Akara Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Akara (àkàrà) is a bean fritter made by grinding peeled cowpeas (black-eyed peas), adding onion and other seasonings, and deep-frying the paste. Its main ingredient, the cowpea, is an old crop deeply rooted in West Africa, cultivated here by around 2500 BC, as genetic, textual, and archaeological study has shown (Herniter et al. 2020). It was a bean long at hand in the kitchen, from far back in time.

The setting is the Yoruba lands of southwestern Nigeria. The handwork of grinding peeled beans and frying them in oil produced akara as a snack of the market and the street. The lightly fried fritter appears on everyday tables and is at the same time offered to the orisha in Yoruba worship, holding a place in both daily life and devotion. The Yoruba word àkàrà simply means "bean fritter."

Later this fritter crossed the Atlantic. Carried to Bahia, Brazil, by enslaved Yoruba people, it changed there into a dish known as acarajé.

Akara's origin is often told through the myth of the orisha goddess Iansã (Oya) and the thunder god Xangô. The phrase àkàrà n'jẹ is read as "eating the ball of fire," tied to the tale of fire bursting from Xangô's mouth. But this is a legend that explains, after the fact, the fritter's role as an offering in Candomblé ritual; it is not the story of how the dish came to be. In Yoruba, àkàrà simply means "bean fritter" and jẹ means "eat," and the reading "ball of fire" is a later gloss that grew up alongside the myth—where a word comes from is not where the dish comes from. That the main ingredient, the cowpea, is a native crop long cultivated in West Africa also points to a fritter present in the market and the kitchen well before the myth (Lody, "Acarajé: Between Bahia and West Africa").

Of acarajé, the dish across the sea, a firmer trail survives. In the third of the letters that Luís dos Santos Vilhena wrote from Salvador to a friend in Lisbon, collected as Recopilação de notícias soteropolitanas e brasílicas, acaragés (acarajé) appear alongside abarás, acassás, vatapás, and carurus among the foods that eight, ten, or more Black people (negros) came out of the wealthiest houses of Salvador to cry for sale in the streets. The title page of the collection bears the year 1802, but the first twenty letters were written in Bahia, and Vilhena sailed for Europe in December 1799, so this letter most likely predates his departure. In the streets of late-18th-century Salvador, then, a food called acarajé was already being sold. The list does not say the sellers were women, and it mentions neither trays nor how the food was made. A later study that quotes the passage in full (Bacelar 2013) notes that the folklorist Vivaldo da Costa Lima saw only four dishes in the list as "typically African": acarajé, acaçá, vatapá, and abará. The trade of the women who sell acarajé was registered in 2004 as Brazilian intangible cultural heritage. The mother fritter that remained in Africa and the descendant born across the sea live on side by side, still, on both shores of the Atlantic.