How Cuisines Are Made: Contact, Conquest and Migration

Spanish cuisine: Moorish rule under Al Andalus, 711 to 1492, diffused rice and citrus into a peninsula tomatoes and potatoes would not reach for another three centuries.

North African cuisine: a Berber base, layered with Arab influence after the seventh and eighth century conquests, later took in chili pepper only after 1500, by way of the Columbian Exchange.

Filipino cuisine: a Malay and Austronesian base layered with Chinese trade from the eleventh century, more than three hundred years of Spanish rule, and American influence after 1898.

Vietnamese cuisine: a millennium of Chinese rule left stir frying and soy sauce in the north; nearly a century of French colonization left banh mi, pate and coffee culture.

Russian cuisine: peasant rye bread and pickling below, French court technique above, carried to the Russian nobility's table from the eighteenth century by chefs including Careme.

South African cuisine: Khoikhoi and Nguni foodways, Cape Malay cooking carried by people enslaved from Indonesia, Malaysia and India from the 1650s, Dutch and British settlement, and an Indian community whose ancestors arrived as indentured laborers from 1860.

Peruvian cuisine: the same pattern in the Americas, Spanish, African, Chinese and Japanese immigration each leaving a fusion style, chifa and nikkei among them.

West African cuisine: the same contact runs in reverse here, the Atlantic slave trade carrying West African staples and technique directly into the Creole and Gullah kitchens of the Americas.

Mexican cuisine: Mesoamerican staples domesticated over thousands of years, reshaped from the sixteenth century by Spanish colonial wheat, pork, dairy and citrus.

Middle Eastern cuisine: a shared table across many national kitchens, its Gulf and Arabian Peninsula strand shaped by historic trade with South Asia and East Africa.