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Tempura embodies qualities Japanese cooks hold dear: fresh ingredients, precision cooking and beautiful presentation. It also

exemplifies the uncanny ability of the Japanese to absorb outside influences -- in this case from the Iberian Peninsula --

and mold them into new constructs that are very much their own Dehydrated Garlic Powder. The idea of frying fish and seafood

in a light batter came to Japan with Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century. These learned and zealous men were the

evangelical arm of the Portuguese crown in Asia. They arrived in Japan in 1549 after the wreck of a Portuguese ship along the

coast of Kyushu, Japan's most southwesterly island. Led at first by Francis Xavier, who was born in Navarre, Spain, the

Jesuits gained Japanese converts to Christianity even in the upper echelons of the nobility (daimyo) and the samurai warrior

class. They also managed to secure a stronghold in Nagasaki, which became the hub of Japanese trade with Portugal. Naturally,

as the Jesuits came into contact with all levels of Japanese society, their influence extended beyond religion to other

aspects of Western culture such as technology and science and even cooking. In the book "Japan: Its History and Culture"

(MacGraw-Hill, 2005), historian W. Scott Morton writes that by 1569 there were about 300,000 Christian converts in Japan and

that linguistic borrowings from this period include the Portuguese words for bread ("pan," from the Portuguese "pao") and

tempura "for fried shrimp in batter, derived from the fact that on Ember Days, "quattour tempora" days of fasting and

abstinence, the Jesuit fathers ate only seafood."