Shawarma Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Shawarma came into its present form across the Levant—Syria, Lebanon, Jordan. When it did so cannot be fixed from the sources, but the name is already on record in the nineteenth century. The Arabic name shawarma derives from the Turkish çevirme, meaning "turning," and Spiro's vocabulary of the colloquial Arabic of Egypt, published in Cairo in 1895, lists it as śâwirma with the gloss "rich stew, roast meat." The word was thus part of Egyptian speech by 1895 at the latest, though the gloss mentions neither a vertical spit nor the Levant.

What shapes this dish is a piece of equipment: the vertical rotating roaster. Lamb, chicken, and beef are ingredients long present in the Levant, but the way of stacking thinly sliced meat, turning it on a vertical axis, and shaving off the cooked face layer by layer takes form only with this vertical roaster. The device goes back to the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, when the döner spit came to be set upright, and it passed to the Levant, settling there under a local name and with local meats. Until the vertical spit reached the Levant, the Levantine shawarma had no way of taking shape.

Its setting is urban street food. Roasting a large mass of meat on the vertical roaster and shaving it off to order, to be handed over quickly, fits neatly the setting of ordinary street eating. Levantine shawarma arose at the point where an Ottoman-derived spit technique met the setting of the urban shop.

In telling shawarma's origin, the name of İskender, a Turkish butcher of Bursa, is often invoked. The tale that he devised the vertical rotating spit in the mid-nineteenth century is widely circulated. But he was not the only one to claim the vertical method: Hamdi Usta of Kastamonu is said to have made the same claim around the same time.

The year İskender is supposed to have invented the method ranges across accounts from the 1850s to 1867 and settles on no single date. The story comes from his grandson's account of the family's past, and no other support for it has been shown. With two men claiming the invention, the tale that pins it on one butcher cannot be treated as a sure origin, though it has not been shown to be false either. A photograph taken in the Ottoman Empire around 1853–55 by the British photographer James Robertson is said to be the first to show a döner, and its vendor is said to be neither of the two men, but this too is hearsay.

The history of the technique can be traced without an inventor's name. According to Priscilla Mary Işın's history of Ottoman cuisine, the döner spit was originally horizontal, and in the nineteenth century kebab restaurants in Istanbul began to use vertical spits. This method of stacking thinly sliced meat on a vertical spit and roasting it as it turns passed to Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, where it was called shawarma, a name derived from the Turkish çevirme ("turning"). Greek gyro is a sibling born of the same technique.

Who first thought of it is not settled. Nor do the sources fix the year the technique spread from the Ottoman core to the various parts of the Levant. The genre of rotating roast meat itself is older still if one reaches back to the horizontal spit. Even so, the Levantine shawarma came into its present form only after the vertical spit had reached the region and taken its place at the storefront.