Chicharrón Period COrigin theory BVerified

From Spain to the New World

Chicharrón is pork fat rendered, with the skin or belly fried. It comes from the cooking of Andalusia and the Canary Islands in Spain, and rests on the craft of rendering and frying pork fat. Francisco Martínez Montiño's Arte de cocina (1611), a court cookbook of the Spanish Golden Age, already records a system of cooking built on pork fat.

The dish crossed to Latin America in the 16th century, with Spanish colonization. The pig was not a New World animal; it came across the ocean through the Columbian exchange. Into Peru the conquistador Francisco Pizarro brought pigs from 1531, and after the founding of Lima in 1535 pork is recorded as the first meat to be weighed. Only once the pig had settled into the land could chicharrón be made there.

As it spread, chicharrón took on the ingredients and tastes of each place. In Peru the rib meat is first simmered down, then fried in its own fat, with no skin used. In Mexico skin and belly are used; in Colombia fried skin-on belly is set alongside beans and meats in the bandeja paisa platter. In colonial markets, on the street, and in home kitchens, the Andalusian cooking took root in the cities of the New World.

Chicharrón carries an origin tale of its own. In 18th-century Spain, a farmer's pig rubbed its back against a tree and scraped off its skin; the skin baked in the sun and gave off a bacon-like scent—and that, the story goes, is how the dish began.

But no contemporary record supports the anecdote. Its source is an untraceable folk tale, and the dates do not fit. The word and the concept chicharrón appear in the literature well before then. Sebastián de Covarrubias's etymological dictionary Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611) records the root chicha, and the Spanish Royal Academy's Diccionario de Autoridades (1729) defines it as "the dry, well-browned residue left after rendering and pressing fat for manteca, especially from pork." Both the craft and the concept were already fixed in books before the 18th-century farmer ever appears. The tale of an accidental discovery collapses here.

There is another thing easily overlooked. Because frying pork is so plain a thing, chicharrón seems as if it must have been everywhere from long ago. But the pig was not native to the New World. In Peru, Pizarro brought pigs from 1531, and only after Lima's founding in 1535 was pork weighed as meat. Before the pig had crossed the ocean, chicharrón was never made in this land.

Food-history scholarship traces chicharrón to Andalusia in Spain, carried to Latin America with colonization and varied from region to region. Cynthia Bertelsen's After Pizarro: Food in Colonial Peru and Today describes how the pig became a food in post-Pizarro Peru. The broad line of origin and spread is settled. What remains unsettled is the finer question—when each regional version, in Peru, Mexico, and Colombia, took on its local face.