El Fiambre is Kosher!

Last week I came across an article online which described Guatemala's traditional Day of the Dead dish, el fiambre, as "Arabe", at least in part.

Note: if they had said Spanish, this would undoubtedly make it a 'colonial' delicacy, but because it was pegged as Arab, it should of course be considered 'de-colonial', or even 'reclaimed' (...from those pesky Mayan indigenes.)

 

There are essentially two main ways that culinary techniques that one might describe as Arab, either correctly or misleadingly, could have arrived in Guatemala.

 

1) Between the Visigoths and the Reconquista there was an extended Islamic interlude on the Iberian peninsula, at first a Caliphate and then a patchwork of successor states. 

 

While some Arabic was spoken, the people running this show were Moors, e.g. native North Africans (such as Berbers) who had never been anywhere near the Middle East, and many of the people making up the show thus being run were forced converts from various ethnic groups who had been around since before Roman times. 

 

And so indeed, we find a Moorish precursor to el fiambre called Cachir, which involved copious quantities of cow meat and choice embutidos such as mortadella, a version of which is still prepared in Algeria. 

 

Bright sparks may already have twigged that Cachir is a 're-claimed' version of an earlier Hebrew word, Kosher, which means 'apt for consumption'. (You may recall that de-colonisation in the Levant involves taking the Hebrew names of places, converting them into Arabic and then claiming — or re-claiming — that these are now officially the originals.)

 

2) Sometimes one comes across a very distinct syncretic cuisine in Central America and the Caribbean, of a kind which most of us gringos would describe as Lebanese, but which the locals sometimes refer to as 'Arabe'.(Such as the pita/pan arabe in Guatemalan supermarkets.) 

 

This would be a much later arrival than the partly-remembered Moorish traditions that tagged along with the Castilians. And although these recipes would have long been passed down via the medium of the Arabic language, the the Lebanese diaspora on this side of the pond has been made up largely of Orthodox Christians who later converted to Catholicism (like Shakira's lot), and their reason for being here was related to running away from Islam, or at least its pricklier aspects — from the mid-nineteenth century onward.