Tempura Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Tempura looks like a dish that could only have grown up in Japan, ringed by the sea. Fresh seafood wrapped in batter and fried—that seafood was a long-established local ingredient, brought to everyday tables along Japan's coasts from early on. The way of making it, on the other hand—coating food in batter and frying it in plenty of oil—was brought by the Portuguese who came to Nagasaki in the sixteenth century. A batter-coated, oil-fried dish of Southern-barbarian (nanban) provenance took root as Nagasaki tempura and in time made its way to Edo. That the technique itself derives from the nanban trade is the settled view in food history.

Even so, the fried dish of this moment was still a different thing from today's tempura. The words tenfura and tempura appear in writing in the latter half of the seventeenth century, in works such as the Shokudoki of 1669, the Ryori Kondate Sho of 1671, and the Ryori Kasen no Kumiito of 1748. These point to the existence of the word and the dish, but the time a word was first set down in writing is not necessarily the time the present style was completed.

Edo-style tempura—batter coated thin, fried and served on the spot—took its settled shape in the Edo of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cooking oil was the deciding factor. The Honcho Shokkan (1697) records the use of sesame oil as food, and in 1714 (Shotoku 4) some 17,000 koku of sesame oil arrived in Osaka. Oil was still expensive, yet the demand of street stalls in a city holding Edo's fish markets pushed frying into a trade that could be plied day to day. Fried to order on the spot, skewered, and eaten standing up—tempura took shape as a quick snack suited to the impatient life of the townsfolk of Edo. The foreign fried dish that had reached Nagasaki met the oil and the street stalls of Edo, and became the tempura we know.

The beginning of tempura is widely told as this: a nanban fried dish that the Portuguese brought to Nagasaki in the sixteenth century. This nanban line is well confirmed in food history, and there is little room to doubt where the frying technique came from.

Two stories often told alongside it, however, are less certain than the origin of the technique.

One is the etymology of the word 'tempura' itself. Tempero, meaning seasoning; tempora, referring to the fast days such as those of Lent (Quatuor anni tempora); templo, meaning temple—each has been proposed, all traced to Portuguese or Spanish, and support is split even among dictionaries. The Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten and Oxford dictionaries take the tempero reading; the Kojien takes the tempora reading. The Sekai Daihyakka Jiten, for its part, criticizes these etymological claims for lacking documentary evidence from the period and for leaning on the preconception that this was a dish brought in the age of the great voyages. The pedigree of the word itself cannot be settled from the sources into a single answer.

The other is a naming tale more familiar to the public. Around the Tenmei era, a masterless samurai who came from the Kamigata region to Edo sold fried food, and the fiction writer Santo Kyoden is said to have named it with a play on words—'a wanderer from Tenjiku who comes drifting (furari) to sell it,' 'ten for frying, fura for thin wheat flour.' But this account comes from the essay Kumo no Itomaki by Kyoden's younger brother Santo Kyozan, and is no more than a later play on words. In any case, the word tenfura already appears in the Shokudoki of 1669, about a century before Kyoden was active. Both the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten and Kotobank treat it as a popular belief. It is a playful anecdote about how the characters came to be written, not the etymology of the word itself.

The origin of the technique holds firm in the nanban trade. But where the name 'tempura' came from still lies among competing theories. Between the brightness of the well-known naming tale and the facts the sources support, that much of a gap remains.