 Both the British and the Japanese eat battered seafood that has been deep-fried in oil: the British in the form of fish and chips, and the Japanese in the form of tempura. The technique of battering and deep-frying seafood seems to have originated with Moors in the Iberian Peninsula in the thirteenth century, where the dish was called mu’affar. It spread to the Jewish and Christian inhabitants of Spain and Portugal. In the sixteenth century, Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution took the recipe to Britain, and Portuguese traders carried it to Japan.