A recipe for churros: easy to make, dangerously easy to eat

Other – more nationalistic – Spanish say churros were first made by Spanish farmers tending to churra – a breed of sheep with ridged horns – hence the name and shape of the pastry.

Miranda Brown, professor of Chinese studies in the department of Asian languages and cultures at the University of Michigan, in the US, scoffs at the idea that churros come from China.

“For starters, no one has ever coughed up a shred of textual support. I have yet to see some sixteenth- or seventeenth-century European quoted as claiming that churros come from foreign lands, nor are there any of the usual smoking guns such as loan words suggesting a historical instance of pastry lifting.”

She says the theory fails to take into account the role of the Islamic world in spreading the real progenitor of churros, first to China and other parts of Asia, and only much later to the Iberian Peninsula via the Moors.

In fact, similar-looking fritters are still consumed throughout North Africa, says Brown, and there’s also a variant of another popular treat in Algeria called the banana zlabia (or zlabiat), which is a hot-water dough piped into hot oil, then dunked in syrup.

In old Spanish cookbooks, the ancestors of churros appear as zulâbiyya, says Maria Paz Moreno, professor of Spanish language and culture at the University of Cincinnati, in the US, and the author of many cookbooks on Spain’s gastronomic traditions.

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“You have a recipe for a fried dough with flour and water, fried in oil and drizzled with honey, that can be found in an anonymous manuscript from Al-Andalus [a Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian Peninsula] which would indicate an Arabic-Andalusian origin, from the 13th century.

“So, yes, churros are possibly a food of Arabic heritage, since there are similar desserts that still exist in Iran and Syria.”

The Moors reigned over parts of modern-day Spain, Portugal and southern France from the 8th century, so churros became a common legacy, Moreno adds.

Once zulabiya started spreading, they did so quickly along the Silk Road. By the thirteenth century, the Persian treat had been popular for hundreds of years throughout the Islamic world, says Brown, and there is a version of it today in India called jalebi – the loan of the word here is crystal clear.

But the Silk Road further complicates the picture, blurring the boundaries of food origins, argues Gene Anderson, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, and a food and nutrition expert who has written widely on China.

If the Silk Road legacy makes it tough to identify who invented what first, it’s also hard to totally rule out any Chinese-Portuguese affair in the churro’s origins, especially since fritters are such a spontaneous creation.

“I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody knows. Anything is possible,” says Anderson. “The trouble is that fried dough strips and frybread [fried flat dough circles] are almost impossible not to invent, if you have dough and oil. With them, you have a super cheap, super convenient, super filling snack. They are thus pretty widespread.”

A middle-way theory – culinary cross-contamination and influences – sounds realistic, says Anderson. It is likely that the Portuguese were influenced by and picked up Chinese frying techniques and potentially some fritter shapes to hone their own churros, and that when they brought churros with them to China (alongside other foodstuffs), they might have also passed on some tips to the Chinese.

There’s one particular Spanish churro-like fritter called porra, which is identical to youtiao: it’s thicker than churros and without their typical star-ridged pattern.

“He is cordially hated in China, so they think of him and his wife – who supposedly schemed with him – when they split the youtiao and throw it into boiling oil.” This tale would make modern-day youtiao roughly 900 years old, but it is likely an evolution of a much earlier fritter.

In his extensive culinary research, Sean Chen, author of Recipes from the Garden of Contentment, the first bilingual (Chinese and English) edition of Qing dynasty gastronomy book Suiyuan Shidan (1792), hunted down old Chinese recipes to proved that Islamic fritters first appeared in China thanks to Muslim traders two centuries before they reached Spain with the Moors.

“It is in the Qimin Yaoshu, a 6th century agricultural text, which described an exceptionally crisp thin looped-shaped pastry, fried in either tallow or butter and doused in honey or jujube molasses.”

Chen, a Canadian scientist who develops algorithms for computer-assisted micro- neurosurgery and is obsessed with Chinese food history, found another 1200s recipe for sugary “little pressed short-pastries” while working on his next book, Madame Wu’s Manual on Cuisine.

“This pastry is made with the same bean starch and wheat flour mix as a dough rather than a slurry, but actually has the similar ridged pattern we see in the Spanish churros and also served in a similar fashion. The recipe itself says that after frying the pastries you ‘ladle them out with a perforated spoon, and while hot, sprinkle with white granulated sugar that has been finely ground, then toss’.”

According to Chen, Islamic fried dough pastries similar to jalebi were introduced quite early by the Muslim and Turkic Uygur people in Central Asia and were already quite prevalent in China long before the Iberians introduced churros. Jalebi evolved over time, and took on indigenous Chinese traits.

“If we look at them through the lens of a ‘culinary grammar’ it’s hard to push aside youtiao as not being even somewhat related to this system of related recipes.”

Another fried pastry tied to this Muslim doughnut tradition is sanzi dough twists, which are made throughout China but especially by the Uygurs, says Brown, with some versions resembling Indian jalebi as they are formed in a lattice.

Chen is open to some kind of “osmosis” theory that links youtiao and churros.

“Whether the Portuguese were influenced by, or influenced, the frying techniques or dough shapes in China is not known [by me], but when they introduced churros, this was definitely a meeting between cousins, many times removed,” he says.

The likely cross-fertilisation of food creations, and culinary overlapping, reveal the extent of the movement of people, goods and ideas between the Middle East, central Asia and East Asia even back then, says Chen. And that’s a much more fascinating story then establishing food copyright or genesis.