Speculations, please: the griddle-seared pastry (warka-popiah) across Eurasia
I’ve invented the name. There is no general name for the thin sheets of pastry that wrap egg rolls, crop up in North African and Middle Eastern sweet and savory dishes. Anyone who has a better suggestion, please send it in. I simply offer this as a shorthand, parallel to shortcrust or puff.
As some of the links below show, its made by taking a very wet, sticky wheat flour dough, dumping it on a hot griddle, spreading it around, and peeling off the finest of layers of pastry. The parts of the world. North Africa, the Emirates, and Southeast Asia, specifically Malacca. The uses. For wrapping savory or sweet fillings.
Let me be quite clear. Until a few days ago I was clueless about warka and popiah. I’ve still never seen them being made, and so I’m going to be plunging way out of my depth.
I want to take the leap, though, because three of the biggest heavyweights in culinary geography--Anissa Helou, Robyn Eckhardt and Naomi Duguid (no blog post on this because she commented on Facebook but if you are one of the five remaining English speakers who don’t know Naomi’s work, just google her)–are agreed that far flung bits of the world use similar techniques for making thin, thin pastry.
(And if I remember right t Susan Ji-Young Park and Farid Zadi have also discussed this though I can’t find the link right now.)
So let’s speculate. Food history is going to go nowhere without a few wild speculations. And who better than me to make them, since I am so ignorant. Shoot them down, please, but surely in the process we shall learn something.
Premise One. Something many years long years teaching history of technology taught me is that the chances that this technique was independently invented in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia are pretty remote.
Sure, independent invention does occur. 3 or more guys invented the light bulb within the same decade (sorry, Edison fans). What happened was that in the US, England and Australia, electricity advocates were looking to replace gas lighting, that meant having a light, that meant having a bulb. Same problem, same background knowledge, simultaneous invention.
These special conditions don’t seem likely in the pastry case.
Premise Two. Griddle seared pastry was invented in one place and transferred to the others. What is the most likely place for invention? A few plausibility assumptions. This technique requires fine white flour. That pretty much rules out Southeast Asia, not a center of fine white flour production. It requires high skills working fine white flours. And it requires a market for what has to have been an expensive product, pricey raw material, tricky technique. These both point to the western not the eastern end of the range, probably to the Ottoman Empire, a place where fine pastries and bread were highly esteemed. I guess I would bet on North Africa rather than the Emirates, but this is highly fallible.
Premise Three. It doesn’t take a multitude to transfer a technique. What possible connections could there be between the Mediterranean or the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Here’s one suggestion. French or British steamship lines. They left culinary traces all over the place in the late nineteenth century, sometimes by transporting goods (Worcester sauce), sometimes because their cooks dropped off in different places (from the Caribbean to the West Indies, from Goa to who knows where).
Premise Four. Most seemingly ancient dishes were in fact invented at the end of the nineteenth century. Not all. Many dishes go further back. But a surprising number. Which might be the case with egg rolls in Southeast Asia. This was when cheap flour that did not instantly spoil in the tropics arrived, thanks to steel roller mills, steamship lines, wheat on the American Pacific slope.
Of course there are dozens of unanswered questions. What is the relation of this with rolled thin pastry (filo). What is the relation with crepes and their Filipino alter ego, lumpia wrappers. What is the relation with the Chinese tradition of ping, steamed wheat flour products, that goes back at least 2ooo years and that spread westward during the Mongol/Turkic ascendency.
Any thoughts. Anissa? Robyn? Naomi? Charles Perry, the great expert on Islam/Turkic breads? Or Susan?
- The trick to grinding cacao on the metate (grindstone).
- Griddle Baked Pastry in Andhra Pradesh and (?) in Eritrea
The Moroccan green tea and mint culture came about because of a diverted steamship, perhaps this was also the way of the popiah. I was thinking it might also be through the spice trail- Uzbekistan (samarkand) because of how Chiniese style dumplings became so famous there. I have not heard of anyone producing yoyo crepes in those parts however.
An interesting, complex subject.
I don’t know much about warqa/malsuqa, though I assume it (along with puff pastry) was invented as part of the madness for the thinnest possible bread in medieval Moorish Spain and North Africa.
Primarily the Moors used these pastries in a way that would not occur to us, to make tharida, a rather mushy product of bread and stewed meat. (The thinness could have been intended to honor the dish, which it had been Muhammad’s favorite.). Tharida could be very liquid; another form of tharida gave the Portuguese word for soup, acorda. A lot of techniques for making flaky pastry emerged from this ferment.
Filo is descended from the layered breads of the Central Asian Turkic nomads, as refined the the royal kitchens of Istanbul.
The anthropologist Eugene Anderson thinks Chinese pastries represent a Persian influence, because indigenous Chinese way of cooking grain was boiling or steaming, a la millet or rice. Wheat had reached China in ancient times, and there were querns for small-scale grinding, but the millstone was introduced in the middle ages by Persian merchants. Anderson thinks the Chinese learned dumplings at the same time (I think of the people who bought food processors in the Seventies and then bought food processor cookbooks so they could use them).
But the antiquity of spring roll pastry and its cousins is a closed book to me. I’ve queried Anderson.
I have some thoughts, which I’ll share after pausing for a moment — there, a pause — to collect my thoughts after being described as a ‘heavyweight in culinary geography’. Yikes! Rachel, can I quote you in my bio?
First of all, I’d like to call it griddle-cooked, because it’s not really seared. Or even better perhaps, griddle-created or something like that, because the pastry doesn’t exist until it is ‘created’ by rolling that ball of dough over the griddle. Or is dough pastry before it’s pastry, technically? I’m not a baking expert so I leave that to others.
But I think that this will make the ‘transfer’ explanation much easier to come by — popiah are Chinese, as are the skins or wrappers or whatever you care to call them. And if I’m not mistaken they’re most often associated with Hokkien or Fujianese. I’d bet my life that they made their way to Melaka, and then to the rest of Malaysia — and to the Philippines too, where they are lumpia, with Fujianese traders. (Fujianese arrived in Phils before the Spanish did.)
So — Silk Road? Or whatever other path served as the route for dumplings and pasta betw China and the rest of the world. Others will no doubt pick up the discussion from here.
Fascinating, especially as I have just myself been reading a bit about kitcha, the Eritrean bread (not to be confused with enjera), which seems to be made in exactly the way you describe, but not wrapped around things.
Agreed totally, Rachel, that most so-called traditional dishes were “invented” or evolved in the 19th century or later, but how do Vietnamese cha gio, called in English spring rolls, made with rice flour wafers, fit into this?
I’ve been making these for a few years and one thing that stands out is the hugh level of skill that is required to make them. From what I have seen, these were often not items tht you would make casually at home, but you would buy from professionals. It is such a difficult skill that I am wondering if we are looking at the migration of a few skilled individuals, rather then the transferance of a whole cultural package.
On the otherhand in Asia, there are techniques for producing flat steamed noodles by steaming a batter on a cloth. In the Near East thin pastrys are produced on a up turned round bowl (a saj for instance), both are slightly different techniques to what we are talking about here, but both could be extended logically to produce the same result. So possibly independent.
Also worth considering related products in the same locations. In North Africa there is a technique for producing pancakes from a ball of dough which is further liquified, rather then just making a batter which is more usual. Maybe what is worth considering in the North African situation is that there is a core technique of producing flat breads on a griddle (thick and ultra thin), from a ball of dough, rather then the very specific secondary technique of producing warka.
Recently, Paula Wolfert introduced me to a much, much more simple technique for producing the warka, for those that are interested. It is easy and makes you look like a cooking genius.
http://www.paula-wolfert.com/recipes/homemade_warka.html
“Primarily the Moors used these pastries in a way that would not occur to us, to make tharida, a rather mushy product of bread and stewed meat. (The thinness could have been intended to honor the dish, which it had been Muhammad’s favorite.). Tharida could be very liquid; another form of tharida gave the Portuguese word for soup, acorda. A lot of techniques for making flaky pastry emerged from this ferment.”
Tharida is still made. Some versions are rather like pain perdu with thicker slices of bread. A derivative dish, called trid, is indeed made from a thin pastry sheets. The sheets are rolled though.
well, i can’t find anything in my Persian books that resembles warqa or malsuqa (thanks charles, i forgot to mention the word in my post) or popiah. i would tend to agree with charles re moorish spain & north africa and their passion for the thinnest pastry possible. i forgot to mention the syrian sambusak sheets made with batter and not a very wet dough. even though it is not made quite the same as warqa, malsuqa, popiah, or regag, it is the same family. or perhaps it is more like a crepe. in any case, here is how it is made as i describe it in my baking book (which the editor sadly butchered):
The Syrians make savory triangles with a very thin filo-like pastry, which you can see being made on the streets of Damascus. The sheets of pastry are made by pouring very thin layers of batter in overlapping rings onto a large round hot metal plate. The pastry-maker starts at the outer edge and meticulously works towards the centre, until the hot plate is covered with a very large, thin sheet of pastry, which he then peels off to lay on a piece of cloth before he starts again. The process is far too complicated and skilled for me to give a recipe. As with the Moroccan warqa (see page 000), the dough for Syrian sambusak cannot be reproduced successfully by the average, or even excellent home-cook without previous experience. It is far easier and quicker to use commercial filo pastry, or if you are in Damascus, to go down to the souk to buy some ready-made.
by the way, sanbusak is mentioned in la cuisine andalouse, un art de vivre XI-XIII siecle.
oops, meant to continue to say that the dough used for the medieval sanbusak is a regular one, and not a wet one or a batter.
Oh, trid is sometimes called “poorman’s bastila”. Bastila is the famous pigeon pie of North Africa made from warka pastry leaves.
Link to Clifford Wright’s article about the origins of bastila.
http://www.cliffordawright.com/caw/food/entries/display.php/id/66/
As a side note: I think “Maghreb”, as in the larger region of North Africa or Arab West, is all too often translated as “Morocco” the country. This matters— not from a nationalistic point of view— in food history, especially when you are tracing culinary geography, trade routes, avenues of exchange, etc..
I am no expert either in food nor history, and alongside some of the biggest culinary experts — here are my thoughts, on some part of the discussion:
I don’t get how thin pastry is an ‘invention’ and how cooking pastry on griddles an ‘invented’ technique, especially when comparing it all to the inventions of light bulbs? Food has origins, several origins even at separate stages in human history since more than 30,000 years ago with the evolvement of agriculture. It’s almost like discussing who invented and transferred fried rice whereas frying is a common technique of cooking rice, just as griddling is a common technique of making (thin) pastry. The history of cooking wheat product in China can be traced as far back as 220 AD with the ‘invention’ of a type of flatbread called Guokui – literally means Pot Helmet. Legend has it that during the Chinese warring period, helmets were used to bake bread – a primitive griddling technique you may say. Also a tandoor-type oven originated in Persia to cook flatbread brought in by a general warrior who conquered Xinjiang and westwards into Central Asia a little earlier than 220 AD.
Popiah is literally ‘thin cake/pastry/bing’ in Hokkien dialect (spoken by Fujianese in Fujian province, south of China). Its origins go back nearly 1300 years ago and it was also called ‘Spring cake’ as it was a traditional food of offering to Spring God. Hence the origin of ‘spring rolls’. These thin pastries traditionally come in two versions – fried and non-fried. Traditionally it is served non-fried as it can be eaten at room temperature and is easier to prepare. As Robyn said, that’s how they made their way to Malaysia. Popiah is not an equivalent of ‘spring rolls’ or ‘egg rolls’– rolls is just how it is eaten, the common technique of wrapping in stuffing, rolling it and eating. That should explain Nancy’s question how Vietnamese cha gio (called Vietnamese spring rolls) is made with rice flour and unrelated to thin pastry made with wheat.
As for the origins of noodle/dumpling – my understanding is archaeologist has established that pasta originated in China at least more than 1000 years before Italy.
Katy, So glad you contributed and hope to hear from you again, Rachel
I don’t think the dome was made of metal. It has a sandstone appearance./
Did Adam send you the second photo showing an earthenware gdra del trid?
Those sheets of trid are further cooked by steaming.
No just that one. Steaming too. Interesting.
Here’s what Gene Anderson had to say in response to my query about how old spring roll pastry is:
I don’t really know. They were traditionally fried and the flakiness came from that (the very high heat), which is not usually the western way to do things. I don’t know of any spring roll recipes with flaky pastry in the few old-time cookbooks that have been translated.
–Gene A
Charles, this spring roll pastry – if you are talking about oriental style spring roll in relation to the thin pastry in the discussion (?) – I have explained it on Robyn’s EatingAsia Facebook page – Rachel has probably read it too. If you are talking about spring rolls in the West, I don’t know.
However, bear in mind that ‘spring’ rolls refers to a type of food (a thin pastry) that was used for offering to Spring God in the ‘ancient’ days in China – I see no sense that there is something called ‘spring roll’ in the West.
Try South India cuisine: from Kerala state- they have Parotta (flaky pastry flat bread), Idiappam (fine rice noodles steamed using wet rice flour dough), and Kuralappam (fried spring rollish things with savory/sweet stuffings). The last one is an import from the original Christians who migrated to Kerala via sea about 1 AD- note also located in Kerala-Goa region are burial places of St. Thomas the Disciple and Vasco Da Gama. These christians have a different cuisine and pride calling themselves roman christians. And the Indians who migrated (B.C?!) to Africa, Caribbean islands brought over their curry, flat bread concepts. To contemplate history: India-Persian Silk routes, ancient sea travel from China to Africa via India, and the accessibility of Rome and Greece through the RedSea (gulf of Aden) and Gulf of Oman! Google these and compare the regional recipes- never ceases to amaze me!
Thanks for the comments, Mari. I think much of the work that has to be done in food history has to do with sorting out these far flung influences and getting very clear about who was going where when. Very interesting patterns.