Empanada Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The empanada is a savory pastry of Argentina's Río de la Plata region: a filling of beef and onion wrapped in kneaded wheat dough and baked or fried. It was brought over from the Iberian Peninsula in the colonial period, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the regional styles packed generously with beef took firm shape across the country in the nineteenth century.

Both wheat and beef were Old World crop and livestock, carried across the sea to the Río de la Plata. Until wheat could be had locally and the craft of kneading it into bread dough took root along with the settlers, the empanada in its present form was not baked on this land, because wrapping and baking in bread is itself a transplant of Iberian baking culture.

Its makers were ordinary people. It was made both at market stalls and in home kitchens, spreading from settlers to the rural population until it became an everyday snack to be bought or baked. In Tucumán and Salta in the north of Argentina, it took on local character in its filling and its dough.

The word and the recipe

The word empãada first appears in writing in a verse of the Cantigas de Santa María, the collection of Marian songs in Galician-Portuguese compiled under Alfonso X (c. 1282). The earliest surviving recipe reaches back only as far as the seafood empanada in Ruperto de Nola's Libro de guisados (composed c. 1490, printed 1520).

The origin most often told for the empanada, in tourist guides and local histories, is that "in the seventh century, in Visigothic Galicia, rules for cooking the empanada were proclaimed." But no contemporary document supporting that seventh-century date has ever been produced. The earliest appearance of the word empãada in writing is a verse of the Galician-Portuguese Cantigas de Santa María (c. 1282), compiled by Alfonso X, some six hundred years after the claimed seventh century. The recipe too can be traced no further back than the seafood empanada in Ruperto de Nola's Libro de guisados (composed c. 1490, printed 1520). The sculptures of the Pórtico de la Gloria at Santiago Cathedral, often brought forward as evidence, are of the twelfth century and say nothing of a seventh-century proclamation. Seen this way, the Visigothic-origin story is a legend without the support of any source.

So where does the wrapped pastry itself come from? The form of folding dough around a filling and baking it is far older than Galicia. The lineage of the sanbusak, whose name comes from the Persian sanbosag ("triangular parcel"), was praised in verse by the Abbasid poet Ishaq al-Mawsili and set down again and again in Arab cookbooks of the tenth to thirteenth centuries. Galicia was one stage that shaped this widely diffused craft of wrapped dough into its own style, which then crossed to the Río de la Plata with Iberian settlement and grew into the regional beef empanada. In northern Argentina, Lebanese and Syrian immigrants of the later nineteenth century also brought the same wrapped-dough culture by another route.

Galician, or Middle Eastern? The answer to that question changes depending on which stage one calls "the beginning." The ancestor of the general form lies in the wrapped dough of the medieval Arab and Persian world; Galicia is a waypoint that codified that style; and the beef empanada of the Río de la Plata is a regional style that developed further along still. It is precisely because the origin cannot be pinned to a single point that a story like the seventh-century Galician one, where a date alone runs off on its own, collapses before the sources.