Peixinhos da horta Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Peixinhos da horta means, literally, 'little fish of the garden.' Green beans dipped in wheat-flour batter and fried take on the look of small fish fried whole—hence the name. But no fish goes into it. This was a vegetable dish for the days when meat was set aside: the Catholic fast days, above all Lent and the Ember Days (in Latin, the quattuor tempora).

The green bean came from the New World, taking root in the Iberian peninsula after Columbus. It already appears in Fuchs's botanical illustrations of the mid-sixteenth century. This bean that had crossed the ocean was drawn through a wheat-flour batter and fried in oil.

What was born under the rule of abstaining from meat was a method: cloaking vegetables in batter and frying them. Devised to fill the fast-day table, this fried preparation was carried to Japan by the Portuguese and their missionaries. In 1543 the Portuguese made landfall on Tanegashima; in 1550 Hirado, and in 1571 the port of Nagasaki, became gateways of the Namban trade. On that same current, a dish of the religious calendar—garden vegetables fried in batter—is thought to have crossed the sea and become the parent form of Japan's best-known fried food.

The origin of tempura is still argued in several ways. The leading view, backed by scholarship and by public bodies such as Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, sees Portugal's battered frying as the prototype. A Lenten and Ember-day dish—meat set aside, vegetables fried in wheat-flour batter—reached Nagasaki on the sixteenth-century Namban trade. What this view holds to is one point only: that the technique of battered frying crossed to Japan.

Often confused with it is the question of the name. Tempura is frequently said to derive from tempora, the Latin for the fast days—but this is not settled. Dictionaries more often trace the word to Portuguese tempero (seasoning) or temperar (to season), and different dictionaries point to different original terms. The transmission of the technique from Portugal is firm; where the name came from is a separate matter, and an open one.

Frying food in batter has its own native lineage in Japan too, in the vegetable frying of Buddhist abstinence cuisine, and some caution against overstating the Namban influence. Even so, the path from arrival to settling is visible. The word tenfurari appears in the 1669 text Shokudōki; the Chinese characters for tempura were assigned by Santō Kyōden around the start of the Tenmei era (about 1781). Between the sixteenth-century arrival and the fixing of the name, more than a century passed.