A Short History of Empanadas Through NYC’s Restaurants

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NEW YORK — When I think of empanadas, I think of golden fried corn-dough, filled with beef, onions, potatoes, peppers, and garlic.

The classic savory hand pie of my native Colombia.

When I feel homesick, I go to a Seba Seba Bakery in Jackson Heights for a beef empanada. Add some ají picante, and it tastes just like home.

As a teenager, I was shocked to learn that Argentina also had empanadas, but theirs had flour dough and were baked instead of fried.

Since then, I’ve made it my mission to try as many dishes as possible that involve foods enclosed and cooked in dough.

Thankfully, I live in New York City, an ideal place for the empanada aficionado. According to data from the Department of City Planning, more than 2.4 million Latinos call NYC home. You can find all kinds of empanadas—from oven-baked Chilean empanadas to Dominican pasteles and Ecuadorian empanadas de verdes. Nearly every variety from Central and South America can be found and enjoyed here.

“Old World” Varieties

The word “empanada” comes from the Spanish verb empanar, which means to enclose something in dough and cook it by baking or by frying. In English, empanadas are defined as a Spanish or Latin American pastry. For this essay, I ll define an empanada as a dish in which various ingredients are enclosed in dough and cooked by baking or frying, and that forms part of the culinary traditions of Spanish-speaking countries. 

Curiously, the oldest known recipe for an empanada that I found from Spain was actually written in Persian by the Andalusian scholar Ibn Razīn al-Tujībī in the 13th century, in Al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled region of the Iberian Peninsula. His cookbook includes recipes for fried pastries with thin bread and various fillings, called Sanbusak (or Sambusak), a Persian dish also known today as a samosa. (Fun fact: the dish was first mentioned in a 9th-century poem by Ibrahim al-Mawsili, who appears in several stories in One Thousand and One Nights.)

I found a similar dish at Persepolis, a Persian restaurant on the Upper West Side, where their sambusas are described as “dumplings stuffed with seasoned potato, carrot, and green peas.” They are thin and crunchy, with a flavor that is slightly reminiscent of fried empanadas.

As far as I know, the earliest written references to the word “empanada” in Spanish appear in court records from the 15th and 16th centuries during the Spanish Inquisition trials, where the food was used as evidence of Jewish faith and identity. For instance, a prosecutor claimed Jewish families ate empanadas cooked in oil “during the holidays, with much pleasure,” and empanadas were a common part of Jewish cuisine during that time. But why were empanadas linked to Jewish food? It might be because during the Middle Ages, Jewish communities faced less violence in Al-Andalus than in the rest of Europe. For hundreds of years, the two communities lived and worked together (although this was far from a religious utopia, as non-Muslims were considered second-class citizens). As subjects of caliphs, they adopted many elements of Islamic culture, including poetry and gastronomy.

I had the chance to try a similar empanada to those described in the Inquisition trials, of all places, in Little Italy—at the Tomiño Taberna Gallega tapas bar. They’re listed on the menu as empanadillas de atún (mini-tuna empanadas).

Cooked in a way similar to sambusas, these little empanadas feature a crispy fried flour pastry and are served with red peppers, onions, tomatoes, and tuna. The warm, savory flavor reminds me of sitting by an indoor fireplace. However, I also thought about the thousands of Muslims and Jews who might have eaten similar dishes before being expelled by the Spanish monarchs or fled their country to avoid the Inquisition. Some found a new home in the so-called “New World.” 

“New World” Ingredients

“When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they disliked most of the natives’ foods,” Carl Langebaek, an anthropologist at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, notes. He explains that Europeans, believing their food and culture were superior, imposed their culinary traditions, but often left the cooking to Indigenous women, who likely used familiar ingredients while adapting to new dishes. Some of today’s empanadas in the Americas are a result of this culinary blending, like Colombian empanadas, where corn (the “king of Indigenous foods” says Langebaek) replaced wheat, just like the ones you can find in Jackson Heights.

More ingredients than corn were used to make empanadas. In Sunnyside, Queens, you can enjoy mandiocas, or yuca empanadas, at the Paraguayan restaurant I Love Paraguay.

Yuca is a woody shrub native to South America that replaced wheat flour in many dishes across the Americas (in Colombia and Ecuador, we love to eat yuca bread). They are filled with a hearty mixture of minced beef and onions. The texture of the dough is very different from most empanadas. Despite being fried, it is more mushy than crunchy

Some empanadas in the Americas kept their flour dough. For example, in Sunnyside, Bolivian Llama Party serves a different kind of flour empanada—salteñas. 

Named after her hometown of Juana Manuela Gorriti, a writer and first lady of Bolivia who arrived to first arrived to Potosí as a political refugee and sold stew-filled empanadas on the streets to survive, the empanadas feature a filling of meat, eggs, carrots, potatoes, and peas, all bound together by a glaze-like sauce called “jigote,” and encased in a sweet pastry. Perfect comfort food.

The European conquest of the Americas led to cultural genocide and the disappearance of many cultures, yet these empanadas provide small glimpses of what some Indigenous cuisines might have once been like. And while many gastronomies vanished, certain ingredients from the “New World” transformed cuisine of the “Old World.” Consider this: how different would Italian dishes be without tomatoes, Indian cuisine without chili peppers, or European history without potatoes?

Dessert

Not all empanadas are savory. Some are sweet.

At La Cabaña Salvadoreña in Washington Heights, you can try a sweet empanada filled with cheese, wrapped in fried plantain, and topped with cinnamon. I paired it with horchata, a drink from North Africa introduced to Spain in the 9th century and later brought to the Americas with empanadas. (Foods like ginger, yam, and plantains traveled from Asia to Africa hundreds, if not thousands, of years before reaching the Americas in European ships.)

And empanadas continue to change. For example, at The Bronx Brewery in Port Morris, Empanology makes empanadas with unexpected fillings. During my visit, I tried Thai shrimp and pizza rolls empanadas. My favorite was the red velvet (they frequently rotate their offerings, their current dessert empanada is a sticky toffee pudding that I have not tried, yet). I was initially skeptical. I’m not a huge fan of red velvet cake and thought it was designed for cute photos, not taste. How wrong I was.

The cake and the fried pastry’s contrasting textures enhance each other. Served with powdered sugar on top, the empanada comes with tres leches and cinnamon sauce that taste like a holiday party. As a kid, I could not have imagined food like this existed. Empanadas, like Latinos, are so much more diverse and complex than what I thought growing up.

That makes me smile.

And I went for seconds of the red velvet empanada.

About the Author

Santiago Flórez is a Colombian journalist, educator, and anthropologist based in New York City. 

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