soon as that mess started, and except for one book and many stories, not much is left about the family's true story, so even this recipe helps me feel closer to my own personal history.

There was a woman in my temple who found out she was descended from Marranos when she was young. Every Friday night, her grandmother would take her down to the basement to light candles, and no one knew the reason, not even her grandmother. It was just something their family had always done. And then she looked into it and traced the reason back to the Spanish Inquisition. That's when she decided to convert to Judaism, to sort of "return" to the culture her family lost.

There are many versions of this dish in Jewish cuisine. The Hungarian Jewish version is Solet ("sholet") which consists of slow and long cooked dried beans, barley, onions, smoked meat, paprika and caraway seeds. A similar dish is cholent. Solet is one of my favorite things to eat in the world...

We are a Jewish family and have been waiting a long time for you to do some Jewish food! We're Ashkenazic (of German/eastern European descent), not Sephardic, but my kids and I were very appreciative of this fascinating (if sad) excursion into the history of our Sephardic siblings. We'd love for you to show us more Jewish recipes from times ancient and modern - there is so much interesting food lore to draw from! Thank you for your excellent program.

Wow! Interestingly there is a dish from Tunisia that is called "madfouna", which has the same Arabic root of dafina. It's also of Jewish origin (Jewish Tunisians call it bkaila also) and has fatty beef and some herb that look like chard. Maybe was it brought by Jewish Spaniards settling around Tunis. That makes me think of an episode idea, a period of history rarely spoken about: north African Jewish cuisine (from the Jewish migration following the reconquista to the "pieds noirs" cuisine if you want a more modern take)

Taking a wild guess on the background Pokemon. Espeon has the magic bounce ability (reflects non-damaging moves back at the user) and is rarely used in competitive teams. Hence, "nobody expects" using a non-damaging move only to have your opponent switch to an espeon and reflect it.

Hola, Max, tu pronunciación del español está muy bien ;) Saludos desde Argentina

This is a really wonderful video! My Mother's family can trace their ancestry back to when they left Spain in 1492 when the edict against Jews was issued. They emigrated to the Ottoman Empire, living in Italy, and eventually moved to the Isle of Rhodes. I am only here today because they saw the signs of war in the 1910's and some of them emigrated again to America (all the way to Seattle, as far away as they could get they reasoned). Those who stayed ended up being killed in the Holocaust. We don't have our relatives, or the local history for our former homes, all we have are the recipes my Great Grandmother brought over with her, and even most of those are gone, as my Grandma only passed down several dozen of her favorites to us by memory. No recipe cards used, only teaching from memory, mother to daughter. As a budding chef I have been working to recreate my Grandmother's and Great Grandmother's recipes so I can record them for our family for the future. Seeing a recipe like this which goes back to my family's earliest known origins is truly fascinating to me, and feels like learning about a past I never got to know about (we are Americans, as my Grandma would say, as she refused to teach us any of her parent's Ladino or Spanish and told us to learn America's history). Thank you for making this video, especially about such a very niche Jewish community which is very unheard of to most people.

As you mentioned, the name of the dish, adafina, is clearly Arabic. دفين (dafīn) means "buried" or even "secret." The feminine form دفينة (dafīna) can be used to mean "buried treasure." Add ال (al-) the definite article, assimilated to ad- before a word that begins with d, and you get الدفينة (addafīna) and simplify the double consonant (Spanish, unlike Italian, lost most of its double consonants) and, presto, one gets "adafina." Another comment refers to a Tunisian dish called madfouna (مدفونة) which would be a form related to dafina, from the same root.

Wow I never thought of the fact that the Sephardim had their own local version of Cholent. I mean it makes sense that they do but I was so used to the garlic-heavy, barley-based Askenazi(Central European) version

Eggplants get bitter as they mature and develop seeds. They also have a super short shelf life which contributes to bitterness. Best thing to do is get smaller fruit and cook your eggplant the day (literally) you buy it. Growing an eggplant plant is totally worth it if you get hot summers, they're really kind of pretty! The ending of the episode really hit me hard. It was important to hear, though. I'm glad you shared it.

4:27 As an interesting aside, while salt was relatively expensive, it wasn't so expensive that you couldn't use a bunch of salt for your eggplants. This isn't because they were dumping a fist full of salt in the pot, but rather because they would preserve their vegetables and other food by salting the ever living hell out of them. Before the advent of canning in the early 1800s there were four major ways to preserve your food: Dry them, Pickle them (with or without vinegar), cook it in a shit tonne of sugar or honey (which was expensive but not unaffordable), or Salt them (or store them in salt). By the time of the Spanish Inquisition there was a a sizable middle class that grew with the renaissance, of which a not insignificant portion of which was jewish. For the people cooking this dish it wouldn't be a stretch to say they could afford the extra salt. This is actually part of why the Spanish Inquisition was so damaging, because many jews had to flee Spain for their own safety and because laws at the time prevented the carrying of gold, silver, spices, and many trade goods it left countless jews destitute. This was to such a degree that there was historically significant spike in jewish pirates aligned against spain, both in the Mediterranean and in the New World, which fucking awesome but a story for another time.