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 African. Both travelled to Brazil along the routes of the Atlantic slave trade. Bahia was a major destination for the Africans carried to Brazil: by one estimate some 1.35 million people, roughly a third of all those landed in Brazil. The beans and oil came across with the people themselves. The oil palm is first described plainly as growing in Bahia at the end of the seventeenth century, in 1699. Acarajé in its present form is thought to have come together once both bean and oil could be had here.

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 offered in 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. Candomblé communities sold it to meet the costs of their festivals, and for Black families newly freed from slavery the trade became a means of economic independence. 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 bean fritter that crossed the ocean joined with the dendê oil and vatapá of Bahia and changed into something apart from the Yoruba akara — a dish particular to Bahia.

The name acarajé is set down in the letters that Luís dos Santos Vilhena wrote from Salvador to a friend in Lisbon. His third letter lists the things that eight, ten or more Black people, sent out from the wealthiest houses of the city, cried for sale in the streets. There, alongside mocotós, carurus, vatapás, acaçás and abarás, stands the name acaragés (acarajé). The letter gives only the name; it says nothing of how the dish was made or what it looked like. The title page of the collection bears the year 1802, but according to the editor's preface the first twenty letters were written in Bahia, and Vilhena sailed for Europe in December 1799, so this letter was most likely written before then. A food called acarajé, then, was being sold on the streets of Salvador by that time at the latest.

Bacelar (2013) quotes the passage in full as the most cited of Vilhena's texts, and notes that the folklorist Vivaldo da Costa Lima saw only four dishes in the list as typically African: acarajé, acaçá, vatapá and abará. Bacelar writes that denying the African elements in Bahian cooking would be absurd, but that reading the list as a sign that Bahian food had been Africanized is no more than a "daydream". The dossier of IPHAN, the Brazilian government body that in 2004 inscribed the craft of the Baiana women's acarajé-making on the national list of intangible cultural heritage, treats acarajé as a bean dish brought to Bahia by Yoruba people, and an essay by Lody discusses the ties between Bahia and West Africa. 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 letter shows, it should be said, is only that a food by that name was already being sold in the streets by then. Acarajé grew up within the oral culture of street selling and Candomblé rites, and when the first fritter was made has not been pinned down.