When I first saw the frying pans filled with floating zalabia, the round shape was extraordinarily similar for me, even though I had never been to Egypt or the Middle East before. It’s oily, and sweet, and probably not healthy, but it´s delicious. The taste, however, was unexpected. I thought it would be slightly salty, because in my Southern-American home country, Colombia, we have something that looks exactly like zalabia, although larger and cheesy edging to the sweet, called “buñuelos”. We associate buñuelos with Christmas because it´s a tradition to eat them next to natilla (custard) during the traditional Novena de Aguinaldos, in which we visit each other’s house to read a booklet of prayers for nine days before Nativity (sometimes these visits become actual parties with people dancing and getting drunk). I dismissed the similarity between buñuelos and zalabia until I found, by mere accident, that buñuelos were usually linked with Moriscos (Spanish Muslims forced to convert during the sixteenth century, and later expelled from Spain en masse during the early seventeenth). It turns out that after the Catholic Kings took the kingdom of Granada in 1492, and after…
