Moorish-era oil-and-garlic cooking (Ajillo precursor) Period COrigin theory CVerified

Garlic warmed in olive oil. In the home and street kitchens of al-Andalus, Muslim-ruled Iberia between 711 and 1492, this was an utterly ordinary gesture. Before anything like the later restaurant style of tapas took shape, it was not a special dish but a rooted, everyday way of cooking.

Both olives and garlic were long-standing ingredients of Iberia and the Mediterranean, staples that were always on hand rather than things to be sent for. Together with saffron, these three ingredients formed the base of Andalusi cooking. The thirteenth-century cookbooks of al-Andalus, the anonymous Kitab al-tabikh (held to be the oldest Iberian cookbook) and Ibn Razin al-Tujibi's Fudalat al-khiwan (1227-1293), set down many dishes of that time built on a foundation of garlic, saffron, and olive oil.

Heating garlic in oil is also a base technique that connects to the cooking of North Africa and the Middle East. Repeated day after day in the kitchens of al-Andalus, it became the matrix of the dish later called al ajillo in Spain. New World ingredients such as chili peppers have no place in this cooking of this period.

English-language web encyclopedias and recipe sites still carry the story that garlic was introduced to Spain from the Arabs, or Moors, in the sixteenth century, and that ajillo began there. As a story it sits comfortably. But the ancient Roman record undercuts its premise.

Pliny the Elder's Natural History (first century) already records a seasoning of garlic combined with olive oil, later called aleatum and regarded by some as an ancestor of aioli. The Roman pastoral poem Moretum likewise describes a native paste of garlic and oil ground together. Garlic was a crop native to Iberia well before Rome, and the notion of a sixteenth-century Arab introduction lands centuries after the oldest date the sources record. What the Arabs did bring to Iberia were citrus, saffron, and eggplant, not garlic.

So where should the ancestry be sought? Two views stand together here. One places the technique of heating garlic in oil in the local cooking of al-Andalus, with the thirteenth-century cookbooks as its record. The other declines to see it as a distinct Andalusi invention and sets it instead within a Mediterranean continuity reaching back to Roman Iberia, with Pliny's record as its anchor. Neither erects a single origin story. This dish of garlic simmered in oil rose less from any one inventor than from a long-accumulated layer of Mediterranean cooking.