The battle over a kebab’s nationality

By Howard Chua-Eoan

In an essay for The Spectator in 1965, the enchantingly droll British food writer Elizabeth David related the travails of a Paris restaurant at the end of the 19th century that went out of its way to make the English dishes already on its menu even more à l'anglaise. It was a heartfelt attempt to accommodate its British customers. And so, with the roasted marrow bones came English mustard — and chips (that’s fries to Yanks). It wasn’t a success. “Marrow bones,” David wrote, “being one of the rare dishes that no Englishman would want chips with.”

In the early 21st century, nations seem even more thin-skinned about their native cuisine — and proprietary as well. In July, the Istanbul-based International Doner Federation petitioned the European Union to impose strict proportions to the vertically roasted, horizontally sliced cutlets of meat — and if restaurants and shops fail to comply, they can’t label their products “doner” or “doner kebab.” Germany has protested loudly, because its large ethnic Turk population has turned doner into a staple of popular dining, serving it up in various innovative styles (as do the Mexicans and Greeks, though they call them al pastor and gyros, respectively).

Indeed, it might seriously be argued that doner kebab is Germany’s de facto national dish. Several ethnic Turks in Germany claim to have pioneered the doner im brot — the kebab sandwich, which is different from the preparations (with pita or rolled in flatbread) Turkey is most familiar. The prevalence of the sandwich in Germany goes back to the 1970s and there are shops proudly proclaiming to sell “German Doner” in Copenhagen, London and other non-German cities. It’s more than likely that a successful petition would strip thousands of German doner kebab shops of the name and carve a deep hole in the sector’s €7 billion ($7 billion) in annual sales (just think of redoing all those signs and advertisements). Increased kebab prices wouldn’t be ideal for Chancellor Olaf Scholz at a time when inflation is still a volatile political issue.

In a similar development, Italian gastronomes turned all huffy when ketchup purveyor Kraft Heinz Co. released its first canned pasta product in a decade: spaghetti carbonara. (The company previously put spaghetti bolognese and ravioli in tins.) One chef called it “cat food”; a social media commenter, who self-identified as Sicilian, declared it was incitement to homicide — no matter that carbonara isn’t really from the island but from the area around Rome and the region of Lazio. For now, however, only British retailers and consumers may face Italian ire: Heinz’s carbonara is only available in the UK, priced at £2 ($2.60) a tin.

This kind of culinary flag-waving — which I wrote about a year ago — has been going on for ages and is now exacerbated by online X-perts who brandish their patriotism like cleavers. An early skirmish in the current war between Moscow and Kyiv took place off the battlefield — and led to Unesco, the United Nations world heritage agency, declaring that borscht was Ukrainian, not Russian. In Asia, mainlanders are mad at Taiwan cookbooks for not giving China enough credit for the island’s cuisine. If the Italians are furious about Heinz, don’t tell them that Filipinos like their spaghetti (especially the strands served by the global chain Jollibee) soft and almost mushy. Mamma mia!

What most nationalists forget is that the concept of a “national dish” is a relatively recent fabrication. Italy didn’t exist as a modern state until the second half of the 19th century. What we recognize today as pizza and sumptuous Italian fare may have gotten their impetus from immigrant communities in the Americas whose prosperity inspired their compatriots back in the old country. More importantly, the misty beginnings of carbonara might be traced to a US military kitchen or provisions (eggs, bacon, noodles) for American GIs in the peninsula during and right after World War II.

Meanwhile, a doner victory for Ankara will probably set off kitchen revolts all over the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa because of the precedent it will establish. Most of the cuisines in the region have ancestral links — in name if not concoction — to the Ottoman Empire, which disintegrated in 1922, leaving Anatolia and the area around Istanbul to contemporary Turkey. But the sultans had ruled a vast realm, seeding their culinary influence throughout the Mediterranean.

For example, what’s borek in the land of Recep Tayyip Erdogan finds its cognate in the burek of Serbia, Croatia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia. It’s called boureki in Greece, brick in Algeria and brik in Tunisia. Sephardic Jews have a version as well. The preparations have evolved differently but retain the name, which bears witness to the ancestry. There are many other Ottoman dishes that persist in the same way. Woe betide any country that tries to claim one or the other as its exclusive property. There have been enough wars in the area.

The history of cooking shows that food is no respecter of borders. Just consider these cases of the transmigration of taste: chilies from the Americas; tea from China; potatoes from Peru; crystal sugar from India. Techniques cross borders too; new methods to perk up flavors emerge in one place and then are spread abroad. There’s always been a fusion of cuisines and a diffusion of ideas. No country really owns a dish when you break down the recipe. Nor will people stop eating, say, their favorite broth, even after an international organization declares it was invented by someone else.

Still, the fastest way to a young nation’s heart is through its stomach. Saudi Arabia is in the middle of culinary research as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s quest to build a cultural identity beyond oil and religion. What might it come up with as a national dish? It could let popular choice be its guide, as Thailand discovered with pad Thai.

Thailand’s national dish of noodle, tofu and egg evolved from recipes created by Chinese immigrants that were widely assimilated with local condiments in the 1940s when the government promoted noodle consumption amid a rice scarcity. In the 1960s, it was nationalized to project the country’s identity with visiting tourists and around the world. Pad Thai would literally bear the country’s brand on the menus of Thai restaurants overseas (many officially subsidized) and become a symbol of national unity.

Just don’t say too loudly that it has Chinese DNA.