the Empanada Theory

the
EMPANADA
THEORY
lauren clem
ILLUSTRATIONS BY EL AINE CHEN
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G R A Z E // I S S U E S E V E N
MY BROTHER JAMIE HAS A THEORY.
It’s called the Empanada Theory, and it’s about food. The theory
goes that every culture in the world has a food equivalent to the
empanada. Every culture has some sort of pastry turnover filled
with meat and vegetables and fried, baked, or steamed to taste.
I first heard it during a long car ride up I-95 for Thanksgiving,
but its real origins can be traced to a conversation at Julia’s
Empanadas on Connecticut Avenue back when Jamie was in
graduate school. I don’t know whether it was the drinks or the
whiff of the Georgetown degree they were all seeking, but he
and his friends seemed to think they could track every culture
in existence by its use of the humble empanada. Every facet of
human society was deconstructed to a piece of fried, stuffed
dough—because this is how our generation holds audience,
amidst frialator fumes and unwashed linoleum, an hour till closing
on Saturday night.
Sure, he said to me later, there are pasties and strudel and
calzones, but, given a liberal definition, a whole host of other
culinary phenomena fit the bill. Senegal has its fataya, India its
karanji. In the native Creole, Haiti’s variation is called pate. Korean
mandu are served with a soy and chili dipping sauce, and I had
a friend in middle school whose mother used to fry up wontons
into convenient empanada-like packages. By the end of the car
ride I was sold. Empanadas, it would seem, were what we’d been
missing—the secret link connecting all of us together by something stronger than simple human DNA.
It wasn’t the first time one of us had come up with a food
theory. Jamie and I often partake in the scientific practice of
classifying living things according to what they eat. In high school
it was the Cookie Dough Theory, the one that labeled people by
two groupings—those who eat cookie dough and those who stay
away. The cookie dough eaters are the risk-takers, the instinctfollowers, the trekkers who will find what they seek in life. The noncookie dough eaters get nothing. This one was the premise of my
college application essay and later a graduation speech. Its roots
lie in the direct correlation between how willing my high school
companions were to eat cookie dough during after-school baking
and how far they ventured outside their small New England towns
after graduation.
Anyone who’s seen The New York Times’ latest upheaval over
brunch would have trouble arguing food’s application as a so-
ciological device. When freelancer David Shaftel wrote an op-ed
about the untimely meal, he spurred a war that could only result
from the bruising of such a celebrated institution of modern urban life. Perhaps it was his use of brunch as a catch-all for everything demoralized and decadent about young society:
“Brunch has become the most visible symptom of a demographic shift that has taken place in our neighborhood and others
like it,” Shaftel wrote on the ham-and-eggs etiquette of Brooklyn. “There’s something more malevolent at work than simply the
proliferation of Hollandaise sauce that I suspect comes from a
packet.”
The article met with raucous outbursts from both sides of
the ongoing brunch debate. The New York Times had to write a
second article summarizing the hundreds of voices in the op-ed’s
comments section just to hold the focus when other publications
started picking up the thread. Brunch, it would appear, is not only
a convenient tool for summing up some big social themes no one
really cares to read a thesis on. It’s also a bit of a sore spot for the
leisure-reading class. Our food defines us—what we eat and how
we talk about it while we’re waiting for the meal to come. Malevolent or not, Shaftel is right that there’s more to Hollandaise than
butter and egg yolk. When we spend so little of our day sitting
face-to-face, table talk isn’t just filling empty time.
My brother’s been slowly establishing the mental framework
of the menu for some time now, but the Empanada Theory didn’t
happen overnight. Before he was at Georgetown, Jamie was at
the U.S. Naval Academy, where he laid the foundations for an
education in military history, counterterrorist strategy, and fine
Italian cooking. As part of the college’s support programming
he was assigned a sponsor family—a resource for home-cooked
meals and empty couches during the one afternoon a week the
midshipmen were allowed off base. Alex and Joe were middle-aged life partners who owned a high-end bed and breakfast
in the colonial Annapolis neighborhood two blocks away. When
they weren’t showing guests around the antique draperies of
their Georgian-decorated home, they were creating elaborate
dinners to be served-family style around their expansive dining
room table. They would never allow one of their sponsor midshipmen to graduate without understanding the value of life’s finest
offerings, namely proper cooking utensils, imported espresso,
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spent too much time in chain restaurants. He would drive an hour
through rural Virginia to sit and write training reports at what he
called the closest decent coffee shop to base, often calling to
recap his week on the way.
Even during his undergraduate years, it was clear his holistic
approach to this seemingly practical topic was unusual. Jamie and
his roommates used to argue endlessly over menial topics, such
normalcies as dinner, drinks, what movie to see. It was like watching two people fight with incompatible weapons. They trapped
themselves in gridlock over the smallest details, never able to
understand the other because the lenses they used to examine
things were not the same.
One topic they never could find consensus on was the em-
G R A Z E // I S S U E S E V E N
and good red wine.
The weekly culinary event took its toll on the eating habits
of my brother, who up until this point had subsisted on the mess
hall’s fourteen-day rotation and my mother’s best Hamburger
Helper. He began to go through alternate phases of gathering
recipes and spurning their check on his creativity, and even
started a lifelong collection of cast iron pans. His phone calls
began holding fewer descriptions of training exercises and more
recountings of what he had eaten last Sunday at that restaurant
by the bay. I often wondered how his views on food—as more
than physical nourishment, as fodder for conversation, for
entertainment—compared with those of his classmates. Later in
his career I would listen to him complain that his fellow officers
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G R A Z E // I S S U E S E V E N
panada. The roommates enjoyed throwing out locations, looking
for a people somewhere in the world for whom the empanada
theory did not apply. There were a number of years when cultural
variations on the food were top on his Internet search list. The
Himalayas? Momo, stuffed with pork and buffalo meat. Eastern
Europe? The pierogi, of course. What about America? All the
foods here came from somewhere else.
“Easy,” Jamie said. “Hot pockets.”
“Okay, so what about Eskimos? I bet you they don’t have empanadas.”
I spent an entire evening helping him search the bowels of
the Internet for an Arctic equivalent of the flaky, meat-filled crust.
Turns out the Inuit version of bannock, a form of fried bread, is
sometimes cooked with meat and dried fruit inside. For a region
that averages an above-freezing growing season of four months,
we decided this was close enough.
It might seem trite to reduce the entire scope of human civilization to a common love for a pastry. It is. The pervasiveness of
the empanada model across regional constraints shows a funda-
mentally human craving for rolled dough and high cholesterol
meats. But there is also a deeper perspective to the debate, one
that recognizes the import of anything we take into our bodies.
The word empanada comes from the Spanish empanar, to bread.
Empanar refers to the manual process involved in the making
of the dish but can also be interpreted as the act of consuming
the ingredient itself. What’s more, the Greek prefix pan- means
“all-inclusive” or “whole.” Whole, as in one with many parts, all
in need of bread to stay alive. Eating is a cultural phenomenon
and also the most intimate of our bodily functions. When we take
food together, we bring nourishment into our bodies and share
it amongst ourselves. Across all regions and dialects we huddle
together over meals. We recognize our fragility and celebrate
the chance for life. We bring potlucks. We hold banquets. We
break bread.
Of course, that strain can’t be embarked upon without recognition of how the empanada also evidences our determination
to separate the wholeness we share. The empanada originated
in medieval Iberia and eventually showed up in one form or an-
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The thing about the Empanada Theory is there is no “why.”
There is no “therefore.” Our obsession with deep-fried dough
could be an indication of a deep-set commonality not felt in
everyday life, or it could mean when someone tells us to like
something, our blank minds nod and say okay. If I eat a meat
and raisin-filled pastry in Buenos Aires and eat it again in Jakarta,
there’s nothing to say I have anything in common with the servers
that handed them to me—or that they have anything in common
with each other—and there’s nothing to say that we don’t. Such
is the theory of empanadas. All we’re left with, really, is the
acknowledgment that lots of people like to eat their meat and
fruit and vegetables wrapped in dough. Because, let’s be honest,
empanadas are delicious, and it’s little wonder that people all
over the world like to eat them and then talk about how delicious
they are. Food is, after all, nature’s catalyst for conversation, and
empanadas are prone to sparking conversations like the one
started on Connecticut Avenue some years ago.
I have an image of people of many languages sitting around
a table. They share without words a platter of meat and vegetables wrapped in dough, conversing in nods and hums over the
meal at hand. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that such a
conversation could lead to anything except mutual appreciation
for the versatile snack that is the empanada.
Then again, there’s nothing to suggest it couldn’t.
G R A Z E // I S S U E S E V E N
other in every corner of the globe. While it’s easy enough to say
empanadas cropped up independently of each other, so we must
all think alike, most experts would admit the food’s popularity
in Latin America and Southeast Asia comes as a direct result of
Spanish and Portuguese colonization. The worldwide favorite isn’t
proof that we all come round to the same ideas so much as an
indication of how we force these ideas on one another in ways
far less innocent than recipe-sharing. Even before colonialism,
the empanada’s appearance in Iberia coincided conspicuously
with Moorish invasions, suggesting it was never an original food
at all but merely the war-child of the central Asian samosa. Food,
like history, is written by those who win, and the empanada has
a history of conquest hidden in its flaky plateaus.
Some time ago Jamie called from Okinawa where he was
stationed with the Marines. He’d recently returned a week late
from a training mission to the Philippines. Their departure back
to Japan was delayed because a member of his battalion was
arrested and charged with the killing of a transgender Filipino
woman encountered during a night out. We spoke for a while
about the incident, discussing whether he’d known the suspect
and how the event would figure into the military’s already poor
international rap.
After a time we moved on to other topics, and I asked what he
had done with his liberty time before all outings were canceled
and the Marines were called back to the ship. I wasn’t surprised
to learn he and some buddies had gone in search of food. As
he described the meal the tone of our voices was still several
sentences back, acknowledging that much had gone unsaid.
“We found a restaurant and ordered all these different plates.
They had these little rolls filled with meat and vegetables. Fried
in dough, with little dipping sauces.”
He took a breath, and I could see where this was going.
“Lumpia, they were called. Filipino empanadas. You need to
look them up.”
I could be annoyed with my brother for thinking about
empanadas while his ship was docked at port pending
investigation of an international hate crime, and I wouldn’t blame
you if you were. There is much that goes unsaid in the world that I
would be hard-pressed to answer whether anyone has the words
to describe. But there is also much that is said casually, tenderly,
as we work at stitches to close an opened void, and these stitches
comprise the everyday reality that runs as commonly as frying oil
and folded dough between one meal and the next.
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