This article is taken from the June 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

One of the many thrilling things about being a food history geek is that recipes refresh the parts other scholarship cannot reach. Not only does the archival spadework of historical research — inventories, tax accounts, guild edicts — whizz along much faster when one encounters a new way with aubergines, but recipes can provide evidence for otherwise insoluble conundrums. 

Domestic science gets sexy when it can square up to big macho questions such as the consequences of the 1492 Alhambra Decree for the economies of the western Mediterranean. 

La mujer y la sarten en la kozina se yevan blen (“the woman and the frying pan get on well in the kitchen”) is a proverb from Ladino, the language of the Iberian Sephardic Jewish community, which combines elements of Aramaic, Hebrew, Spanish, Turkish, Greek and Arabic. The Sephardi flourished on the Iberian Peninsula from at least the fifth century, but forced mass conversions following the Catholic pogrom of 1391 drove many of its traditions underground. 

Food history is a huge and largely untapped source of the fate and influence of Sephardic culture, since in the words of the historian, Renee Lévine Melammed: 

With no Jewish community available to provide teachers, rabbis, schools or texts, the only institution that remained more or less intact and viable was the family … the home transformed into the one and only centre of crypto-Jewish life.

The extent to which food kept culture alive is attested by the fact that the Holy Inquisition used culinary evidence, down to the odours emitted from kitchens, to determine confessional prosecutions. Whether or not medieval price indexes are your thing, isn’t there something exciting about this sensory aspect of history, the immediacy with which we can still actually taste the past?

The community in Bethlehem “mourned for the meats and savouries of Seville”

Meson Don Felipe in Waterloo describes itself as London’s original tapas bar, dishing out raciones of padron peppers and patatas bravas since 1987. The neighbourhood has been snazzified since they opened, but the restaurant, which set out to recreate the atmosphere of the tapas bars of Madrid, has remained an unassuming place. There are lots of cheerful posters on the walls but otherwise things are mostly brown, which is the way its loyal customers like it. 

As a loather of everything to do with small-plate dining, I confess I wasn’t keen, but Deirdre wanted to check out the wine list (a choice of 60 by the bottle, more than 20 by the glass and a nice offering of 50cl carafes), and I like her just enough to let her dip her paws in my escalivada.

Based on the civilised Spanish custom of never drinking without a yummy little something to nibble, Don Felipe has no pretensions to being a gourmet establishment, but the food does a lot more than mop up a few sherries. Classic albondigas, meatballs in tomato sauce, were spongy and juicy, the meat just loosely-packed enough to allow the sweet, irony tomato to seep through every scrap. 

Steamed octopus with olive oil and paprika was far more than the gloriously simple sum of its parts, offering firm, glistening flesh with the verdant flavour of the oil offset by the smokiness of the spice. Taut chunks of chorizo castellano came crispy outside, intensely porky within, accompanied by plenty of lemon to cut through the sunset orange fat. Eggs, potatoes, onions with nothing added but skill means that tortilla really leaves a cook nowhere to hide, and Don Felipe’s version was plain, proud and perfect.

Admittedly there were a few duff notes — the vegetarian paella (one of a varied selection of meat-free dishes) was stodgily wadded together to no particular end and the ingredients in a Spanish surf-’n’-turf special of squid with chorizo and chickpeas were having a hissy public quarrel. Yet, overall, the dishes we tried performed exactly as they should, with no unnecessary flourishes. 

Deirdre raved about the wines, taking me through a tasting of Gonzalez Byass Palo Cortado sherry, a crisp, nutty white Rioja and a glass of punchy, polished Ribera del Duero. The choice is really fantastic, not least, as is the case across the menu, for being truly affordable. 

I raved back about the berenjenas fritas, deep-fried slices of aubergine drizzled with honey and a plate of chicken livers soused in amontillado, both recipes direct descendants of Sephardi cuisine. The aubergine in particular was extraordinarily refined, the velvety fruit acting with the sweetness in a salt-caramel combination which, like the tortilla, belied the simplicity of its ingredients.

It might seem like a modern, metropolitan combination, but it would be instantly recognisable to those who made it 700 years ago. 

Deirdre was more interested in her pudding of Galician almond tart with praline ice cream than my droning about the extraordinary extent of the Sephardi culinary diaspora. But she spooned away patiently enough while I explained that anything from “Italian” pan di spagna cake through the börek of the Balkans to Caribbean cornmeal tutu can be traced to its brilliantly adaptive endurance. I didn’t want to share anyway. 

The Sephardi weren’t necessarily all that impressed by the indigenous cookery of their places of exile: apparently the community in Bethlehem “mourned for the meats and savouries of Seville”. Lucky for us that Meson Don Felipe continues to serve them.

Meson Don Felipe, 53 The Cut, London, SE1 8LF