Ten Fried Foods, Ten Stories

Patongko, the fried dough set out each morning at Bangkok’s coffee stalls and rice-porridge shops. In substance it is youtiao, the paired lengths of dough fried together that are a morning staple of Chinese communities, and it is said to have crossed into Thailand with Teochew and Cantonese immigrants.

What is interesting is the name. The word patongko is said to have originally referred to a completely different white sweet, 白糖粿, in the Teochew language. Vendors are said to have once sold youtiao and this white sweet from the same stall, and Thai customers came to favor the youtiao. Only the name, the story goes, migrated over to the item that sold better, so it is told, though no record has been found showing when or where this took place. It is a market kind of story, in which a name crossed over to a different product.

The word tempura is widely held to come from Portuguese, but both its etymology and the route by which it arrived have more than one theory behind them, this is not a simple straight line running from the 1543 arrival of firearms to tempura. Among the earliest clear appearances in the written record is Shokudōki (1669), and a detailed method of preparation appears in Ryōri Kondateshō (1671).

It was the street stall that raised tempura in Edo. Food historian Ryoichi Iino explains that concern over fire kept vendors from opening fixed shops, so for a long time tempura could only be bought at a stall. It was Edo’s fast food, skewered and eaten standing up. Dedicated shops serving freshly fried tempura at a sit-down counter are said to have increased only once the Meiji era began. Then came the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. Craftsmen scattered from Tokyo across the country, and tempura, the story goes, became a dish eaten nationwide.

Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) contains the phrase ‘fried fish warehouse.’ Fried fish itself, the story goes, traces back to a food culture among Jewish immigrants, who fried fish for the Sabbath because it could be eaten cold. London’s streets had fried fish before it ever met chips.

Two tellings claim the title of ‘first shop.’ One is Joseph Malin, who opened a shop in London’s East End around 1860, though some accounts note that this shop sold only fried fish, not fish paired with chips. The other is John Lees, said to have begun selling fish together with chips from a market stall in Mossley, Lancashire, around 1863. John Walton, who has studied the history of this dish, takes the view that no one actually knows who was first, that it appeared in multiple places at close to the same time, around 1860. A trade association was established in 1913, and by the interwar period, shops across Britain are said to have reached roughly 35,000. It was the hot, fast supper of people working in the industrial cities of the Industrial Revolution.

The technique of frying flour-dredged chicken in lard is recorded in the 1824 cookbook The Virginia House-wife. It has widely been explained that Southern fried chicken arose where a Scottish frying technique overlapped with West African seasoning traditions. But this framing has also drawn objections as an oversimplification, and food historian Adrian Miller, too, avoids stating it as a single settled origin. What research clearly documents is the role that Black cooks, women, especially, played in cooking and selling this dish, under slavery and in the post-emancipation South.

In 1840, a railroad opened at Gordonsville, Virginia. In an era before dining cars, formerly enslaved and free Black women sold fried chicken to the train windows during station stops. Known as the ‘waiter carriers,’ their trade, researcher Psyche Williams-Forson argues, rested on the fact that fried food could be carried, eaten cold, and kept without spoiling. The history of vending in this town is still confirmed today across multiple news reports and studies.

The record on samosa runs deep. Its etymology is traced to the Middle Persian sanbosag, a triangular pastry pocket, and it is said to be mentioned in the 11th-century Persian chronicle Tarikh-e Beyhaqi. Around 1300, the Delhi court poet Amir Khusrau is introduced as having referred to samosas eaten by the nobility, and the 14th-century traveler Ibn Battuta is likewise said to have written in his travelogue of small pies stuffed with meat and nuts served at the Delhi court. The point at which both the date and the contents can be clearly confirmed is the 16th century, in the Mughal court’s official record Ain-i-Akbari, which even sets down the method of preparation.

Central Asia’s tradition of wrapped pastries is said to have reached India through cooks from the Middle East and Central Asia who worked at court. No record has been found that pins down when it became a street food. Today it is handed over at stations, in markets, at chai stalls, holding potato, alongside a tamarind chutney.

Its ancestral form is chun bing, a thin wheat-flour wrapper rolled around vegetables, not fried. The custom of eating this on the first day of spring, one of the twenty-four solar terms, is called ‘biting spring,’ and is said to have become widely established by the Tang dynasty. There are also records that, at the Ming and Qing courts, lavishly filled chun bing were prepared as gifts to mark the first day of spring.

The shift to a fried form is said to date to the Qing dynasty: the steamed, thin-wrapped roll passed through oil and became chun juan, spring roll, gaining the crackling texture of a fried wrapper. And this roll crossed the sea. Lumpia, carried to the Philippines and Indonesia along with a name that traces to the Hokkien 潤餅; chả giò, in Vietnam, wrapping pork and glass noodles. One thin wrapper took on a different name and a different filling at every table it reached across Southeast Asia.

What is often told as the beginning of churros is that Spain’s itinerant shepherds carried dough that could be fried quickly in place of bread. The name is also said to come from its resemblance to the horns of the churra sheep breed. Neither claim goes beyond legend, but a 13th-century Andalusian cookbook already records zalabiya, a fried sweet, and the lineage of fried dough on the Iberian Peninsula runs old.

Firmer ground appears in the 19th century. In Madrid, dedicated churrería shops and stalls grew up, and workers coming off the night shift dipped churros into thick hot chocolate each morning. Riding Spain’s routes of governance and trade, the dish crossed to Latin America, and today it is fried in plazas and markets across the region, changing shape and filling from country to country.

Acarajé’s ancestral form is akara, a fried bean fritter of the Yoruba people of West Africa. People forced to Bahia by the Atlantic slave trade carried with them the technique of frying black-eyed-pea batter in dendê oil, the oil of a palm native to West Africa, and this dish crossed the sea along with them. Street vending of it is said to have begun around the time Brazil abolished slavery, in 1888.

On the streets of Salvador, women called baianas, dressed in white, have sold acarajé from trays. The dish also carries a side of ritual food, tied to a faith of West African origin. On January 14, 2005, Brazil’s National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) registered ‘the craft of the baianas of acarajé’ as a national intangible heritage, and in 2022 extended that recognition across all of Brazil. What is protected is not the dish alone, but the whole of it, the dress, the tray, and the practice of the person standing on the street.

Potatoes are cut into batons and fried. Two tellings stand side by side over how this simple dish began: one has it that a stall at the foot of Paris’s Pont Neuf bridge was first to sell it; the other has it that, in Belgium’s Meuse valley, it was fried as a stand-in for river fish. Neither is backed by a record that settles the question.

What is certain is that a culture of independent stalls called ‘frietkot’ grew up on Belgian streets, and still stands on street corners today. Between 2014 and 2017, this culture was inscribed as intangible cultural heritage by Belgium’s own communities, one after another. This is a listing under the country’s own system, not UNESCO’s Representative List.

The French côtelette became the Japanese loanword katsuretsu, and once paired with pork, became tonkatsu, a dish born, like curry rice, from a chain of translation. In 1899, Rengatei, a Western-style restaurant in Ginza, served a pork cutlet. It departed from the Western practice of pan-frying in a small amount of oil, deep-frying instead in generous oil the way tempura is fried, and swapped the cooked vegetable side for raw shredded cabbage, these three substitutions are said to have laid the foundation of today’s tonkatsu.

Another turning point came in 1929, at Ponchiken in Okachimachi. Shinjiro Shimada, a cook who had trained in Western cuisine at the Imperial Household Ministry, deep-fried thick-cut pork in generous oil and served it with rice, miso soup, and pickles. Taking the form of a set meal, according to several accounts, became the starting point for its spread nationwide. The two restaurants stand not as rival origin stories, but as two different stages of work, an innovation in cooking, and an innovation in how the dish was served. Some accounts also note that the writings of Nagai Kafu and Kotaro Takamura contain what appear to be earlier references to tonkatsu-like food sold at street stalls.