20 Foods Born From Fasting, Faith And Loopholes

When Portuguese Jesuit missionaries reached Japan in 1549 under the leadership of Francis Xavier, Catholic law forbade Catholics from eating the flesh of warm-blooded animals during Lent and other fasting periods known as Quatuor Tempora. So the missionaries began frying fish and vegetables, battered with flour and water. The people in the port city of Nagasaki picked up on the idea, and it is likely that the word tempura derives from the Latin word tempora. A fasting rule, not an ancient Japanese tradition, created one of the world’s most beloved fried batters.

In Battle Creek, Michigan, there was a hospital called the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which belonged to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Under the influence of church co-founder Ellen G. White, Adventists taught that physical well-being and spiritual salvation were linked, so patients consumed a diet called Biologic Living, which consisted of bland food devoid of spices or stimulants. In the view of the sanitarium’s director, John Harvey Kellogg, indulgent foods incited undesirable passions within the body. He and his brother, Will Keith Kellogg, toasted grain into flakes in the 1890s, then launched Corn Flakes around 1898.

Since biblical law in Leviticus bans eating animal blood, Jewish dietary rules require a process called melichah, which means covering slaughtered meat in salt to pull the blood out before cooking. Regular fine table salt dissolved too quickly, while coarse rock salt would slide off. So salt producers created a coarse, flaked crystal salt that clung to the meat and pulled liquid out of it, yet did not dissolve. Initially sold from the late 1800s as “kashering salt,” it eventually came to be referred to simply as “kosher salt.”

In Swabia, a region in southern Germany, Catholic doctrine prohibited the consumption of any land-animal meat during Lent. According to German legend, when the Cistercian monks at Maulbronn Abbey were given a gift of meat during Holy Week, they did not want to let it go to waste. So they minced it with herbs and spinach and wrapped it inside thick sheets of pasta, calling it “little God-cheaters” because God could not see the meat beneath the dough. Swabians still eat Maultaschen on Maundy Thursday.

In 1634, the Catholic monks of the Paulaner order (part of the Order of Minims) had a monastery in Munich. They had to observe a strict Lenten fast for 40 days and were allowed only liquid food. By canon law, liquid foods didn’t count as breaking the fast, so they brewed a very heavy, sweet beer for themselves to use during their manual work. It was called “liquid bread” and saved the day for them. They named it Salvator, which means Savior, and they’ve been making Doppelbock beers ever since.

Thomas Bramwell Welch, a dentist from Vineland, New Jersey, worked as a lay Communion steward in his church. The Methodist Episcopal Church condemned the use of alcohol, yet it continued to serve wine during the Communion service, since fresh grape juice would ferment into wine on its own if left unpreserved. In 1869, Welch took a method developed by Louis Pasteur and applied it to Concord grapes. He killed the yeast in the grape juice and then sold it to local churches under the name “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine.”

Jewish refugees fleeing the Inquisition of Spain and Portugal arrived in England. They brought with them their strict rule that no cooking was permitted from Friday sunset until Saturday night. Cooks battered cod or haddock in flour and egg and fried it on Friday for eating cold the next day. English writers referred to “fish in the Jewish fashion” by the late 1700s. When Jewish immigrant Joseph Malin opened Britain’s first fish and chip shop in 1860, he paired the fried fish with fried potatoes.

An itinerant Presbyterian preacher and temperance lecturer, Sylvester Graham began a Christian health reform movement around 1829. He believed that Adam and Eve ate an unrefined vegetarian diet in the Garden of Eden, and that white flour and other rich ingredients led to gluttony and carnality. His 1837 Treatise on Bread-Making instructed his followers to consume coarse, unsweetened bread made of whole wheat with the bran and germ still attached. The product was Graham flour, and it wasn’t meant to be a delicacy.

In 1191, after traveling to China, Japanese Zen Buddhist monk Myoan Eisai brought back with him tea seeds and a method of pulverizing leaves into a fine powder. Zen monks, who were required to sit motionless during their lengthy meditations, known as zazen, found that whisking the powdered tea into hot water helped keep them calm and alert while warding off sleepiness. Eisai documented the method in his 1211 treatise, paving the way for the future Japanese Tea Ceremony.

Coffee’s history begins in Mocha, Yemen, in the 15th century, where Sufi Muslim religious orders were looking for a way to get through the long hours of mandatory all-night prayers and dhikr, or group chants. According to a 16th-century chronicler of Islam, the Sufi leader Shaykh al-Shadhili and his followers discovered that roasting the seeds of the coffee fruit and then boiling them produced a stimulating beverage known as qahwa. It could be circulated among Sufi congregations during prayer circles. This information spread, first to other parts of the Islamic world, then to Europe.

Exodus commands that Jews not eat any food that has risen from leavened grain during the seven-day period of Passover, in commemoration of the hasty departure of the Israelites from Egypt. The Talmud made that into a concrete law: from the time the baker puts water on the flour, he or she must mix, roll and bake matzo in 18 minutes or less, since rabbis decided that is when wild yeast begins its fermentative process. Anything left longer than that is considered chametz, or leavened bread, and is forbidden on Passover.

The original Advent bread of medieval Saxony in what is now Germany was a plain fast bread called Striezel, dry as a bone since the Catholic Church forbade the use of butter and milk in such baked goods and mandated the use of tasteless turnip oil. In 1490, however, after petitions from Saxon rulers, Pope Innocent VIII issued the Butterbrief, or Butter Letter, allowing butter during Advent, first for the ruling family, and later for ordinary bakers who paid a fee toward a cathedral. This sweetened and enriched bread came to be known as Dresden Stollen.

After Spanish conquistadors returned to Europe from the New World with cacao beans, hot chocolate made its way across the continent, and Catholic theologians wrestled with the idea for years. It wasn’t until 1662 that Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio issued a ruling: liquids didn’t break a fast, and chocolate, consumed hot, was liquid, so it didn’t break the 40 days of Lenten fasting.

In ancient India’s Vedic Period, about 1500 to 500 BC, Hindu religious texts prescribed that priests offer the fire god Agni clarified butter by pouring it into specially built fire altars during religious rituals. Because raw butter went rancid very quickly in India’s tropical climate, the priests started cooking it over a low flame to remove the water and milk solids until only a clear, stable golden liquid remained. Vedic literature considered ghee a highly sacred substance, necessary for both ritual offerings and religious feasts.

The Torah mentions challah for the first time as a commandment in the Book of Numbers: Israelites had to set aside a portion of dough from every batch and give it to the Temple priest. When the Second Temple was destroyed, the rabbis maintained the custom by having bakers remove a small bit of dough before baking it, and burning it in the oven. Centuries later, Ashkenazic bakers of medieval Eastern Europe adopted the holy term for their braided Sabbath loaves.

In western Christianity, Lent forbade the consumption of eggs, milk, butter or sugar for 40 days. On Shrove Tuesday, the day before fasting commenced, church doctrine dictated that families go to confession and rid their houses of such forbidden items. Instead of tossing out these ingredients, cooks would blend them all into a batter and fry the concoction into thin pancakes. This day has been known in England since at least 1439 as Pancake Day.

Observing a month-long fast from sunrise to sunset during Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. And while Muslims are not allowed to fast on the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, they are commanded by Islamic religious law to consume at least something sweet before their morning prayers. So throughout South Asia, Persia and the Middle East, families make Sevaiyan or Sheer Khurma, thin wheat noodles cooked in sweetened milk and flavored with dates, saffron and nuts, for this religious obligation.

Cloistered nuns in medieval Ávila, Spain, lived under monastic rules that demanded frugality with anything donated to the convent. The local vintners of the city clarified their wine using raw egg whites and would often be left with barrelfuls of yolks, which they presented as a donation to the nuns at the Convent of Saint Teresa. Not wanting to throw these eggs away, the nuns cooked them in a mixture of sugar syrup, lemon and cinnamon, forming small gold balls known as Yemas de Santa Teresa, which are still sold commercially today.

Under Catholic canon law, Christians were to abstain from the flesh of warm blooded animals every Friday in remembrance of Christ’s crucifixion. Fish, however, was acceptable. Given that there were over a hundred such fast days per year throughout western Christendom, fish was a highly sought-after commodity. Beginning in the 1400s, Basque and Portuguese fishermen began fishing the North Atlantic for cod and salting it heavily to preserve it during transport inland, resulting in the dishes we now know as Italy’s Baccalà, Spain’s Bacalao, and Portugal’s Bacalhau.

In Germanic monasteries during the 7th century, the entire span of Lent prohibited any food that came from animals. So bakers used the simplest ingredients possible: flour, water, and salt. They formed the resulting dough into strips and then bent them, folding the ends up so that they looked like the arms of a worshipper held across their chest in the traditional position of prayer. This bread was named bracellae, “little arms,” in Latin. The oldest surviving depiction of the pastry is in a 12th-century encyclopedia put together by the Abbess Herrad of Landsberg.

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