Acarajé Period BOrigin theory CVerified

When and where it took shape

Acarajé is the signature street food of Salvador, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia. Skinned cowpeas (black-eyed peas) are ground and shaped into a patty, deep-fried in dendê (the red oil of the African oil palm), then split open and filled with vatapá and other accompaniments.

Both of the ingredients that define the dish, the cowpea and the dendê oil, were originally West African. Both travelled to Brazil along the routes of the Atlantic slave trade. Bahia received more enslaved people than anywhere else in Brazil, and the beans and oil came across with the people themselves. Dendê oil appears in the Bahian record at the end of the seventeenth century, in 1699. Only once both bean and oil could be had reliably in this land did acarajé take its present form.

The cooking itself is plain and forceful. The peas are ground and worked into a light, airy batter, then dropped into hot dendê oil to fry. The red colour and the toasty aroma of the finished fritter come from that palm oil.

The settings in which it was served gave the dish its distinct character. Acarajé is indispensable to the rites of Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion, and at the same time it was a good peddled by the Baiana women who stood in the streets. For them, selling it was a way to make a living — and to buy back their freedom. Moving between these two settings, the sacred and the street, acarajé became a dish that stands for Salvador.

Acarajé traces back to akara (àkàrà), a bean fritter that the Yoruba people of Nigeria and Benin have long made — skinned cowpeas ground and fried, a snack of the West African market and street corner.

When many Yoruba were brought to Bahia through the slave trade, the dish came with them. The name itself tells of its origin: acarajé is said to come from the cry of the vendor calling out to "come eat akara." The bean fritter that crossed the ocean joined with local dendê oil and vatapá and changed into something apart from the Yoruba akara — a dish particular to Bahia.

This origin lived for a long time in the oral tradition and the trade of the Baiana women, thin on firm documentary support. That changed with the letters that the Portuguese official Luís dos Santos Vilhena wrote home from Salvador between 1798 and 1802. Among the goods sold by the Black women who peddled from trays in the streets, he set down the name acarajés, listed alongside mocotós, carurus, and vatapás. By the time that letter of 1802 was written, acarajé in its present form was already rooted as a street food of Salvador.

Building on this contemporary source, the study by Bacelar (2013) reading Vilhena's account, the essay by Lody on the ties between Bahia and West Africa, and the dossier of the Brazilian government body IPHAN — which in 2004 inscribed the craft of the Baiana women's acarajé-making on the national list of intangible cultural heritage — together support the line of descent from a Yoruba origin. The dish carries in it the record of how the culture of people brought across in bondage survived on new ground and was handed down in two forms, the street trade and the sacred offering.

What the sources fix, it should be said, is the upper bound — that acarajé already existed by 1802 — not the moment the first fritter was made. Having grown up within the oral culture of street selling and Candomblé rites, its earlier steps were never set down in writing.