How did shawarma become a sensation in India?

Goa’s food culture has been changing rapidly to cater to domestic tourism. But it was still a surprise to see a roadside stall with a picture of an Arab man taking a knife to a vertical cone, with the words ‘paneer shawarma’ on it. Who eats this? What do Arabs feel about this? And how do they even get the paneer to stick together?

Salah Jamal answers the second question in his book Arabian Flavours, essays on Middle Eastern food. Arabs, he writes, traditionally considered taking guests to a restaurant an insult — real hospitality required feeding them at home. But food from street stalls, like shawarma, or its true vegetarian counterpart, falafel, fried balls of crushed chickpeas, was an exception because it wasn’t taken seriously: “It is not thought of as a dish, nor as food that’s eaten at home, and least of all as restaurant food, but frivolous street food.”

Many restaurant dishes can be made at home, but not shawarma. Nobody, except an extreme food enthusiast, has a vertical grill at home. It doesn’t even make sense for most restaurants. It is really meant for a food stall where it is fired up for all to see, with the meat cone spiked on the rod in front, spinning slowly as it grills, giving off appetising aromas to draw more people in. It is lovingly tended to by a worker with a knife to shave off slices for customers, exposing the uncooked layer beneath to the grill. You can tell how long the night has been, and how hungry the customers, by how the bulging cone slowly becomes slender.

Shawarma has spread through the Arab world and reached here through Indian workers encountering it in the Gulf. But its origins lie in Turkey, as can be seen from its common names — doner kebab, deriving from the Turkish donmek, or shawarma from çevirme, both of which mean ‘turning’. It developed in the mid-19th century Ottoman Empire with the cities of Bursa and Kastamonu competing for its site of origin.

Kebab grilling had always been done horizontally, so going vertical was visually striking and also allowed the melting fat to drip down and baste the lower levels of meat.

Shawarma travelled from Turkey in many ways. Traders from Lebanon, which was intermittently ruled by the Ottomans, took it to the Gulf and western Africa. The 1922-23 exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey is credited with taking it to Greece, though anti-Turkish feelings required its name to be translated into gyros, which is how it is usually known in the US as well. Greek or Lebanese migrants took it to Canada, where it’s called donair.

The most surprising migration was to Mexico, where it possibly went with Lebanese migrants. But an earlier Middle-Eastern link was with the camel herders taken there, with their animals, during the American Civil War, as a desperate measure by the Confederate states to break the US naval blockades of their ports by establishing supply caravans through the southwestern desert.

Many of these herders were Christian, so had no problem adapting their grilled meat recipes to the pork that was common in the region. These vertically grilled pork stacks are now called al pastor, meaning herdsmen’s style.

But no migration proved more enduring than the one to Germany, where Turkish gastar beiter (guest workers) went in the 1960s as much needed labour for the German economic boom. Doner kebabs went with them and became very popular with Germans, especially after they were reinvented with the sliced-off meat placed in sandwiches. This became so popular that when neo Nazi opponents of migration tried launching the slogan ‘Bockwurst statt Döner’ (traditional German sausage not doner), it was undermined when many members admitted still wanting to eat doner.

Germany and Turkey are now in a diplomatic dispute over who really owns the dish. What either might make of a paneer version is another question.