Typically for my old recipes I look at old cookbooks
but today is a little bit different because I look to a trial transcript
from the Spanish Inquisition to recreate 16th century adafina,
a stew meant to be slow cooked overnight.
So thank you to Babbel for sponsoring this video as we look at what it was like to cook
during the Spanish Inquisition.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
This time on Tasting History.
So yeah, a little bit of a dark origin for today's recipe. It comes from a trial transcript
of Blanca Ramirez in Toledo Spain in 1523. Maria who is a servant of Blanca's mother-in-law details how Blanca
"Showed her how to cook a stew into which they put chickpeas and fava beans,
the fattest meat that could be had or udder was added to the pot, and if they were in season eggplant was added
and they added dried coriander and caraway and cumin and pepper and onion
and the stew began to cook from vespers until the next day at noon;
when they wanted to cover it the night before they threw chopped and crushed chard in;
and if there was no chard then they used radish leaves."
So I learned about this recipe from a wonderful cookbook called 'A Drizzle of Honey' which is
all about Sephardic cooking of the 15th 16th early 17th century.
Sephardic being the Jewish community in Spain at the time so definitely go check out that cookbook, it's wonderful.
But as a lot of the sources that they cite in the cookbook are actually originally in Spanish
I decided to challenge myself and translate a few on my own with a little help from our sponsor Babbel.
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and they're designed for real-world experiences. It's perfect for travel or translating recipes.
By taking a course like food in Spain you get lessons where you learn all about the cuisine of the region.
And taking these lessons allowed me to pick out certain phrases when translating the recipe
like garbanzos y habas, or carne the fattiest meat.
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Now while the recipe was in Spanish the name adafina is actually an Arabic word but
they had lots of words for this dish including some Spanish words
such as calient or transnochado which referred to the dish being cooked overnight.
Its Hebrew name is hamin and its Yiddish name cholent.
There are many ways to make this dish with lots of different ingredients
depending on when in history it's being made and where in the world it's being made,
but the one thing that they all have in common is that it is slow cooked usually overnight.
It originated in ancient Judea likely to align with the Biblical verse
"You shall not kindle fire in any of your dwelling places on the Sabbath day."
"So bake what you want to bake, and boil what you want to boil. Then set aside whatever remains and keep it until morning."
And that's precisely what we're going to do. So for this recipe what you'll need is:
one cup or 160 grams dried fava beans, one cup or 180 grams dried chickpeas,
two and a half pounds or about a kilogram of beef, and you want something pretty fatty for this
or you can actually go with udder but I don't know where you're gonna find a cows udder so just go with a nice fatty beef.
A quarter cup or 60 milliliters olive oil, one tablespoon of salt, one large onion diced,
a quart or a liter of beef broth or water, two teaspoons ground coriander, one and a half teaspoons ground cumin,
two teaspoons ground caraway, two teaspoons fresh ground pepper,
two large eggplants peeled and chopped, and a large handful of chard leaves.
So the first thing to do is prepare your eggplant. Now you can actually just throw your eggplant in and it's going to be fine,
but some eggplant can be rather bitter so I prefer to add a bunch of salt,
and I mean a bunch of salt over the eggplant, and let it sit for several hours.
Now I don't know that they would have done this at the time, probably not unless they were a very wealthy household,
because it is kind of a waste of salt but it makes it better.
Now pretty much everything else can be done in one pot. So first add the chickpeas and fava beans to a pot, and cover them with water and
then bring them to a boil for two minutes, then drain them and set them aside.
In the same pot heat two teaspoons of olive oil, and then add the onions and a bit of the salt
and cook for about five minutes, or until the onions start to brown.
Then take them out and do the same thing with the meat adding the rest of the olive oil and the rest of the salt.
Once the meat is browned on all sides add the onions back in and pour in the beef broth or the water, and bring it to a simmer.
Then cover the pot and let it cook for one hour. At that time take the eggplant that has been well salted
and pour out the purple liquid that has drained to the bottom, and then rinse the eggplant rather well,
and then add it into the pot along with the chickpeas and the fava beans, and add in all of the spices.
Let it return to a simmer and then cover and let it cook for yet another hour.
Now at this point in the Medieval Spanish household of Blanca Ramirez it would have been sundown
and so they would have covered the pot with hot coals, and let it slowly simmer overnight
but before they would have done that the recipe says they would have added the chard or radish leaves.
So chop up your chard and then pound it flat and add it to the pot.
This is also a good time to give it a taste and see if it needs a little more salt or any other spices,
then you can either put the pot in the oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit or 95 degrees Celsius or you can use a slow cooker fort this.
Really it should go overnight but about six hours will do just fine.
Now the cooking ofthis dish overnight was so important not only for the flavor
but to follow the Biblical commandment to not work on the Sabbath,
and hence for the Jewish community in 15th and 16th century Spain
it was actually something that could get you brought before the Spanish Inquisition.
So while our adafina cooks make sure you are subscribed to Tasting History
and that you've hit that notification bell so you never miss an episode
as we go back to a rather unpleasant time in history.
Now to cover the full background of the Spanish Inquisition is really
something that you do like in an entire master's degree in history,
not a 15 minute video on YouTube so I'm going to just give a little background on it for context,
but with the caveat that it is so much more complicated than this.
Now on the Iberian Peninsula there had been a large Jewish population since at least the Roman Empire and for much of
their history it had been a relatively peaceful existence.
There had been flare-ups of violence but overall not too bad.
Then in the summer of 1391 there was a series of mass killings
against the Jewish population that ended up leading to many converting to Catholicism
and those people were known as Conversos,
fast forward 100 years and the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile have been united with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella.
Shortly after that they also added Granada to the kingdom which came with a large Muslim and Jewish population.
Well with all of this combining of kingdoms there was some confusion over who was who and who believed what,
and the Converso population was very diverse.
There were the people who had converted to Catholicism and had been converted for a hundred years
and had lost all ties to their Jewish past,
but then there were also those who had converted to Catholicism, considered themselves Catholics
but still held ties to their Jewish community.
Then there was a group called the Marranos who follow what modern scholars term crypto Judaism,
meaning that they had converted because the other option was death,
but they still practice Judaism in secret in their homes.
Well in 1478 Queen Isabella became convinced that there was a large amount of this Crypto Judaism inside of the Converso population
and their ultimate goal was to convert all of the Conversos back to Judaism.
So she and Ferdinand requested a papal bull to establish an inquisition to look into the matter.
Now inquisitions were nothing new, they had been going on throughout the Medieval period but
usually they were created to address a specific issue and then were dissolved,
but not the Spanish Inquisition.
It was like the Cher of inquisitions, it just kept going on and on and on for 300 years,.
The last person not being tried until 1818, but it was those first 50 years that were the most brutal.
Soon after its creation it became a sort of secret police and the inquisition would send
inquisitors from town to town spreading fear and mistrust amongst the population
because the way that they investigated was really to rely on the population as informants,
and so when they would go to a town they would post what were known as Edicts of Faith,
and these were things for people to be on the lookout that could give away someone as practicing Judaism.
Some of these things were like lighting a candle at sundown on Friday...
which pretty much everybody did when candles were your only source of light.
Another was if somebody wore a clean shirt on Friday, heaven forbid,
but most of them had to do with food. One list posted in 1517 and Valencia cautioned citizens to be on the lookout
for "Those who prepare food for Saturdays on Fridays, in pots over small fires:
for they do not work on Friday night and Saturdays as on other days."
Other edicts outlined how meat had to be killed in order to keep it kosher, and be on the lookout for that,
or if anyone was buying meat during Lent that was always a big red flag.
Then there were specific foods that became ingredients of mistrust including eggplant.
Eggplant had come to Spain with the Moors and was popular throughout the population, no matter the faith.
It appears in many of the earliest Spanish recipes like those from the 14th century but by the 16th century it had become much rarer
because of its association with Jewish cooking, and their very existence in a recipe would open up the writer to scrutiny.
Though eventually eggplants would return to popularity in Spain and are now in a lot of Spanish cooking.
Dried meat known as cecina de vaca also became taboo because of its association with Jewish families.
Don Gonzalo, a jeweler from Sorya, was convicted by the inquisition because
his family made "dried beef... and the wife and daughters of Gonçalo the jeweller were porging the meat."
Porging refers to a specific way of removing fat and vein from an animal to keep them kosher.
Now because of the intimate nature of cooking and eating at home it was often the family friends or servants
of those Jewish families who ended up turning them in.
In 1485 the servant of Teresa Sanchez testified that her mistress "did not eat bacon, or hare, or conger eel, or eel."
So if you just didn't like eel das suspicious.
In fact many of the ingredients used as evidence by the inquisition were so omnipresent in society
that eating them pretty much applied to everyone!
Eating fish or hard-boiled eggs in the days after someone dies was considered suspicious,
but in a society that ate fish multiple times a week pretty much everyone could be guilty.
And like I said the Jewish and Converso populations were still very much intertwined, and so people would
find them following the culinary traditions of their neighbors or their ancestors simply because
it wasn't with any religious intent.
It's like when we go out partying on Mardi Gras, it's just
because we party on Mardi Gras. It's not because we're about to go into Lent and can't eat meat for 40 days.
At least that's how most people think about it.
So Conversos only becoming aware of many of these dietary issues
once the inquisitors had come to town and posted their Edicts of Faith
would then alter the way that they were eating.
Some stories tell of people hanging chorizo outside of their house
just to prove their Catholicism. And in 1511 Juana Gonzalez reported
that her mistress "does not eat eel or octopus or hare or rabbit"...
but clarified that during Lent she had been eating these things ever since the inquisitor had come to town.
Now unfortunately this close relationship between Conversos and their Jewish neighbors
led the Inquisitor General Tomás de Torquemada to convince the king and queen to sign the Alhambra Decree in 1492
which decreed that the openly Jewish population of Spain had four months to either convert to Catholicism or
to leave the Kingdom of Spain under penalty of death,
and so there was an exodus of Sephardic or Spanish Jews to other more tolerant parts of Europe
including the Ottoman Empire and the Netherlands.
And eventually a large community grew in Jamaica oddly enough under the protection of the descendants
of Christopher Columbus.
Though when they left Spain it was decreed that they
"must not take out of Spain any gold silver or valuables..."
and so when they left they, often did so destitute with only a few belongings and of course
their recipes like this one for adafina which I'm about to eat.
And here we are adafina from the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
Now some sources say this would have been served cold at the time, others say that it would have been heated back up.
I'm going with heated back up because I don't want cold stew.
Here we go.
That's wonderful. I mean it's beef stew but it's so interesting because
those spices and those
other flavors that you don't typically get in a beef stew are there and make it unique.
It's very, very different from from most most beef stew that I've had.
What I really, really like is that the eggplant is basically turned too mush, and so it acts as a kind of it combines all
of the other ingredients together like actually brings them together but then you also have the
chickpeas which while they've been cooked for a very long time they still have some some feel to them.
They aren't mush so you get this wonderful texture inside of this very soft stew, and the
meat I mean it's just it's fallen apart. You get the flavor without the texture at all it's just-
it's really, really nice and it's and it's something that is unique, you know.
It's not like every other stew I've had.
So I wanted to read this little poem from the time period by Antón de Montoro
and it's- he's a Converso and he talks about no matter what he does to to fit in with the
Catholic population, no matter how faithful he is they still just won't accept him.
"I recited the creed and adored pots of thick bacon, half-cooked rashers, I heard mass and prayed,
I crossed myself and I made the sign of the cross, yet I could never kill the mark of Converso."
So make sure to follow me on Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and I will see you next time on Tasting History.