Pastel de choclo Period BOrigin theory CVerified

When and where it took shape

Pastel de choclo is a dish that stands at the heart of the Chilean table. A sweet batter of ground fresh corn (choclo), sweetened with sugar, is spread over a meat filling and baked in an oven or an earthenware dish until the surface browns. Break through the lid and the warm filling appears beneath.

It helps to see the dish in two layers.

The outer corn batter belongs to an old South American food. Corn is a crop the indigenous Mapuche have grown for more than a thousand years, and the batter dishes made by grinding and kneading the fresh kernels and then wrapping or baking them (humita) were on this land long before the Spanish arrived. Choclo, the fresh corn at the heart of the lid, was a long-established native crop, on everyday tables here from early on. Analysis of organic residues left in pre-Columbian pottery confirms that corn was eaten in this region far back in time.

The change came in what the batter enclosed. The Spanish settlers brought cattle, along with onions, raisins, olives, and other foods and livestock the land had not known. Ground beef browned with onion and combined with raisins, olives, and hard-boiled egg makes the filling known as pino, born in the settlers' kitchens; it is a New World flavor akin to the Spanish baked pastry, the empanada. Until cattle crossed the ocean and took root on this land, the present form, with its filling of meat pino, had no way of coming into being.

The old sweet corn batter now enclosed this beef pino and was baked in the oven. When the indigenous batter and the settlers' filling came together on a single plate, today's pastel de choclo took shape. The distinctive pairing of a sweet baked lid over salty meat below, two worlds sharing one dish, is what gives it its appeal.

Today's pastel de choclo comes clearly into the documentary record in the nineteenth century. The French naturalist Claude Gay walked through central Chile in the 1830s, recording rural life, and set down a peasant festival dish in which a filling of mutton (sometimes chicken) was capped with a sweetened corn batter and baked. This is the earliest reliable record of the dish in Chile, and it shows that the present form, with its meat filling, was certainly there by then.

There is, however, a famous anecdote that claims a far older origin. Among the Peruvian tradiciones written by Ricardo Palma is a piece in which pastel de choclo is served at a monastic banquet in Cuzco around 1608. On this basis it is sometimes said that the dish had already taken shape in colonial Peru, earlier than in Chile.

But the anecdote cannot be read as a contemporary record. Palma was born in 1833, and he wrote more than two hundred years after the events he describes. His tradiciones are, by their very genre, history laced with literary embellishment, not primary sources. There is a strong suspicion that the dish name "pastel de choclo" was projected back onto an age in which it is far from clear the dish was yet called that. And in the Chilean colonial records concerning that same Cuzco of 1608, the dish never appears.

What emerges instead is a more grounded account of its making. The anthropologist Sonia Montecino, in her book "La olla deleitosa: Cocinas mestizas de Chile" (The Delectable Pot: The Mixed Cuisines of Chile), describes pastel de choclo as a dish of fusion (mestizaje) in which the indigenous corn batter and the Spanish pino melt together. Mapuche cooks stood in the settlers' kitchens and worked old-world fillings into the native batter, and that meeting is where the dish was born. The antiquity of the corn batter is genuine, and so is the newness of the beef pino. That an old indigenous food and the ingredients the settlers brought were joined on a single plate, that fusion itself, is what pastel de choclo truly is.