Ajiaco Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Ajiaco—also called ajiaco santafereño, after the old name of Bogotá—simmers chicken with several kinds of potato and the native herb guasca. Its history does not gather into a single origin, because its base and its defining touch come from different eras.

The base is Andean. The potatoes, the maize, and the herb guasca are all old crops of the soil, grown in these highlands long before the conquest and dropped daily into the pot. Guasca was a wild plant the Muisca called huázyca, and it still forms the core of ajiaco's particular scent. Chicken came by an entirely different road. Until this Old-World fowl crossed the sea and reached the lands of Colombia, the chicken ajiaco we know now had no way of coming into being. Chicken spread across the Americas in the 16th century, arriving with the Spanish conquest.

The cooking itself set up no barrier to hold the dish back. Simmering in an earthenware pot was the native way from before the conquest; no new tools and no new command of the fire were needed.

The dish began in the pots of Andean households and spread to the tables and market kitchens of ordinary Bogotá, where it settled. Its familiar form firmed up only in the 19th century, when the dish passed from the home pot into the eating habits of the city and took on the outline of a regional dish.

Ajiaco's history reads more clearly once two questions are told apart. One is where the dish itself—Bogotá's chicken soup—came from; the other is where the name ajiaco came from. The two belong to different layers, and following either, they do not collide.

The early shape of the dish reaches back to a primary source. The friar Fray Pedro Simón, who travelled with the conquest, wrote in his Noticias historiales (first edition 1627) of an agiaco—'a stew made of many and diverse herbs and roots with some meat.' The meat there was not chicken but beef, mutton, dried meat. Onto the base that the Muisca had kept before the conquest—potatoes, maize, and native herbs simmered on the Bogotá plateau—the meat of Old-World livestock was folded in, and by the colonial period this stew had rooted as a dish of the land, as the record of the time shows.

The form everyone now pictures—chicken, three kinds of potato, guasca, and a finishing touch of cream and capers—firmed up later still, in the second half of the 19th century. A close study published in a scholarly journal holds that the 'crowning' of ajiaco with cream and capers was the work of Beatriz Pombo, sister of the poet Rafael Pombo, in June 1877. Capers first reached the shops of Bogotá in 1875, so that garnish could not have come before. And in 1893, Cordovez Moure's memoir Reminiscencias de Santafé y Bogotá set down the present form, with chicken, potatoes, cream, capers, and guasca.

The name is another matter. The word ajiaco is traced to ají—'chili'—in the language of the Caribbean Taíno people, and in Cuba a same-named catch-all soup had spread by the 16th century. When Simón wrote agiaco in 1627, he meant not a particular chicken dish but the stew of roots and meat widely called by that name. Yet the name's passage through the Caribbean takes nothing away from the dish's own descent from the Andean Muisca base. That the name came from the Caribbean and that the dish grew from the Andes sit together without strain.