How roasted meats went spinning all the way around the world

Tacos-al-pastor-porc-mariné

Even during his days off, Raul Morales gets spotted by fans. On a recent visit to Universal Studios Hollywood, Morales, owner of Taqueria Vista Hermosa in Los Angeles, was waiting in line when he heard shouting.

“People called out ‘Chef Al Pastor! Chef Al Pastor!’” Morales said, laughing. Morales, who was born in Mexico City, came by the nickname through decades of hard work.

He’s the third generation of his family to make al pastor tacos, their fresh tortillas filled with richly seasoned pork shaved from a rotating vertical spit.

“My recipe is very special, and very old,” he said.

Yet while Morales’ family recipes go back generations, and similar spit-roasted meats like shawarma and döner have been around for hundreds of years, his tacos represent a kind of cuisine that’s as contemporary and international as it is ancient and traditional. When you thread meat onto a spinning spit to roast it, it turns out, it doesn’t stay in one place for long.

‘Any place you have a pointy stick or a sword’

Roasting meat on a spit or stick is likely among humans’ most ancient cooking techniques, says food historian Ken Albala, a professor of history at the University of the Pacific.

Feasts of spit-roasted meat appear in the Homeric epics The Iliad and The Odyssey, writes Susan Sherratt, emeritus professor of East Mediterranean archaeology at the University of Sheffield, in the journal Hesperia.

Iron spits that might have been used for roasting appear in the Aegean starting in the 10th century BCE. Such spits have been unearthed in tombs associated with male warriors, Sherratt writes, noting that roasting meat may have been a practice linked to male bonding and masculinity.

“I think the reason that it’s associated with men is partly because of hunting, and the tools, or weapons, that replicated what you would do in war,” Albala said. “When you celebrated a victory, you would go out and sacrifice an animal to the gods, which would basically be like a big barbecue.”

Roasting meat is not as simple as dangling a hunk of meat over the flames. When roasting, meat is not cooked directly on top of the heat source, Albala says, but beside it, which can generate richer flavors.

“Any place you have a pointy stick or a sword, people are going to figure out very quickly … if you cook with it off to the side of the fire, it’s going to taste much more interesting,” Albala said.

Those early roasts likely featured whole animals, or entire animal parts. But centuries ago, cooks in the Ottoman Empire developed a different, more specialized technique, layering thin slices of raw meat onto a spit, building a dense, tapered stack that can be cooked as it spins .

A pair of miniature paintings in a 1620 manuscript commissioned by Ottoman statesman Hafız Ahmed Paşa depict cooks slicing meat from rotating, layered spits, says Mary Işın, author of “Bountiful Empire: A History of Ottoman Cuisine.” The food is being served in elegant outdoor meals, which suggests to Işın that the food may have been featured at royal picnics.

“In those miniatures, you can see it’s an upper-class thing,” Işın said.

The paintings don’t specify what the spit-roasted meat was called. But Işın has found 15th-century Ottoman texts describing rotated, spit-roasted meats as çevirme kebabı, or “turned kebabs.” Over the years, Işın said, the recipe may have spread across the Ottoman Empire, which, at its height, stretched from central Europe to north Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.

From Ottoman sultans to shawarma and tacos

The term “çevirme” later entered both Arabic and English as shawarma, a similar dish that’s still beloved across the Middle East and beyond. Meanwhile, in the Ottoman Empire, the word çevirme was eclipsed by another Turkish term: döner.

“They both refer to something revolving,” explained Mary Işın. The word “döner” didn’t appear in print until 1908, in a novel by Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpinar, but Işın believes the word was likely widely used by then.

And the way it was eaten changed, too. In the centuries following early depictions of courtly picnics, the layered, spit-roasted meat that was sometimes called çevirme, and later döner, became a food of the people. By the early 1800s, it was a favorite among tourists frequenting Istanbul kebab houses.

“Foreigners agree that this dish is the most delicious in the country, and I am perfectly of the same opinion,” wrote the French traveler François Pouqueville, who visited Istanbul in 1800.

And as migrants crossed continents and oceans, they took the delicious meal along, incorporating different meats into the process, serving the results different ways, and offering it under different names. In Spanish, the stack is called a trompo — the word for a child’s spinning top, which the vertical shape of the prepared meat resembles.

In the late 19th century, immigrants from the Ottoman Empire — many from the region that later became Lebanon — took shawarma to Mexico, says Jeffrey M. Pilcher, a professor of food history at the University of Toronto, and author of the book “Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food.”

“You have people setting up restaurants with what they called tacos árabes (Arab tacos) in the 1930s, in Puebla in particular, which has a big Lebanese community — but their origins were Ottoman,” said Pilcher. Those tacos árabes, generally served in a flour tortilla or pita bread, were a precursor to al pastor, which appeared a few decades later.

“It’s the second generation of Mexican Lebanese immigrants, who really identified as Mexican, who start selling al pastor tacos in Mexico City neighborhoods like Condesa,” he said.

By then they were corn tortillas filled with pork, a meat that was more widely available than the lamb traditionally used in the Middle East. Seasoning came from a Mexican-style marinade using local ingredients like pineapple, achiote and chiles. “What we think of now as tacos al pastor is a product of the 1960s,” he said.

How döner crossed a continent — then came back

In the early 20th century, migrants from Asia Minor brought their favorite spit-roasted meat dish to Greece. The word “gyro” comes from the Greek verb “to turn.” But it was under the Turkish name — döner — that the dish spread westward from Turkey across Europe.

A wave of Turkish guest workers arriving in Germany after the Second World War brought döner with them, eventually innovating a style that differed from those served in Turkey, wrote Ayşe Çağlar, a professor of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna. Now, it’s one of the country’s favorite meals.

“Nothing else is as often quoted as döner kebap to refer to Turks’ positive effects in Germany,” she wrote. Today, the city’s official tourism organization, visitBerlin, estimates that there are some 1,000 döner kebab shops in Berlin alone, generally serving the meat stuffed into a split piece of bread or pita. The döner kebab generates an annual €3.5 billion in revenue across Europe, according to the Association of Turkish Döner Producers in Europe, which is based in Berlin.

Some would like to see the food’s Turkish origins honored. In 2022, the Turkish government applied to the European Parliament to secure protected status for the döner, the same designation that covers Italian mozzarella and Spanish jamón serrano.

Yet even in Turkey, döner is ever changing, said Vedat Başaran, the chef-owner of Istanbul’s Terşane restaurant, who has done extensive research into Ottoman culinary heritage.

“Döner has gone from a street food to a restaurant food,” Başaran said, adding that when he was a child, in the 1970s, döner wasn’t hugely popular in Istanbul.

Now, he said, the city’s biggest döner restaurants, like Bayramoglu Döner, serve thousands of customers daily, offering very thin slices of meat on a plate along with thin lavash bread, fresh salad and onions sprinkled with sumac. “Döner has become a party food for all levels of society,” he said.

And at other, smaller eateries across the city, like Sedef Bufe Cafeteria near the historic center, döner meat is sliced thickly and stuffed into a split pita bread, a sandwich-like concoction that differs from the traditional Turkish version — but resembles the döner that’s now so common in Germany.

Başaran thinks the sandwich-style döner suggests that the version Turkish migrants popularized in Germany eventually found its way back home. “They’re doing a new kind of döner. To me, this kind of döner is almost copied from the kind in Germany,” he said.

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‘Anything nice travels, right?’

“Döner is indisputably Turkish,” Işın agreed. “But anything nice travels, right? You’ve got this tasty food, and you take it with you.”

That’s how the Ottoman-style spit-roasted meat spread across the Middle East and Europe, and how it leapt the Atlantic to arrive in Mexico.

And it’s just what Raul Morales did, too. Morales was seven when he began helping at his uncle’s taco cart in Michoacan, cleaning and chopping tomatillos, jalapeños and chiles. “My uncle was my mentor, he taught me everything,” Morales said.

In 2001, having moved to Los Angeles, he opened his taqueria in the South LA food hall Mercado La Paloma, marinating pork for his al pastor in a 24-hour marinade using chiles, cumin, garlic and thyme, as well as pineapple juice, orange juice and grape juice.

In 2003, the Los Angeles Times named his tacos al pastor the city’s best, bringing in what remains a steady stream of customers to Taqueria Vista Hermosa.

Today, Morales’ family specialty, which he learned at his uncle’s side in Mexico, has traveled across North America and to countries across the globe. You can buy an al pastor taco in Argentina, Australia or London. In Levi, Finland, Lost Tacos taqueria serves al pastor to hungry customers living well above the Arctic Circle.

Morales isn’t surprised. Al pastor is delicious — a living heritage that transcends international borders.

“People really love these al pastor tacos,” he said.