Chicharrón Period COrigin theory BVerified

When and where it took shape

Colombian chicharrón is a slab of skin-on pork belly, fried until the skin puffs up and turns crisp. In the Andean Paisa region of Antioquia it spread as a farmer's breakfast and a meal to eat between spells of hard labor, and it has long been loved as a hearty, meat-heavy dish.

There were no pigs in the New World; they came across the Atlantic in the exchange of livestock and crops that followed 1492. Spaniards brought them as they pushed colonization forward, and by the founding of Santa Marta in 1525 and Bogotá in 1538 the animals were already on the ground. Until pigs took hold in Colombian soil, a dish of fried skin-on pork belly had no way of coming into being.

The frying itself is Spanish in origin. A concrete ancestor is the torrezno de Soria of Castile, a fried strip of pork belly. This way of rendering pork fat and frying the skin and belly crossed the Atlantic with sixteenth-century colonization, settled into the Paisa region, and there took on its own form: skin-on belly puffed and fried.

Today it is an indispensable part of bandeja paisa, the celebrated Colombian platter that heaps beans, rice, egg, and fried plantain together on a single large plate.

Colombian chicharrón traces back to Spanish fried pork belly. The torrezno de Soria of Castile's Soria region is taken as its direct ancestor, and it crossed the Atlantic with sixteenth-century colonization, changing shape to suit each place it landed in the New World. The chicharrón family has many regional versions: a Mexican style that blows the skin into a great crackling sheet, a Peruvian style that boils the ribs before frying, and others. Colombian chicharrón is the version that settled in the Paisa region of Antioquia as skin-on fried pork belly, spreading among ordinary people as a farmhand's food.

Pigs reached Colombia between roughly 1525 and 1540, as the Spanish drove colonization forward. A study of the food history of New Granada notes that the councils (cabildos) of the newly founded towns left records regulating the movement of pigs within the city in 1539 and 1540, which suggests that by the first half of the sixteenth century a great many pigs were already present.

The bandeja paisa platter that features the fried pork appears in print only around 1950, and the story that traces it to the meals of the arrieros (mule drivers) points to the nineteenth century. But these mark when the platter was assembled and settled into the region, not the beginning of fried pork belly itself. The moment a dish comes into being and the moment it is named and popularized as a regional specialty belong to different layers. No record survives that sets down the year in which the Paisa way of frying skin-on pork belly took its settled form. What is clear is that this fried pork can only come after the colonial era in which pigs crossed the ocean.

For the earlier history of this dish, see also its parent, chicharrón.