The Curious Eater, New Beginnings: Churros Redux, a Food with Legs

A few weeks ago, a ghost from lockdown resurfaced as I was scrolling through Instagram.

No, it wasn’t empty grocery shelves. Or the sight of people carrying away the last rolls of toilet paper, or even unhappy children logged onto school-issued iPads.

Rather, it was an old story, and a persistent one at that:

Churros come from China.

Some well-intentioned vlogger had repeated this piece of mythology for the umpteenth time.

The Portuguese in the sixteenth century had visited China and noticed people making youtiao, breakfast fritters. Impressed, they brought it back on their ships. An Iberian and Mexican classic was born, or so the story goes.

I confess that I had to suppress the desire to reach out to him and send him a link to an old blog that I’d written—a blog intended to deflate the dreams of people who wanted to imagine fanciful connections.

You may be wondering why I had written a blog on such a subject, or why I had a blog at all.

My blog—chinesefoodhistory.org—had sprung to life during the pandemic. It was not intended to be a public blog per se. Rather, it was a desperate effort on the part of a professor teaching a large course on Asian foodways to students across the world during lockdown.

I had decided to convert all of my eighty-minute lectures into blogs rather than subject several hundred already unhappy students to another dreadful Zoom lecture.

The idea of writing a blog had been both a foolish and fateful decision. Foolish because I had underestimated the scope of the task. Fateful because that decision took my writing, and me, far out of the ivory tower.

Overnight, I was talking to food lovers, journalists, and people around the world about food history. Together, we thought through far-flung culinary connections.

Looking back, I miss that sense of community, even if I am happy that my daughter, now ten, is back in school and no longer taking out her pent-up energy by applying crayon and paint to our walls.

From those conversations, the seed of a book—Dumpling Therapy, my forthcoming book with St. Martin’s Press—was born.

***

Back to the churros.

During lockdown, I’d written a long, scolding post about their supposed Chinese origins, lecturing harried journalists about shoddy research and Eurocentrism.

My harangue fell on deaf ears. A few journalists called me to get the story right. But the myth persists.

Why?

Because I learned something crucial: you can’t kill a catchy story with critique alone. You need a better story.

And there is a better story—one I forgot to tell in my indignation. One that was sitting right on my desk in a fourteenth-century recipe collection.

Muslim Julabiya

Recorded in a 14th-century Chinese almanac, Shilin guangji [Forest of Affairs, ca 1330]:

Use mung bean starch and wheat flour to make a paste, then fry it in boiling oil until soft and cooked. Alternatively, omit the bean starch and use only flour mixed with honey or maltose syrup. Mix with cold water to form a paste.

Now, this isn’t a perfect match for the modern churros. Churros require an extra step—the

hot-water or cooked dough method (like choux pastry for éclairs). You cook the dough on the stovetop first, then pipe it into hot oil.

But it’s a close relative in a far-flung pastry family called julabiya (Persian) or zulabiya (Arabic). In India, it’s jalebi.

The pattern repeats: something piped through small holes into hot oil, then soaked in syrup.

The medieval Chinese version resembles its Indian counterpart most closely. But it’s still related to churros.

How do I know?

Because the basic recipe—with the same name, to boot—appears in a Moorish Spanish cookbook, where it goes by zulabiya.

Thanks to Charles Perry, we now have a translation of an anonymous thirteenth-century Andalusian cookbook and can see this clearly:

Preparation of Zulâbiyya

Knead fine flour and add water little by little until the dough is slack. Let it be lighter than the dough for musahhada. Leave it in a pot near the fire until it rises. You will know it is done when you tap on the side of the pot with your finger. If you hear a thick, dense sound, it has risen. Then put a frying-pan on the fire with plenty of oil, and when the oil boils, take this runny batter and put it in a vessel with a pierced bottom…

I suspect that this recipe represents a technological midpoint within the broader julabiya family. Here, the cook allows the batter to ferment gently in warmth, rather than relying on the hot-water, steam-driven method used for modern churros.

At some point, the recipe matured into the hot-dough method—with its steaming and blasts of heat that gelatinize the starches. When exactly that happened is unclear, but today that innovation survives today as “zlabia banane” or “zlabia el banane” (banana zulabiya) in Algeria and Morocco. It’s a Ramadan favorite.

My attempt to create a banana zlabia

In Spain? It got a new name: churros.

Here’s what this pastry tour taught me:

The people claiming churros came from China weren’t entirely wrong—trade did broaden palates, and far-flung culinary connections are real.

They just had the source wrong and the direction backward. And they drastically underestimated how deep those connections ran.

Centuries before Portuguese ships reached China, Muslim traders traveled from al-Andalus and the Mediterranean to Alexandria and onward to Quanzhou in southern, coastal China—carrying their favorite fritters with them.

Ming Dynasty Chinese Porcelain--and Reminder of China's Connections to the Muslim World

In the early modern period, julabiya was enjoyed simultaneously across the globe: China, India, the Middle East, North Africa, and Moorish Spain.

Granada in December 2014. A reminder of Spain's Muslim past. Photo by author.

Those fritters found favor with fourteenth-century Chinese palates. Whether a version still survives somewhere in China, I don’t yet know—that would require another mad food history hunt. But I wouldn’t be surprised.

So, no, the churros didn’t come from China. If anyone ever calls me, I’ll tell them that the truth is far more interesting.

The cousin of the churros was once popular in China.

It was called julabiya.

That’s one food with legs.

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